186. Question Time: Nigel Farage’s plan to become Tory leader

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0:51Welcome to the Restus Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart and me, Alistair Campbell. I wanted to start with a question from Senka, who I think is a young student, friend of mine. 24th of October this year marks the 5th anniversary of the retirement of Jeremy Hayward as the Cabinet Secretary. I was wondering if Rory announced it could reflect on the role of the Cabinet Secretary at shaping government policy and Sherry recollections they have Lord Hayward's impact on public service. So let me start with that. Tell us about that, Jeremy Hayward. Well Jeremy was somebody I first was aware of when he was Norman Lamont's private secretary.

1:25Norman Lamont, Tantra of the East Checker on the John Major, Black Wednesday and all that. And Jeremy was this rather skeletal figure that I used to see the whole time. Skeletal because he was quite skinny. Very skinny. And I used to see him. He's definitely skinny than you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was always there. He looked incredibly young. He looked very calm. And then when we won the election in 1997, I think he would have been at the treasury then. But he was always somebody absolutely seen as a civil service high flyer. And did various roles. And let's just dig into that saying what makes from the perception of you or the new Labour government coming?

2:06What is the civil service high fly? What are the characteristics if you were kind of tick off two or three characteristics of the service high flyer? I'd say with Jeremy, phenomenal work rate and interlaced. So they're very clever. They work very hard. Yeah. And also we were aware that he'd done this job for the conservatives. And yet the minute that we came in, he was absolutely there for us as a government, delivering on the government agenda. Now, one of the things that I've been grumbling about with the current cabinet secretary Simon Case, who's this very unusual person who got the job very young historically, having not really had the traditional career that they had to come in as a point.

2:42Right. I didn't know that interesting. So one of my grumbles about him is that he hasn't been conducting himself as you can see from the WhatsApp during the COVID inquiry with the kind of formality and dignity that I would have associated with the great cabinet secretary's deposit. Just to remind people of cabinet secretary, the most senior civil servant, the British government runs the whole civil service. And because it's not the United States, we have very few political appointees. 99 .9 % of government is run by the cabinet secretary. But the great people, my father worshipped a man called Suburk Trend, Sir Robert Armstrong, who was the economic or with the truth man.

3:18That's right. He became defined by that sadly. I guess those people were quite sort of intimidating, quite formal figures. You can't really imagine them sending cheeky texts under the table, making jokes about the primers as well. No Jeremy was not that sort of person, but he was somebody who, I mean Jeremy would just as likely be on top of the budget and what was happening in the budget process, but was also very good at spotting some of the difficult personal stuff that was coming down the track as well. I mean, particularly in the modern age, we get so much about the wives, the kids, all that sort of.

3:54Jeremy was just a, he was across everything very straightforward to deal with, very honest, would always give a frank opinion. But ultimately, this is why, you know, when we talked to Theresa May for leading, and she said she never had a sense of the civil service trying to block. Jeremy Hay would saw his job as trying to help the government deliver on its agenda. So a great guy, and by the way, his, his widow, Suzanne, I'm going to shout out to her and her books. She's written this amazing book called Wave Walk about her childhood, where her parents just decided one day that they were going to, the kids were going to grow up on a boat traveling around the world constantly sort of, you know, going to Terrell's store was a capsizing, it all sorts of terrible stuff.

4:35And so it's not, it's not a romantic story. No, it's not a wonderful, positive story, because I always fantasize about putting my kids on a boat or something like that. Well, if you do, I wouldn't do it like this, and I've got to be honest, I think that Suzanne has come through it to become an incredibly successful person in her own right, with the childhood that she had as a pretty amazing story. Now, we're talking of people becoming, you know, very, very successful to the point that they get invited, as I was a couple of years ago into important television programs, Stuart Preble, is that name that brings about a little bit better than any other TV guy?

5:09You might be amused to know, he tells me, that Rory is a sitter in next Wednesday's episode of Portrait Artist of the Year on Sky Arts. He is only the second sitter in 10 years who is chosen to stand for the entire four hours that he was being painted. The only other one was the rugby player, Gavin Henson. Now, Rory, first of all, who is Gavin Henson? Not Gavin Henson, Gavin Henson. Gavin Henson? Right. Do you know who he is? You obviously didn't follow the British Irish Lions tour that I was on in 2005, close to the end of the season. You obviously weren't promoting it well, I know. Well, that is not the case, because I got into a lot of trouble for over promoting Gavin Henson, which if you Google Alistair Campbell, Gavin Henson, photograph Storm, you will read all about that.

5:59And he was a rugby player. And he and I, similar people, you're very, very, very different. Apart from this thing about standing. Apart from the standing thing. I don't know if you still are still together, but he was married to Charlotte, church. So what was the standing thought? What was that about? Well, I do love standing. I don't like sitting, but it did turn out to be a mistake because once you start standing, you can't move because you've got three painters in front of you. And you have to hold the same position. And I began to realise as we entered the fourth hour and I'm rocking back and forward on my feet.

6:30How were the paintings? They were extraordinary. I think incredibly unfair to portrait painters. I know because you have to stand there and judge them. They turn around. And also, they make them do them in four hours. I mean, I think to do it properly, they would have wanted days. One of them was a woman who essentially produced a sort of caricature of me. It was a kind of slightly grotesque, a slightly combative caricature. There was another rather nice portrait, which was of me full length. Only one of them actually attempted to paint me full length. I discovered at the end, having stood up all the way through two of them just.

6:59So that was a terrible waste of time. Total waste of time. But anyway, she paints me full length. And then the third one that I selected was very impressive, but a bit embarrassing. It was an enormous canvas, sort of just a head. Six feet by, yeah, five feet and just my head. Wow. And it was painted by Scott who'd read my books, was very excited to be painting me, felt that we had a great connection with mountains and walking. But I'm struggling to work out where to hang it because you can't really stick up in your own house. Well, I thought I thought I'd put my head in your own head. No, you can't do that.

7:30I've had a lot of quite a lot of portraits done and sent to me. And one of the many reasons I was upset that my mum's death was the fact that my mum was the only one who really wanted them. Yes. The one that I chose is the best. It was actually quite a small one, which we do have at home. And then there was another one which was kind of slightly David Hockney -esque. But you've also got three children. Can you not shelf them off? They don't want huge ports, so dad, either. Maybe when I'm dead. I don't think right now they do. Perhaps the rest is politics. Office should just have our portraits up.

8:01Very good. I think that's an excellent explanation. It will Spotify's studio. Now, here's a question for you. William Dobson. We talked a lot about them at least on the main podcast, but did anyone else notice the irony, says William Dobson of Rishi Sunak, within the context of a governmental position to decry all forms of terrorism, meeting his Israeli counterparts at the King David hotel? Now, so this is - So this is - So this is - So this was in 1946 and it was an attack by Jewish terrorists, Jewish terrorists, approved by Hagana. This is when Britain was the occupying power in Palestine and they went into this hotel, which was where a lot of the British military was based, set off a bomb that killed 94 people, including women, and was a devastating moment for Britain, because particularly people like Churchill who'd been strong supporters of the Zionist movement, State of Israel, were having to get up in the House of Commons and work out what to say about an attack in this case not by Arab terrorists, but by Jewish terrorists that had killed 94 British people.

9:04But you don't think the Zionist should not have gone to the hotel because of that? No, I don't think so, but - But we definitely have meetings in the King David hotel. It is a reminder of the complex status and people maybe don't remember that history, yeah. Yeah. Um, question for you which I know you like, Celia Richardson. Hmm, I know Celia Richardson. I know where this one's going. Yeah, that's it. I've actually had a matter too. One of the authors of the book, The War Against the BBC, how an unprecedented combination of hostile forces is destroying Britain's greatest culture and institution of why you should care.

9:31Very long subtitle. It's now looking into attacks the National Trust. Do I know Sunroori think they are parallels? Are they members of the National Trust? Have they voted yet? Voting really matters. Members haven't told the third and they've ever. So, so you have voted. You have voted. I'm a member of the National Trust. And I voted for what you might call the anti -restore trust ticket. Yeah, so we keep coming back to this largely because I think you're a friend of Celia Richardson. And there is a very interesting standoff happening in the National Trust. And actually, of all the polarizing issues in British politics, this is perhaps the most polarizing.

10:03And my attempt. Who's doing the polarizing? My attempt to try to do an explainer here is going to get me in trouble. It's exactly yes. Because Alice was very clearly on one side of this. So, the argument of restore trust, and they have candidates including Lord Sumpch, who was the Supreme Court justice. He was my lord at the Hutton inquiry. Right. So, just very very well, but I think he's a bit off the page on this one. Right. Okay. Anyway, he's there Canada for this. And the argument of the restored trust people is that they feel that the National Trust is moving away from the interests of its members for a couple of reasons.

10:36One of them is that they feel that the National Trust is increasingly putting more and more focus on landscape and nature. National Trust owns hundreds of thousands of acres to British countryside. For example, it owns the place where the Sycamore gap, where the Sycamore tree was cut down. It owns a lot of hedgents wall. And probably the most exciting thing that the National Trust has is it owns an enormous amount of Britain's coastline. And had this incredible thing called Project Neptune, where it put together a lot of Britain's coastline. But the argument for the restored trust people would be that another very fundamental dimension of the National Trust is its historic houses and collections.

11:13And they feel that the staff of the National Trust have often become, they think, embarrassed about the historic houses and collections to a polygetic for them. Lyle will not really present them in the way that the people who donated these houses to trust would have liked them presented. And to try to hit a balanced line on this, English heritage, which I talked to a bit, would say that maybe some of the things National Trust did presenting some of these houses five, ten years ago is not the way English heritage would dealt with those issues. Well, I was also speaking to some of the English heritage recently.

11:47And I was asking them to explain to me what they thought was going on with this restored trust thing. The person I was talking to took a very different line. They basically said they felt this was yet another part of the kind of so -called anti -woke cultural right trying to find another cause to get a people excited about. I do think there's something really strange going on in our politics at the moment. This BBC is a classic example. You know, I think you and I both would agree that we might sometimes criticize the BBC on individual stories and individual decisions. I'm not sure it's very wise for Tim Davies to be going to the 1922 committee for example unless he's also doing the same for the PLP.

12:24But the BBC is a massively important institution and we should defend it, promote it. And I think the National Trust is in the same place. And I do see a parallel in that these good institutions being undermined because they don't fit this very narrow world view. Yeah, well, I think something that I also think though that you can have incredible wonderful institutions and the BBC is a fantastic example of that. But you know, I've just been rewatching W1A in the amazing comedy about BBC. And of course there is a truth in all these bureaucracies that they can a bit peculiarly bips it. So you also need to be able to say all these things can be improved, all these things can be reformed.

13:04You don't want to get into sort of the need to defend. And I think you know, there are some really interesting questions around the National Trust. So for example, on an landscape management, how they get the balance between protecting small farmers. So bitrix Potter, I hit this in Cumbery. Basically gave her land in Cumbery as somebody who really believed in small family farms and rare breeds and sheep farming. And the National Trust has increasingly emphasized rewilding, which is making a lot of those tenant farmers very unhappy. So there are issues to get into there. I think there is to use around the place of volunteers the National Trust.

13:41I think a lot of the volunteers who gave a lot of time and life the National Trust felt that they were increasingly seen as a bit embarrassing and a bit marginal and the whole organisation was professionalising and it wasn't giving enough space to volunteers. So there's stuff that can be done. And I think it's a pity if you have to be either in the form of abolish the BBC or in the form of everything the BBC does is wonderful and there's no bureaucratic nonsense. Yeah. Okay. James O 'Leary will Nigel Farage's prophecy that he'll be Tory party leader by 2026 come true? If he does, what does this say about Conservative politics in the direction it's going?

14:16Well, what do you say? Look, I said on the podcast and I think you were a little bit taken about, I think Nigel Farage does have his eyes on the Conservative Party. It was really interesting at the party conference that he and Lisztrust and Suéla Bravaman were the ones who were getting all the love from the crowds and he was a Conservative. He's a game player, you talk about political entrepreneur, he's somebody who moves effortlessly from one campaign to another. He's just a campaigner. I mean Nigel Farage would be utterly hopeless as a minister, utterly hopeless as in a position of government, I think.

14:49But if the Conservative Party loses the next election, I think it will move substantially to the right. So, O 'Leary Bravaman is probably the favourite to take over his leader. I think she will very quickly become horrendously unpopular with the public and I think Nigel Farage might then well be back inside the Tory party and want to take it on. Do you disagree? Well, boy, I mean, I hope we're a long way from that. I mean, I do agree with you that the most likely betting is that when the Conservative Party loses the next election and you'll definitely win now. Yeah, I think it's almost impossible for me to see Rishisina winning the next election.

15:23The latest by elections just totally confirm that. And I think we also enter in a politics where even if there hadn't been the catastrophes of those trust as economic management and the catastrophes of Boris Johnson's Premise ship, people want to change, people don't like incumbents, it's not a climate suits incumbent. And I think there is a lot of anger from the right of the Conservative Party against people like Rishisina because they feel he betrayed their great hero Boris Johnson and they've learned all the wrong lessons. They think that the reason they're not more populous is they won't write wing enough.

15:57You know, you've got this trust signing her budget and saying, you know, we should have gone even further, cut taxes more. We've got other people saying we should have done an even harder Brexit. And this is what the Conservative Party did under Ian Duncan Smith when it lost to Tony Blair, it went to the right. But eventually, of course. And it's what Labour do historically has done when we've lost his... Yeah, with Michael Firth in terms of it. Yeah, yeah. Go to the left. But in the end, of course, these parties come back if and when they come back because the party members begin to want to win again.

16:25And then they move back to the centre ground. And that's what happened with David Cameron. They finally got fed up with being the sort of extreme French party and they wanted to win again and they moved back to the centre ground. Is a related question from Tom? Is reform a strategic advantage or disadvantage to Tories in the coming election? What might the implication for future elections be? And Richard Ties, the leader, he did an interview at the weekend where he was very... Absolutely vicious about the Tories. Now, Farage used to be vicious about the Tories and then did the deal with them that helped them in the last election.

16:55But Ties was basically saying there is no way they're going all out to try and destroy the Tories. They didn't do that well in the by -election, but given they'd had pretty low profile, they didn't lose their deposits. No, it can't be a big problem. And one of the reasons why David Cameron agreed to the Brexit referendum is that in the local council elections, the European elections Nigel Farage's party was taking an enormous number of votes from the Tories. They were getting up towards their 20 -25 % margin and he really believed that it would be almost impossible for the Social Security majority without promising a referendum.

17:26And by doing so, he actually did huge damage to the country, right? But what he was able to do is to put that threat from the right to bed. So I think it could be a real issue. Okay, Roy, lots more questions. Let's take a quick break.

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18:52Question from Joe Rooks, I'm currently on a maternity ward waiting for my third born to arrive. My wife and I have yet to choose a boy's name. Have you ever noticed a pattern of impressive people with a shared name? Any suggestions you can offer? My wife has already vetoed Alistair and Rory. That's very sad, isn't it? Perhaps this is a girl. Oh, it's a boy's name. I read something in one of the magazines at the weekend that it's now big business in America of advising people about their name. Can we get into that? Well, I get a response to the podcast. Yeah, but somebody was making like a fortune giving people...

19:27That's from what their name is. With the siblings names, fits with the whole thing. You don't think AI could do that even more quickly. Probably could do that. Yeah, absolutely. And I saw a picture of Elon Musk with one of his children. I wouldn't recommend Elon. I'm not, I'm not recommending Elon. I'm very down on Elon at the moment in lots of ways. But his child has this mathematical formula. I'm always supposed to do a girl on the semiaum is A squared minus MC2. The artist formerly known as... What were we going to say to Joe, though? Well, so I... What were you called Rory? I think I'm called Rory because my mother had a friend at university who she adored and thought was the most glamorous man in the world, called Rory McPherson, who was the kind of perfect Scott.

20:09He was an incredible... You're Kristen Rory. No, because the priest in Hong Kong, I was Kristen Hong Kong refused to Kristen Rory, said it wasn't a proper Christian name. So I was Kristen Roderick. So you're Roderick on your birthday? Yeah, because the priest said I can't cross New Rory because it's not a proper saint's name. So you've got a saint Roderick, but not a saint Roderick. Apparently, yeah. Well, if you become sanctified with that, would that solve the problem? But the promise there'd still be Saint Roderick, wouldn't I? We called our son, first born Rory. We've got no Rory's in the family, but I'd written a novel where the hero was called Rory.

20:42And I think there was somebody going on with that. It's a nice name, though, Rory. I like... It's not bad. And I called my eldest son, Alexander, on the grounds that it gives you a lot of choice. So you can be Sandy, Al, Alex, Alex, Zander, and he chose to be Sasha. Yeah, how did that happen? I don't know. I think we call it as the baby, and it's just really stuck with him. He loves it. His second name is Wolf, and I thought maybe... Yeah, I thought he might want to be called Wolf Stewart. That might be quite a strong name. Wolf with one or two. With one L. Yeah. One L, one L, one L. One L, one L.

21:17Okay, so Wolf's the animal, a lot of wolf name. No, the animal, yeah. Wow. But he didn't go with it. Joe, I don't know if this is helping you at all. I noticed last week, I mean, Gary Linnaker, as you know, is our boss. Somebody sent me something saying that nobody in the United Kingdom was Chris and Gary last year. No. That can't be true. That's extraordinary. Grace, our daughter's name has become very popular, and Calum are other son. That's becoming popular as well. We chose our names partly because there weren't that many people using them at the time. Well, when I was called Rory, it was very unusual.

21:44Yeah. And it was actually very helpful for my political career, as I guess it was for that rather horrible person we don't mention on the podcast to have an unusual first name. Oh, him. Yeah. Yeah. I think Tony Blair was a good name for a politician. Gordon Brown, that was a good thing. Well, I had this thing of a, and of people running on Rory, the Tory, or I'd go Tory for Rory. Right. I get quite a lot of people say how, say they say to me in the swimming pool, how's Rory, the Tory? Good. Okay. What about size of British Army? Peter Wilson is the size of the British Armed Forces a problem given all this going on the world right now.

22:18Yes. Yeah. I don't know whether that's the Peter Wilson, who was the senior advisor in Downing Street and should be our next ambassador to China. I presume not. Oh. The British Army said at one of its smallest level on record, and although we are spending, you can fit the entire army into ultra -fid. So, what? Yeah. I mean, it's terrifying. I mean, to put it in context, we talk about China on the pod yesterday. China's got an army of about 2 .3 million. We've got an army which, you know, hovers around about 70 ,000. Taliban future in Afghanistan. Cactus Mark. Afghanistan seems pretty far from being the societal collapse that was routinely being predicted when the Taliban took over.