199. Question Time: Why the infected blood scandal still haunts today’s politics

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1:05Welcome to The Rest Is Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. Very good. What would you like to begin with? Well, you've mentioned once or twice this American politician George Santos, Leo Loner. What's next for George Santos? I suspect another Botox operation. I mean, absolutely unbelievable. I mean, we talked about George Santos because he first came to our attention through his amazing claims about his own personal biography, his educational record, which turned out to be totally fictitious. He is now facing the most astonishing array of different types of criminal charges, many of them to do with abusing campaign financing money.

1:42But this is part of a much bigger story. I mean, we talk about corruption. And if anybody's listening who's up for this, a book on corruption is desperately needed. It's very difficult to read good stuff on how corruption works in different countries. Because this is also, at the same time, Robert Menendez, who we've talked about, who's the Democrat Senator from New Jersey found with gold bars in his house. And we've talked a little bit about some of the scandals around Rhode Island, where the mail was a famously corrupt official, as some of the scandals around Florida and the early 1980s, when the FBI did sting.

2:15So there's that American corruption. I remember saying to you that one of the great things in the FBI sting in the early 80s was they were trying to soft soap and say, you know, could I incentivize you in some way, Senator? And the senators said, no need to do that. I'm as bent as they can. Tell us a little bit what you think. Well, Santos, I think it's the first American politician who's been kicked out of Congress, not for treason of some sort. The fact that there's many Republicans voted to kick him out, as was the case, is pretty stunning. And I've watched a little bit on the news of him being chased down the street by the media.

2:45And I did honestly, I'd never noticed the Botox thing, but you mentioned it in a previous podcast. I've never seen a face quite like it. He has not got a single line of any sort on his face. It's amazing. When it works, though, it's really impressive. Is it a very jealous? I was sitting with someone who was a year ahead of me at university. I was looking at this incredible. He's a very wealthy man, but his face just looked like I kept looking and looking and looking. I just couldn't find anything. But do you think it's weird? I just couldn't imagine having a face like that. Well, but what are the problems?

3:12It can't begin to go wrong. I mean, with Putin, it begins to look a bit bizarre, doesn't it, as the years go on. I remember Eve Pollard, who was my editor at Son de Mirage, said, the thing to remember is you get old. You either look old or weird. Ah. Very good observation. That's a very nice. And I think Santos looks very, very weird. Finally, they're on this corruption point. Well, why do you write that book? Well, I think it's a really good book. I mean, I'd love to get into it. So somebody was saying to me, I've found very interesting about difference in corruption in Nigeria and corruption in China and corruption in the Gulf.

3:40So he said, in the Gulf, you have to hire a prince and it's a standard 1 % commission. In China, when you're getting a contract, you pay 10 % commission, but it doesn't affect your likelihood of getting the contract because the Chinese officials are really held to account for deliveries. So they choose the best contract. They think it's going to deliver on time on budget and then take the 10 % commission. You know, Xi Jinping, having had his big crackdown corruption. I don't know where I saw this, but the average weight and the waist size of Chinese civil servants has diminished since the anti -corruption.

4:13Since the anti -corruption drive, because they're not as fat as they used to be. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, the problem is partly complete. And this is a lesson made from British politics. No realism at all about the targets they set. They will set every government comes in promising to almost sort of triple the country's growth in the next four years. And that's one of the reasons why the corruption goes along with no performance at all. The objectives are so unrealistic that there's no incentive for any of the senior civil servants or ministers to actually get anyone who's going to deliver anything because nothing that could be delivered could ever meet the nonsense that they're spouting.

4:47There's a neat bridge to a question from Fiedras. What is the likelihood of anyone being held criminally liable for negligence in the handling of the COVID pandemic? Is it possible families could bring a civil case against key individuals? Now, the reason I say that's a bridge is I do think there has been a considerable corruption in the handling of COVID contracts. I don't know whether the inquiry is specifically looking into those. I know the National Crime Agency are looking at it to some of these big contracts. We've got the wretched Johnson up for two days towards the end of the week. Have you been able to follow much of the COVID inquiry?

5:18Yeah, I mean, I think it's fascinating, absolutely fascinating, because I was dealing with that government at the time. You got mentioned a lot by Michael Gove. You can say, Rory Stewart said this and Rory Stewart said. Yeah, so Michael Gove's line was, yeah, Rory Stewart was right, but he wasn't as early on it as he claimed. Actually, I was saying things much earlier than he's going to be creditful, but the main reason I'm a bit cross about this is the pressure I came under from that government, including WhatsApp's from Matt Hancock and others to basically tell me to shut up and stop saying what I was saying.

5:50Now they're all coming out saying we accept that we should have locked down earlier. Or in his case, they're saying that they were advocating it. Many of them who at the time were attacking me for what I'm saying, now saying, oh no, no, they were pushing for the same thing I was pushing for. That didn't feel like it. It felt like they were putting huge pressure on me and sending in people to see me to try to convince me not to say what I was saying. My favorite tweet of the inquiry so far was, I didn't if you watch Michael Gove give me evidence, but somebody said the inquiry judge in QC will be waking up this morning to discover that Michael Gove is still on his last answer.

6:20It was one of the most loquacious performances I've ever seen and he was so clearly irritating them. And they kept saying shorter answers, please. And he kept saying yes, well, I have just made the context. So the serious point from Fedras, do you think it is possible that families will bring civil case against key individuals? I think that there's big legal problems in being able to do that in Britain. I don't think you can bring civil cases against the government in that way. I think you'd have to do it not against individuals that would have to be government negligence. But there's somebody who keeps trying to get something called hashtag MIPO trending on Twitter, which is misconduct in public office.

6:54Would that be a criminal thing? I don't know how that would work. There's a very good question that we've had. This leads us onto the biggest example of government liability that we're struggling with at the moment, which is contaminated blood, unbelievably horrible tragedy, where back in the 1980s, over 30 ,000 people were injected with contaminated blood, and given HIV and different forms of hepatitis, over 300 children were infected with HIV, and where the government has just faced the defeat. And that's the most extreme injustice. And by a bit, I'm in a bit like Hillsborough. It takes so long.

7:31I mean, this was the only 1980s. I asked a question in the House of Commons in March 2015, which is now eight and a half years ago to David Cameron and PMQ's asking for fair treatment for people and pushing ahead with what was then the Penrose Report, Lord Penrose's report on this. And David Cameron seemed to promise me in March 2015 that the government was going to provide compensation adequately for these people. And here we are eight years later. And I can absolutely understand why conservative MPs rebelled against the government and have pushed to get this done. The last night in the Commons was their first defeat on a whip vote since it's really soon it became Prime Minister.

8:07I was talking to a member of the Shudder Cabinet recently who said that the worry is that the sums of money that are going to have to be used to settle all this are so large that the government is deliberately trying to just keep this thing ticking over until after the next election, so that it doesn't go into there. Yeah. Already pretty bad economic figures. They've already, I think, committed to giving a hundred thousand pounds each as a provisional thing to 4 ,000 effective people. And the maths on that obviously is that's four hundred million pounds just for that. So as they push for broader compensation, it's going to move into the billions.

8:44And it was the same when I came in equitable life, people with actual life lost a lot of money and again, the government is stuck in this thing which I think government are often stuck in and you may have been stuck in at times, which is balancing their sense of moral obligation towards people who've been badly treated with the Treasury saying where on earth are we supposed to find these billions of pounds? It was interesting yesterday. I think Lucy Fraser, the culture circle she was asked about it and just yet again hiding behind process. Well, let's wait for this inquiry, let's wait for this inquiry, let's see where it all pans out.

9:12So what the people who are campaigning on this seem to be saying is that they're just trying to drag it out. Because as far as I remember, the inquiry, when I was asking this question a much, the big report from Penrose was published in 2015. Absolutely. The big facts have been known for a long time and now it's all about the process and they're just dragging it out and dragging it out. What about Michael Gove then? No rickets. Can you explain the role Michael Gove has played in the 13 years of Tory government? He's always at the centre of power, never in a top job. The media left unright seemed to enjoy him and perceive him as capable.

9:43He seems to be an independent actor in each of these governments. So Michael Gove is firstly very clever, very articulate, in person, very, very polite, courteous to colleagues. I mean, he's extraordinary in the House of Commons lobby. He's the one person who anybody has a complaint, goes up to a wall, was listened very thoughtfully. I pay tribute to him a bit in the book because he was the only person who ever did a proper handover with me when I became prison's minister. He went out of his way to see me, get out his roller dex, share all the names and introductions, give me advice on what he was trying to achieve.

10:15But he's also somebody who is seen as very, very ambitious, stabbed Boris Johnson in the back when Boris Johnson was running for leadership first time against Theresa May, ran for the leadership himself. I was running against me and I found that I was caught up in some pretty eccentric moves by Michael Gove where he'd say, Rory, I really want to, you know, be part of a team with you ambiguous about whether that was a team with him leading or me leading. And then he would then produce a front page store in the times attacking me and then get times journalists into photographs meeting one Wednesday meeting, etc.

10:49So I think he's somebody who every prime minister accepts is a very, very effective, if sometimes controversial, very controversial when he was education secretary, quite popular when he was just a secretary and environment secretary where he embraced much more progressive causes, effective, but people sort of see him as dangerous and uncontrollable and therefore are keeping him out of the top offices of state to date. I think the point that Noah makes about him seem to be popular with the media, he's very, very close to Rupert Murdoch. He was the times columnist, wasn't he? He was the times columnist to wrote all sorts of crazy things at the time.

11:25The point you make about the justice secretary is interesting because when he was justice secretary, shortly before he was moved out, I can't remember why that re -shuffle happened, but there's quite a big re -shuffle, but like a couple of weeks beforehand, he asked me to do a review of mental health in prisons, which I thought was quite interesting that he would have something like me go in and, you know, he's reaching out to potential critics, he's bringing them to the tent. Yeah, I was in two minds because I wondered whether he was doing it for the politics, as opposed to because he wanted to actually do anything about mental health in prisons, but he is, I think, his great success is in media manipulation and getting the media to kind of run his line the whole time.

12:00Essentially, here's a quiz question for you, Rory, which three members of the Conservative Party have spent the most time as a cabinet minister since 2010. I'm Michael Gove, presumably, because he was only out for a very, very short time. He was right in there from 2010. Jeremy Huntspin in there very long time. Number three. Okay. And number two. Wow. Number two, I'll give you a clue is somebody that you think was promoted far too early and went on. Could it be Liz Truss? Is Liz Truss? Well done. Three out of three. Very good. God, but Liz Truss didn't get into the 2014, so that's interesting.

12:37I mean, Gove, fascinating because given the number of prime ministers we've had and the number of reshuffles we've had, you would have thought one of them would have thought, okay, I'm going to give him one of the big officers of state. He's always wanted to be chance with the exchequer. Yeah. And it's fascinating that he's never quite there. Never got there. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that comes down to this sort of trust thing. Can you really trust him? They've all had a bit of a sort of, they've all felt the knife a little bit at times, haven't they? A lean and hungry look. So Simon, her stammer just lost the election by giving the nod to Satcha.

13:06No. It was an interesting thing that we talked about a bit in the main pod. So he wrote this piece of Sunday Telegraph, presumably quite deliberately, putting in Satcha. And he would have done it to reassure swing Tory voters. Is that right? Yeah. What's the message? I mean, if you were advising, what was he trying to do there? He was trying to signal to broadly Tory supporting audience that Labour could be trusted on the economy. Correct. That was the main point of the piece, I think, trailing the speech, the resolution and foundation, where he was saying that they weren't going to turn on the spending taps.

13:37And also, I think, trying to signal that he was going to be a big radical force of change. So if you actually read what he said about Tatcha, he didn't praise her. He simply made a statement, I think a statement of fact, that she was a radical reforming prime minister who unleashed entrepreneurialism. But it's made some people very, very angry. Absolutely. Two Labour MPs have come out publicly saying this is an absolute outrage. And of course, on top of the, you know, the attack is come under from the left. He's a user who came straight out. Scottish First Minister. So I think it was deliberate.

14:07Would he have welcomed them actually taking from that whole piece, this half line in a sentence about Tatcha, Atley and Blair, a front page headline that says, starma praises Tatcha. The reason the telegraph put that there was because they knew that would cause him a problem. But he cherished the rep for the telegraph to drive the telegraph. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. In the same way as we're treating, who's currently in Australia looking at their health system, I saw he had something in the telegraph. So they're obviously deliberately reaching out to Tories. And it's not stupid to do that because ultimately, I mean, this is the sort of golden rule of elections.

14:38You have to get people voting for you, haven't voted for you before. So would you do it again? Yeah. I think I would. I think you would be careful. It was a very wonderful guy called David Bradshaw, who worked for me at the mirror and then in Downey Street. And he used to draft and ghost a lot of Tony Blair's articles. And there were so many of them. So for example, if we had a budget or a queen speech, we would target every local paper in the country and have a sort of slightly tailored article. At every view, this was the game that was played. So at one point, at the national press awards, Tony Blair was freelance journalist of the year.

15:11So he's the David Bradshaw. So I think there's a sort of slight diminishing return to them. But yeah, listen, you mustn't be frightened of trying to take your message to places where normally you wouldn't get heard. So I would definitely do it again, whether on balance, it served the full purpose. I think in the context of what followed the next day, because he did have a pretty big speech, which got reasonable coverage live on the TV. So I think on balance, it was okay. But I don't think that I've actually wanted that as the headline. Yeah. There's another one here on here, which I think is perhaps more significant.

15:42Arthur Broadbent, thought somewhere the starmer refusing to call for a cease firing Gaza, an attempts to woo the Tories by praising Thatcher could lose him Scotland. I do think the Gaza situation is more serious for Labour than this Thatcher kerfuffle, which will die pretty quickly, I think. Labour lost pretty heavily a council by election recently in high gate to the Greens, with a big, big swing. And also, there was on the same day, I think, in Newham, a former Labour councilor who'd resigned to become an independent and protest over Gaza one massively. And I think it's not just about the issue.

16:20We don't need to rehearse all the things we've said before about where people feel they are on this sort of pro -Israel pro -Palestine argument and how well informed they are and all that. But there's no doubt it has cut through at an emotional level to a lot of people who really are quite angry at this. Now, I think the worst thing here could do now is to kind of, as he were, back down from the position that he's taken. But I think it is going to the longer this conflict goes on. And it's going to go on for a while, I think, and it's going to carry on being particularly horrible. I think there is, you know, the Labour Party politics on this are quite tense.

16:52And there's a problem, isn't there, which is in a very polarized age where most of the votes are still on the extremes. The votes are kind of ushaped where there aren't many votes in the centre and there are a lot of votes on the left and the right. Starmer is pursuing a centrist policy, which appeals deeply to you and me and is absolutely the way that Tony Blair won his elections. And what Cameron did in 2010, but what Cameron found is that having tacked the centre in 2010, he then found himself with real problems on his right. And he had to then start doing things to placate the right, which is part of the reasons he granted the Brexit referendum.

17:25And I wonder whether Starmer isn't going to find himself naturally drawn back towards having to do things for the left. I mean, there's a question here from someone called Caroline. Is the Labour Party really still Labour or has the Tory swing to the right and Starmer's interest in snapping up Tory voters? meant that the electorate now has a choice between two conservative parties. Now, obviously, neither you or I think that he's suddenly become a Tory. But the fact that she's asking that presumably is a sign that there are bits to the left of the Labour Party that are beginning to get pretty uncomfortable.

17:53And yet, again, he did this at the Resolution Foundation. Whenever there sort of challenged on specifics in relation to tax, the non -doms, tax on the non -doms, which you could say was a pretty Labour progressive thing to do. And then this change in the tax regime on private schools as well, which is something we never did. Here is definitely Labour. But I think what he's trying to do is to signal that that should not mean that people need to fear some kind of crazy economics coming in. I also think that he's being realistic in a way. I mean, obviously, Labour governments historically want to spend more on public services.

18:27And our record on health and education in particular in the new Labour years was pretty stellar, I would say. But at the same time, he's been completely realistic about the message going to inherit if I can coin a phrase from George. Let's see him embrace the Resolution Foundation's economic policies. Or turn it into a strategy. It would be really great. Yeah. Because with the thing about the Resolution Foundation thing, it's not a budget. It's not saying this is, but it's signalling. It's signalling the directions and the big things that you need to address. And I think that's what we're missing from.

18:56And I think just if people listening often ask us whether they should become politicians, I think Torsten Bell, who's the chief executive, who's really one of the big brains behind this report, was thinking about becoming a member of parliament. I think he still is. And he would be able to fly into a seat in my view. In Torsten's a very, very clever guy. He actually worked wireless to darling and for Edmila Band. So he obviously wants to be a Labour MP and would like some day to be charged with a checker. But paradoxically, I think this is a rare example of a report which probably has more influence than most junior ministers could ever achieve.

19:28Provided the politicians actually follow through. Because three years of work into something like that is something that no politician can actually ever do. You can't do that kind of thinking when you're a politician. Okay. All right. Lows and more questions. Let's have a quick break.

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