(EXCLUSIVE) Boris Johnson: "They Were Looking at Engineering The Virus" And The Government Tried To Bribe Me!

He was the 55th Prime Minister, led through 3 of the biggest crises of the last century, and is one of the most controversial characters in the history of the United Kingdom. Boris Johnson is now ‘unleashed’. Boris Johnson is the former UK Prime Minister, serving from 2019 to 2022, he has also served as Foreign Secretary and Mayor of London. He is also the author of books such as, ‘The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History’ and ‘Unleashed’. In this conversation, Boris and Steven discuss topics such as, his support for the Leave campaign without an exit plan, why he doesn't apologise for Partygate, his initial under appreciation of Covid's danger, and his predictions for the upcoming US election. (00:00) Intro (02:25) What Do We Need To Understand About Your Early Years (04:52) Glue Ear Making You Deaf (05:47) Your Mother Charlotte (08:27) Why Was Your Mother Sent To A Psychiatric Ward (11:18) Why Did Your Mother Say You Were "Self Defending" (13:13) Why Did Your Parents Divorce? (14:42) Was There Physical Violence In The Household? (15:29) What Did Your Parents Teach You About Marriage And Love (18:04) Is Your Public Persona A Marketing Strategy? (24:36) The Imbalance Of The UK's Class System (28:25) Has The Conservative Government Done Enough To Level The UK? (38:30) Boris' Career Rundown (39:00) Did You Expect To Win The London Mayorship? (41:25) You Had 3 Significant Country Events, Do You Wish It Was Different? (43:06) Did You Think You Were Going To Win The Brexit Vote? (45:18) Your Secret Pro-Remain Letter (49:22) You Had No Plan After Brexit (59:41) Did David Cameron React Badly When You Said You Were Going To Leave? (01:01:33) How Does Someone Get A High-Level Job Without Having Done It Before? (01:03:39) If You're In Politics, You Need To Be Okay With Public Attacks (01:05:10) Is Politics All About Bringing Your Friends Up With You? (01:06:39) Do You Regret Brexit? (01:09:53) What Have The Downsides Of Brexit Been? (01:13:45) When Was The First Time You Heard About This Virus? (01:18:13) When Did You Call China To Address Covid (01:19:35) The Virus Was Actually Created In A Lab (01:20:37) Call Trump To Talk About Covid (01:21:29) Lockdowns (01:27:18) Were The Lockdowns Even Worth It (01:28:52) The Tiering System Was Bonkers (01:30:46) Was There A Mental Toll On You? (01:32:31) The Impact Of The Death Of Your Mother (01:36:30) Party Gate (01:47:13) How Many Children Do You Have? (01:47:37) Charlotte Owen (01:47:47) What Happens Next For Boris Johnson Follow Boris: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/GZMiyeVzyNb Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/eQ5qEsXzyNb You can purchase Boris’ book, ‘Unleashed’, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/C9fcSpmAyNb Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook You can purchase the The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: Second Edition, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: PerfectTed - https://www.perfectted.com with code DIARY40 for 40% off Colgate - https://www.colgate.com/en-gb/colgate-total Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Do you really think I was deliberately partying and breaking the rules?

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  But it's all about leading by example, isn't it?

• 0:04Speaker 00

  But sorry, but to say it was a party is a complete travesty.

• 0:08Steven Bartlett?

  Seeing that photo when one of my friends can go to their grandmother's funeral is the most enraging thing. I think all gatherings should have been banned at number 10 because I think...

• 0:17Speaker 00

  What do you mean gatherings?

• 0:17Steven Bartlett?

  Gatherings with alcohol and music and cake, you should never have allowed that to happen.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  I apologize for that. The former Prime Minister of the UK. Whose reign included Brexit, Covid and the Ukraine war.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  He's one of the world's most famous politicians.

• 0:34Steven Bartlett?

  On this point of Brexit, how did David Cameron react when you said you're going to vote Leave?

• 0:38Speaker 00

  He said, "If you come out and support Leave, I will fuck you up forever. But if you support Remain, you can have a top five job in the cabinet."

• 0:45Steven Bartlett?

  But is that not a bit corrupt? And is that how the jobs are dished out in the government at the moment?

• 0:49Speaker 00

  Look, I'm sad to say, that is probably been the way politics has been since the dawn of time.

• 0:53Steven Bartlett?

  And then this letter you wrote about the decision to leave or stay within the EU, which was unpublished. You seemed torn. So do you regret Brexit?

• 1:02Speaker 00

  Well...

• 1:03Steven Bartlett?

  The next big thing was the pandemic.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  There was a lot of stuff we didn't know, and I think almost certainly it was a lab accident. They were looking at engineering viruses and ways that they could manipulate it. Sadly, something went wrong.

• 1:15Steven Bartlett?

  When you talk about lockdowns, you refer to them as bonkers, which is strange hearing it from the guy that put the rules in place.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  Well, did the benefits of lockdown outweigh the very, very severe damage done to kids?

• 1:28Steven Bartlett?

  What do you think the answer to that question is?

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Honestly, I think...

• 1:30Steven Bartlett?

  First, I just wanted to ask a few more things. Trump or Kamala, who's the best for international relations?

• 1:34Speaker 00

  How many kids do you have?

• 1:35Steven Bartlett?

  Charlotte Owen. You're not related, Terry. And then you have quite a distinct persona. People describe you as being a buffoon. When I first saw you, I thought you were a parody from Bo Selecta. Is it calculated?

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Well, to get people's interest in politics, you've got to sugar the pill.

• 1:48Steven Bartlett?

  But also, your mother said you had certain mechanisms to cope with pain. Because your mother is sent to a psychiatric facility when you were 10. I read there was physical violence in the house, and then at 14, your parents get divorced.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  Yes, we were in Somerset. My father told us. And I was, look, I was cross and said, you know, so why did you have us then?

• 2:25Steven Bartlett?

  Boris.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Steve.

• 2:28Steven Bartlett?

  What do I need to understand about your earliest years to understand the man that you are today?

• 2:34Speaker 00

  I think the key thing is my wonderful, happy, very kind of peregrinating childhood in the company of my siblings. The key fact was that after 18 months of existence, my sister Rachel was born. And ever after, it was just a constant struggle to keep the pretense of primacy with my siblings.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  But I think it is probably true to say that healthy incessant sibling

• 3:26Speaker 00

  interaction, competition, whatever you want to call it, rivalry, definitely played a part in my formation. And we used to make fun of it, too. We used to think it was rather pathetic.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  We all knew that there was a culture of trying to win. To be to say, oh, little baby wants to win. And so we were kind of, we competed, but we also deprecated the competition.

• 3:53Steven Bartlett?

  At that age, say before the age of 10, how does that manifest in terms of a feeling? Because you can in hindsight say, okay, I was competitive, but how did it feel? You know, because you.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  It felt like fun.

• 4:05Steven Bartlett?

  But this idea that Rachel came along and then you were vying for attention and competition with her. How does that feel when you're under the age of 10? Because your father, at least, was very, very busy as a man. So I'm presuming he wasn't necessarily so present. I was reading, he moved house 32 times in 14 years.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that, okay, I mean, he was.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  But really, I think I speak for all of my siblings now when I say that you really couldn't have had a more loving, caring, you know, they both of them, I mean, they're both very busy, both my mother and father. My mother was painter, um, my father, yeah, writer, did a huge number of things. But they did invest a lot of time in us. I mean, really a lot.

• 4:53Steven Bartlett?

  It sounded like you had a rough sort of first ten years of life because you also had glaucoma, which is, uh, which made you deaf.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Yes, well, I don't know. I think we need to look very carefully at the.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  I definitely had adenoids and I had tonsillitis and I spent a lot of time in

• 5:12Speaker 00

  St Bart's and had my adenoids out, my tonsillitis, everything like that. And I did have glaucoma. But it, but my, my, my deafness, there's no trace of it now particularly. And I kind of wonder whether it was in fact a a cunning means to avoid my mother's questions. And I, I think, look, I mean, this, I don't know. It may be that I wasn't as deaf as, as all that. So I mean, would you ever do that if your mother was asking you something you didn't actually want to engage and?

• 5:43Steven Bartlett?

  I don't think I'm that cunning.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Do you what I mean?

• 5:45Steven Bartlett?

  Not at eight years old. Your mother Charlotte, um, she had four children. You were the oldest of those four. Um.

• 5:53Steven Bartlett?

  She seems to be a really important character in your life. In fact, when I opened up the first couple of pages of the book, you you dedicate the book in memory of Charlotte, your mother.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  I do.

• 6:02Steven Bartlett?

  She was an artist. She had made paintings of, of, of her children, but also other things. I saw some of those paintings. I did some research on those paintings. Um, but one of the sort of really pivotal moments in her early upbringing is that she suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  She did, yeah.

• 6:18Steven Bartlett?

  You're, what, ten years old when your mother is in, uh, put as an inpatient in a psychiatric hospital? And you're a part four, eight months.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  Something like that, yes.

• 6:31Steven Bartlett?

  What, what impact does that have on you in terms of shaping, shaping the Boris that we know today, if any?

• 6:40Speaker 00

  I mean, I remember it all very, very well. And it's hard to say exactly what impact it it had on me. But I think what certainly happened was that all four of us, all four of the children that that my mother had, we definitely kind of coagulated as a as a group. Because it was a tough time. There were more, there were aspects of the that were were tough because, you know, she she wasn't always there. And so I think it did breed a certain kind of group solidarity.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  And she always kind of blamed herself for not being there for the eight months, whatever period it was. And I I remember feeling very strongly that that was unfair and on and that she actually, you know, did an amazing job. And, you know, you couldn't, you couldn't have asked for more.

• 7:42Steven Bartlett?

  Did you notice her, anything unusual about her behaviour before she was?

• 7:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you the OCD thing is absolutely right. She did have that. And, you know, it was, it was very difficult. And I'm sure people who are watching this know exactly what it is. But she had lots of different patterns of behaviour. One of the, one of them was was about cleanliness. So, so, so the, so the, she, she washed her hands. And then she, she would realise in order to turn the tap off, she'd have to touch the, the faucet, the spigot. And and and she didn't want to do that because that would make her hands dirty again, she thought. But, you know, this is a very well known symptom. And she and she totally got over it. I mean, she totally got over it. She got through it.

• 8:27Steven Bartlett?

  Why was she sent to a psychiatric facility?

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Um, well, I guess because she's, I think.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  That's a jolly good question. I don't really know the answer. I think, I think she probably said that she thought she could benefit from

• 8:53Speaker 00

  therapy. And

• 8:58Speaker 00

  that's what she and my father decided to, was the best way forward. But I, I honestly don't know the answer to that.

• 9:04Steven Bartlett?

  And who looked after you while she was in that facility at 10 years old?

• 9:10Speaker 00

  Well, my father was there and we had a wonderful series of au pair girls and nannies and so on and so forth.

• 9:18Steven Bartlett?

  At 14 years old?

• 9:19Speaker 00

  And they were, they were all great too. But, you know, I don't, I don't, you know, I don't want to give the impression, which would not be fair, that my mother kind of

• 9:30Speaker 00

  was absent for long periods or wasn't a, a presence in our lives. Because she really was.

• 9:36Steven Bartlett?

  It was more her words. I saw her doing an interview where she was talking about

• 9:41Steven Bartlett?

  her belief that you had certain mechanisms to cope with the pain of her going to the facility for eight months, but then also the divorce. When you were 14, I thought those ages, that sort of puberty age where you're figuring yourself out. To get such a jolt of bad news is.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think that's, I mean, classically, yes. And look, I'm not gonna, I think you're on to it. You're, you know, there's, there's, there was an element of, of self-defense that then, you know, many kids in, in my, in our position then develop.

• 10:21Speaker 00

  But I do insist that they both remained remarkable parents. We, it wasn't like we were suddenly cut adrift by either of them, on the contrary.

• 10:31Steven Bartlett?

  Self-defense.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm quoting her on on me, by the way. So I'm quoting, I'm quoting you, quoting her.

• 10:42Steven Bartlett?

  You were there, so you.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I mean, you know, I don't, it didn't, it didn't occur to me at the time.

• 10:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I don't think it can for a fourteen year old, but in hindsight, as an as a man, you go, okay, that was, I created a pattern.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  I don't know, but I mean, but maybe, I mean, I've got nothing else to compare it to, right?

• 11:00Speaker 00

  You know, you're growing up anyway. You're becoming more self-reliant. You've got to do things to yourself.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  So I think, so go back to where it was with my my brothers and sisters. I think certainly, you know, it was another thing that drove us all together.

• 11:17Steven Bartlett?

  Why self-defense and how did that self-defense manifest in terms of behavior?

• 11:23Speaker 00

  I just, God.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  I'd be the worst type of, I want to think, well, how did I, how did I, how did my self-defense manifest? I suppose I became. Yes, unquestionably, it was painful. So how did I protect myself against that? Well, one obvious thing to do.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  I suppose all we'll do, I think I find the best therapy for every type of pain, emotional pain. Is to try to lose yourself in your work. Emotional pain is is about, a lot about, it's about self-esteem. So so like with when when parents split up.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  You know, the the shock is, well, you you can't love us that much. But if you're doing this, right? That's the, that's the what it's all about. Which is not true, of course, but that's what the children, that's what children feel. They feel it's their failure. There's something wrong with them. And that's not true, but that's how kids feel. I suppose to protect myself against that, like, I had a natural avenue for, to build up my

• 12:43Speaker 00

  self-esteem, and that was academic work, um, that kind of thing. But again, and you know, another, I suppose, another type of, of competition. And it, it, and I'm, it is a good therapy. Work is a, work is a, is a great reliever. Or distraction. Well, depends on your sort of theory of psychology, but um, I think it, both. Yeah. Both. Why did they divorce, you know? I think formally speaking, what had happened was that, um, you know, my mother had simply decided she wanted to make another life and, and she, you know, she, she

• 13:26Speaker 00

  found someone wonderful and, and, and, and all, all the rest of it.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  But I think that my father, um, and

• 13:39Speaker 00

  and mother.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  The weird thing about their divorce was that they both continued to be very strongly affectionate towards each other. And, you know, I'm, I'm, again, I'm not trying to minimize the

• 13:59Speaker 00

  psychological importance of any of this stuff for us as, as kids. But that was immensely fortifying because it was so obvious that it wasn't like they were at war. I mean, you know, they, they had a big bust ups, but it was, we felt that there was a real

• 14:20Speaker 00

  residue of, of love and affection between, even if, even if it was, I mean, I think the way, the way we explained it to ourselves was that.

• 14:28Speaker 00

  There was still a residue of love and affection, but that it was just practically impossible for them to to continue. And so that was that was how we rationalized it. And they both found other people and and were very happy.

• 14:42Steven Bartlett?

  You say bust ups, that from everything that I've read, there was physical violence in the household when you're younger.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, this is this is something that has been alleged by sadly by one of my biographers. So sort of pompous thing to say, one of my biographers. Well, some guy wrote a book and put that stuff in. You know, what I can tell you is I have no direct knowledge of of what he said. I don't want to get into it because I don't want to be disrespectful to my mother's memory. And I certainly don't want to say anything that would cause pain or embarrassment to my father. So but I can what I can say is I had as a child no direct knowledge of it myself.

• 15:29Steven Bartlett?

  What did their relationship teach you that marriage and love was?

• 15:35Speaker 00

  They they they so they met at university. They clearly loved each other. But I think if you ask my siblings, they'll they'll they'll tell you that. So that, you know, it was upsetting when when they split up because.

• 15:52Steven Bartlett?

  Do you remember the day they told you?

• 15:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I do. I do. I do. I do. It was it was a we were we were in we were in Somerset and my father said that we all had to go and and up by the the gate towards the engine shed. So you then just stood by the gate towards the engine shed and and we were told this, you know, sad news.

• 16:15Steven Bartlett?

  What did he say?

• 16:16Speaker 00

  I don't remember exactly. I don't remember exactly. But I was look, I was cross and and and said, you know, so what so why did you have us then? Because I thought, well,

• 16:27Speaker 00

  good.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  As you know, I think.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  It is upsetting and.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  Kids do take, you know, kids take it upon themselves, right? And so they do, they do think that there must be some fault or mistake in that in themselves. And that isn't, that isn't true. I mean, you know, you.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  It's very important for kids not to blame themselves for, for these things. So I think that.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  That's, you know, back to the point I was making earlier on with you.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  I think.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  You know, you do need to. Feed the, the.

• 17:23Speaker 00

  Your self-esteem and you need to get yourself back up again. And so work was my, was my way of doing it.

• 17:32Steven Bartlett?

  I, I could see the, um, the emotion in your face when you talk about that moment as if you were teleported back to that moment. For a second.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it may, I mean, look, I mean, the, the, the actual, the truth is I'm, I'm now told in retrospect that that is what I said. I don't personally remember it.

• 17:49Steven Bartlett?

  Do you remember how it feels?

• 17:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, but look, I mean, yes, but I really wouldn't want to over egg it because. My parents were incredibly kind to each other after that.

• 18:05Steven Bartlett?

  You know, when you do this and you throw the, the coal in the.

• 18:07Speaker 00

  I'm just stoking the furnace of my, of my.

• 18:09Steven Bartlett?

  Your self-esteem.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  Self-esteem, yeah, yeah.

• 18:11Steven Bartlett?

  You, um, you have quite a distinct persona. You're, I mean, much of where you sort of first came to public knowledge was on the TV show, Have I Got News For You?

• 18:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know. I think the BBC are very, they, they, they live in permanent state of horror about what they did there because, you know, I think that's one of the reasons that they. I think they, they have a terrible sense of corporate guilt that they unleashed this thing.

• 18:31Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a link between your persona comedic, you know, people often describe you as being a bit of a buffoon. I actually thought you were a, this is just being honest, because I feel like it's important to be honest to someone if you've said it behind their back. But when I first saw you on the screen, I was a very young man. I must have been, I don't know, 14. And I thought you were a parody from Bo Selector. Like, I thought that too.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:56Steven Bartlett?

  I thought it was a parody. But then I came to learn, when you did the London Mayor thing, etc., that you were a politician and who you were and where you'd come from. But the external persona is very atypical of a politician.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:08Steven Bartlett?

  And your general comedic sense, that shows up in the book a lot. You were very comedic on Have I Got News, How I Have I Got News For You. Is that at all linked? When did that behaviour show up? Because there was two points of reference that I was mulling. One is things your sister said about where you sort of learnt that comedy was a useful device. And the second one is something Jimmy Carr actually said to me. He said to me that, he goes, if you ever meet anyone comedic or a comedian, don't ask them if they're depressed. Ask them which one of their parents they were trying to cheer up or win favour from. I wondered if all...

• 19:44Speaker 00

  I think, I don't know. I think that one of the things I've tried to do in politics is to get people interested. And one of the things I've tried to do in Unleashed, which is unquestionably a mixture, there's a lot of serious argument in it, but also I'm trying to tell the story in as readable a way as possible. And you have to, you have to use, you've got to sugar the pill. You've got to, it's like a packet of digestive biscuits. You've got to have, so each of the chapters has a, some solid, you know, wheat germ

• 20:26Speaker 00

  pabulum, but it's covered with some, a little layer of chocolate.

• 20:30Steven Bartlett?

  Did you...

• 20:31Speaker 00

  So you see, you go down, you go down the packet compulsively. And each of those 60 chapters, I think there are 60 chapters in that book, is designed to... Give you a bit of both.

• 20:42Steven Bartlett?

  So you the pill that was sugared, you sugared yourself.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  No, well, it's well, I know that there are, it's the fact of the great things that I think that we did. You know, we took back control of our of our country. We we had a, we we went for a type of independence that people thought was impossible.

• 21:00Steven Bartlett?

  No, I'm specific on the persona.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  And so the complicated arguments about um least about you, you know, as as a as a as a guide to the last fifteen years in in politics, I think it's it's pretty useful.

• 21:14Steven Bartlett?

  But I mean, I worked in marketing for about fifteen years, so I find it quite fascinating that right now in the world, it seems that there's a certain type of atypical personality that's breaking through and being resonant. Is your persona a carefully constructed marketing strategy? Or is, because someone I've someone that knows you referred to as a bit of a loner in private and a quite quiet person.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, no, I I live, I so I'm very, I have a wonderful life. I I spend my time, I I do a lot of painting. I I do a lot of reading and and writing. I muck around, muck around with my kids. It doesn't take much to, you know, my cup to run over with with happiness.

• 21:59Steven Bartlett?

  But you know, all this stuff like.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I know, but that's I I've got, I've always had a lot of energy.

• 22:06Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  I've always had a lot of.

• 22:07Steven Bartlett?

  You understand that that's part of your persona, right?

• 22:10Speaker 00

  Well, I always thought about that.

• 22:12Steven Bartlett?

  But I'm trying to understand, is it calculated? Is it something that you've you've thought about and you understand is effective? Because they describe you as being one of the best sort of election winners of our of our time.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  I think what people will, I don't know. I mean, what people will also say is that um I haven't really changed. I mean, you know, going back to your earlier earlier line of question, I can see where you're going with this. You're you're saying as part of the strategy for defence, do we adopt comedic persona or or or whatever? I don't think that was, I think it was just with my brothers and sisters in our family, there was a kind of horror of of, you know, being dull or not saying anything, you know, we we had to, you know, we all had to amuse each each other.

• 22:59Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 23:01Speaker 00

  That was only polite.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  You know, because it was more fun.

• 23:07Steven Bartlett?

  Your brothers and sisters are less amusing than you are.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  I wouldn't say that.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  That's a very controversial thing to say.

• 23:14Steven Bartlett?

  You would say that.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  I would not, I would not say that.

• 23:16Steven Bartlett?

  You would say that.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Who I would say that?

• 23:18Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. You think you're less amusing, less comedic.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  Have you met my brother Leo?

• 23:22Steven Bartlett?

  No, I've not met him.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Well, then you've got to get Leo on this show.

• 23:24Steven Bartlett?

  But your sister.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  You can get my brother Joe.

• 23:26Steven Bartlett?

  Yes, you're.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  You've met my brother Joe? Honestly, this is, no, look, honestly, this is a serious risk of.

• 23:36Speaker 00

  We had a wonderful childhood because, and they wouldn't deny this, because we all, you know, we had a lot of fun trying to interest and amuse each other and, and, and, and to your point, probably our parents as well.

• 23:50Steven Bartlett?

  Because your sister.

• 23:51Speaker 00

  That's also saying that we were, we were, you know, we didn't, we didn't do kind of charades and, and Christmas masks and, and plays and, and God knows what.

• 24:00Steven Bartlett?

  Jeremy Corbyn said Boris is a calculated intelligent who lives in a persona which is the opposite.

• 24:06Steven Bartlett?

  Is that true at all?

• 24:11Speaker 00

  No, I mean, I, I think that, I mean, I wish it were true in some ways, but I don't.

• 24:19Steven Bartlett?

  Because most of your, most of your videos on YouTube are you tackling a small child world playing rugby and things like this?

• 24:24Speaker 00

  No, by the way, by the way, he might, he, I reckon he could be much older than he looked. You know, that, that, that, the guy in Japan.

• 24:30Steven Bartlett?

  The kid you tackled.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  This kid in Japan, the one I accidentally knocked over in Japan.

• 24:33Steven Bartlett?

  They're all comedy videos.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, he, but he, anyway.

• 24:37Steven Bartlett?

  Eton, it's pretty crazy to me. So you went to Eton at 13 years old. It's, the crazy thing for me is that approximately 20 of the 57 individuals who have served as prime minister went to Eton, which is roughly 35% of the UK prime ministers were educated at Eton, roughly.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:53Steven Bartlett?

  This, for me, when I read that, I go, something's broken here. Because for one school to contribute so many of the most powerful people in, in the land feels like a little bit of, like someone's got their hands on the scale or there's some kind of.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  That's why you need to read leveling, you need to read, read the book, because the book contains, this is the whole fit, theme of the book, right?

• 25:13Steven Bartlett?

  Not the whole theme of the book.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  It's one of the major themes of the book. It's about leveling up.

• 25:16Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 00

  And if, if you remember what I say about it, I, I don't know whether you, you, you got through that bit, but. I so I went there on a scholarship. It was fantastic. I was very lucky. I was I was paid for by the by Henry the sixth. Oh, the legacy of Henry the sixth. And I remember feeling this incredible sense of

• 25:41Speaker 00

  amazement that

• 25:45Speaker 00

  there were kids from some of the most famous illustrious families in in Britain, uh, who plainly didn't have, you know, much um intellectual interest, academic, you know, sp- spark in them. And and kids who'd come from backgrounds all over the country,

• 26:07Speaker 00

  who were incredible. And I and I my my insight at school, very, very, very young, was that this there's there's a fundamental problem, which is that there is ambition and energy and genius and talent, probably completely evenly distributed throughout the UK population. And opportunity is not. Yeah, I agree. And and that is the problem. That is the basic problem in our country. And this country has more potential, arguably, than any other major European economy, because it's so imbalanced. And if you look at the the property, schools like mine, from London in the southeast in the UK economy,

• 26:51Speaker 00

  it's actually unlike France, Germany, Italy, Holland. It's also totally unlike the United States. And so I I decided very early on that the that

• 27:06Speaker 00

  there was massive, massive wasted potential. And so one of the things, uh, so when I became mayor of London, one of my biggest projects was really all the biggest thing we did was really all about trying to lift the the the boroughs that people said were were locked in a permanent cycle of disadvantage and and, you know, you know what I mean? The inner the inner donut of London, Hatney, where, you know, all that. And and it was total rubbish, total rubbish. And you you can change people's.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  Aspirations, but you can then also change the culture of achievement. And and I saw it happen in London. And I was only mayor for eight years, but in that period, you really did see the city change in in, you know, quite a significant way. And I believe very, very strongly that that is fundamentally what needs to happen in the whole of the UK. And and I think that this is the job of politicians. I don't care whether they're Labour or Conservative or whoever. I think that that is that is what we need to be doing. And I think there are very simple ingredients that there's not, there's limits to what politicians can do, but there are some simple things that politicians need to be doing to to make that happen.

• 28:25Steven Bartlett?

  Has the Conservative government done well enough at leveling up the the whole of the UK over the last decade?

• 28:31Speaker 00

  Uh, yes, obviously not, because it's not happening far. It is, I mean, it is happening. Leveling up is happening.

• 28:38Steven Bartlett?

  But if you look at the.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  But it's nothing like fast enough.

• 28:40Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  And, you know, so, you know, I was proud of doing things like running out gigabit broadband from, you know, seven to seventy percent, almost sixty nine, seventy percent of of households in in three years, which is not not bad going. I was proud of all the infrastructure stuff we were we were doing. I think it's a mistake to to stop that. Infrastructure is crucial for leveling up. Transport infrastructure is a great is a great equalizer of opportunity. So things like HS2, Northern Powerhouse Rail, we should be going on with those, in in my view.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  And, you know, whatever my my defects as a politician, I think one thing I was good at was getting a lot of stuff done fast and get and and driving and driving project projects. But.

• 29:36Steven Bartlett?

  The problem is.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  Eaton Eaton was, you know, back to your question.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  That youthful experience was, because I was also at primary school in London. And I really, really decided that this was, because I think our country has this problem worse than most other countries, most comparable countries. But if you think of, if you think of how strong the UK economy already is, then imagine what we could achieve if we leveled up.

• 30:10Steven Bartlett?

  Right. Do you know this, this stat around Eton, that 20 out of the 57 individuals who've served as Prime Minister came from there? Isn't that just the clearest example of the fact that?

• 30:20Speaker 00

  It is.

• 30:21Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. The people that are coming into politics, but also generally the people that are getting to the top in society are starting with a unfair advantage to some degree.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  I, well, I think what it shows is that, I mean, you could probably point to cultures like France or wherever, where, you know, a lot of the country is run by the, the people from the, the great schools. But, yeah, I mean, fundamentally, yes. So I think that the, so the great, the great choice for, for anybody who's interested in public policy is, well, okay, this is, this is clearly, clearly a problem. It's clearly wrong. It's clearly imbalanced. What do you do?

• 31:12Speaker 00

  Do you set out to launch a kind of cultural assault, Pol Pot style, on the successful institutions? Or do you say, actually, what we're going to do is try to spread opportunity? So it's more like America. And, and if you look at America.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  The growth rates have spectacularly outperformed European growth rates. There's a different sense, people have a different sense of what they can do. And we need to have a, we need to have a, a culture in the UK where people don't feel prisoners of their geography, of their background.

• 31:51Steven Bartlett?

  But that certainly is the case, isn't it, at the moment in the UK?

• 31:53Speaker 00

  It's too much the case. I mean, it's less, it's less than it was.

• 31:56Steven Bartlett?

  I went undercover, I went undercover in a school in Liverpool that was very poorly ranked on the Ofsted rankings. I remember being in that school and just thinking, how on earth are these kids gonna have a chance?

• 32:08Speaker 00

  Well, they're not gonna have a chance if their teachers tell them that they're never gonna get into a Russell Group university and they.

• 32:13Steven Bartlett?

  Well, what I observed when I was there was I observed one teacher running from one classroom to the next classroom. This was under a Tory government, trying to teach two classes at the same time. And I remember sitting down with her, cause I, cause I got like kicked out of school, then I was unexpelled from school. So I had a bit of my own prejudices about school. I thought teachers were the problem. And what I came to learn from speaking to the headmaster of the school was that this is effectively run like a business. And the amount of students that choose that school every year determines how much money the school is given by the conservative government. And the, the amount of the parents choose schools based on the league table and the league table is determined by grades. So really, if you think about the, the structure here, the reason why they're driving kids like me to do subjects, which I absolutely hated.

• 32:55Steven Bartlett?

  When I was really interested in business was because if they don't get me to get 12 As to Cs or whatever the nonsense is in certain subjects. Less, they, they rank poorly in the league table, less parents choose the school. They get less money from the government and it's this downward spiral. And because this school was.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  So, so people are, people are naturally skewed to doing subjects that perhaps.

• 33:14Steven Bartlett?

  That, that, no interest of them. They had me pushing some plastic baby around the school in health and social care when I was running businesses in the school. And I was, I was spending so much time in my, in exclusion unit because I was falling asleep in classrooms. It turns out I had ADHD. I wasn't interested in these things, but I was obsessed in these things. The system is, is designed to just, to just sort of spread back you across multiple subjects and you're a failure if you're not good at that. But going back to the sort of, the, the, the economics of the school. I watched this teacher run from one classroom to the other, teaching two classrooms at the same time. And she told me that because less students had chosen that school this year, she was having to pay for the footballs and the, the pencils in her classroom.

• 33:54Steven Bartlett?

  This school, I, I observed the quality of education. With all due respect, they did the best with, with what they had. But oh my god, it doesn't compare, doesn't compare to a lot of the other schools that I've observed. And I thought, God, these children in this school are starting out life with a significant disadvantage. And much of that is just down to the funding situation. They don't have the teachers. The teachers are dropping like flies because they're getting sick because they're understaffed. And I just thought that that's such a, if we think about, you know, what's the furthest upstream thing we can do to give people a fair shake in life so that they can become a prime minister or a CEO or whatever they want to be. It starts there, it starts with education and just giving everyone the same sort of a quality of opportunity.

• 34:37Steven Bartlett?

  But right now, and especially under the, the sort of last 10, 15 years of government.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  Well, I think I probably ought to, to, to resist some of that because, um, yeah, I mean, I think teaching is incredible. I tried to be a, a teacher myself. It's, it's, it's unbelievably difficult and, and demanding job. And I hugely admire teachers. When I came in, in 2019, we put a lot of money into, into the education budgets and, um, made sure teachers were going to be paid, new, new teachers starting to have at least thirty thousand pounds and, uh, a lot of money into, into further education.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  And actually, if you look at that period of, of the conservative administration, I think most fair-minded people will say, actually, look, UK went up the PISA rankings for literacy and numeracy. Most people actually would say that education was one of the things where

• 35:39Speaker 00

  things did get better. And I think the driving out of the whole academy program, I mean, I'm not remotely denying what you say about,

• 35:51Speaker 00

  the teacher, you, you know, the teachers who are being, being totally run, run ragged.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  And, you know, the

• 36:00Speaker 00

  They need the maximum possible support, but if you look at the data,

• 36:07Speaker 00

  schools did get appreciably better in this country during that period. Now, what I wanted to do was really turbocharge that and give not just schoolchildren, but also kids who'd left school at sixteen, the types of skills that they were going to need to

• 36:29Speaker 00

  compete and to make sure that business felt that they had in the schools, in the FE colleges, in wherever it was, they had the talent that they needed to invest in that area. Because that's ultimately what it's all about. It's about having the

• 36:46Speaker 00

  the confidence that the the state is doing enough to deliver private sector investment. That is, that is ultimately what will transform the the neighbourhood. And and you get, instead of getting the vicious cycle of of decline that you talked about, you'll get a, you'll get a a positive feedback loop. And

• 37:11Speaker 00

  parents want to move there, want to send their kids to the to the school. The school get a good re- a good reputation. And and so things will, things will turn around, as they did in London. Look at London schools. You know, I can't, I can't comment on the the school you you mentioned in Liverpool. But London schools really, really change a lot.

• 37:29Steven Bartlett?

  I think with, even with the levelling up thing, one of the easiest ways to level up without building the train line would just be to improve the quality of education in these.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  Sure. And I think if you look at what Conservatives did, they really focused on that. And they focused on the curriculum, they focused on standards, they focused on quality. And I think that was very important because, you know.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  It's very, very important to fund schools properly.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  But you shouldn't underestimate what a great teacher can achieve and the difference that they can make. And if you emphasize quality and you emphasize attainment and you focus on that. That's why I think I'm slightly worried about what's happening now with Ofsted. I mean, I can understand why people don't like one word Ofsted gradings, but parents need to know whether a school is going to deliver.

• 38:30Steven Bartlett?

  You went to Oxford University, then you had a job as a management consultant, which lasted only a week, I hear.

• 38:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wasn't really cut out for that.

• 38:37Steven Bartlett?

  You then become a journalist.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:39Steven Bartlett?

  Become a journalist for the next couple of years, you then appear on Have I Got News For You?

• 38:43Speaker 00

  Is it now faded from the memory?

• 38:46Steven Bartlett?

  It's slightly faded. It's still a great show, but it's still slightly fading. You were then editor.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  You mustn't tell Ian Hislop that it's faded and.

• 38:54Steven Bartlett?

  You were an MP of the House of Combs.

• 38:58Steven Bartlett?

  Then eventually you run for London Mayor. Were you, did you expect to win the London Mayorship?

• 39:04Speaker 00

  Well, you see, this is the way you, I hadn't got the faintest idea. I mean, the thing was that I'd actually been quite an admirer of Ken Livingstone in the old days. And I thought that he had some bold and original ideas for London. I thought he was good on the environment, he was good on air quality, he was good on, I thought. There were some good things that he did.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  But it was clear that after eight years, you know, you start to get a bit ragged.

• 39:31Steven Bartlett?

  Did you think you would win?

• 39:34Speaker 00

  I suppose I must have done. I suppose I must have thought it was a good chance. It was a pretty exhausting campaign.

• 39:39Steven Bartlett?

  But if you ask me if I thought I would win something, I can tell you in hindsight whether I thought I'd win. I did soccer last year, this year, and I can tell you if I thought I was going to win. Did you think you were going to win when you ran?

• 39:52Speaker 00

  I thought there was a goodish chance, but it wasn't obvious. I mean, I think the bookies didn't really have me as the favorite for a long time. I think it then changed, I can't remember exactly, but.

• 40:10Speaker 00

  You know, you see, you make your own luck, right? I mean, I had to, I had to go in there and make the arguments. I mean, I think that one of the things that Ken didn't pay enough attention to was crime. And I thought the was a real issue that needed to be addressed. And that was the, the numbers of teenage kids being murdered. And we really, really went at that hard. And again, it was one of those things where, where I, together with a lot of other people, Kit Malthus, Deputy Mayor, and Stephen Greenhalgh, Paul Stephenson, the Commissioner, Bernard Hogan Howe, who, who followed him. We really, really tried to fix knife crime and gang crime.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  I used to literally lie awake at night worrying about it because it was so on me. You know, every, every single casualty, having to talk to the parents, the, you know, the misery, the misery of, of their suffering. We really felt it and we, and it was, it was a good example of democracy because we'd pledged to fix it. And if we didn't, we had nowhere to go. One of the things I'm proud of is we, we cut the murder rate in London during my time by 50%.

• 41:25Steven Bartlett?

  In 2016 at 52 years old, you become co-leader alongside Michael Gove of the campaign to take Britain out of the EU. When I, when I look at your premiership as Prime Minister of the UK, there's three really significant moments, isn't there? That typically don't fall all in one person's role as a Prime Minister. You had the Brexit issues, you had Covid and you had the Ukraine war.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 41:49Steven Bartlett?

  And before I, before I talk about those particular issues,

• 41:53Steven Bartlett?

  in hindsight now, how do you feel about the fact that you had to contend with three generational crises and issues?

• 42:02Speaker 00

  But, you know, that's the job of being Prime Minister.

• 42:05Steven Bartlett?

  But most Prime Ministers don't get.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Sure, but, but you know.

• 42:07Steven Bartlett?

  A pandemic, leaving the EU.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  Some ministers have had.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  Wars, some people, Prime Ministers have had terrible crises, sterling crises, terrible.

• 42:19Steven Bartlett?

  Do you wish you got a different hand?

• 42:20Speaker 00

  No, I, I, I, I think actually.

• 42:23Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think you'd still be in politics now and as Prime Minister if you, if you got a different hand?

• 42:28Speaker 00

  No, I think there are, I think, honestly, I think there were other reasons for, for, for that. I mean, I'm, so I'm, I'm proud of, of the things that we did with, with the country. I think it was very, you know, people now say Brexit war. Actually, you know, one of the points I make in, in Unleashed is that if you look at it, the model of national independence that we got was crucial. So full, full freedom to do what we wanted in legislation and regulation. That was actually crucial when it came to that pandemic because we were able to vaccinate faster than any other European country, much faster. I mean.

• 43:06Steven Bartlett?

  Did you think you were going to win the Brexit vote?

• 43:09Speaker 00

  Um, I.

• 43:10Steven Bartlett?

  Honestly?

• 43:11Speaker 00

  When I was outside London, yes. When I was inside London, no. So whenever I travelled around the country, I thought, my God, people are going to vote. But then when I got back into the metropolis, um, it felt very different.

• 43:24Steven Bartlett?

  So if you had to put your house on it, remain or leave in terms of the probability of, of the outcome, what you, your predicted outcome, which one would you have voted on?

• 43:34Speaker 00

  Well, I thought polls were, were basically more for remain than for leave.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  But I sort of thought that our voters were more motivated. So I hoped that they would come out. I hoped that they would.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  That I was, but it did, but on a scale that no one had foreseen. I mean, because we had seventeen point four million people voted leave, which was the biggest number voted for any proposition in history. And, um, but, you know, there were plenty of times where I, you know.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  You could be in a, I was at St Andrews University in Scotland for my daughter's graduation day, and you really wouldn't have thought that we were going to vote leave talking to those people there. So, you know, it depended.

• 44:27Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know what's interesting? When I was reading your book, but also when I was reading some of your previous writings, you seemed really conflicted on which way to go, leave or remain, right up until you wrote your sort of first announcement piece that you were supporting leave. You seemed to be really, really conflicted.

• 44:45Speaker 00

  The reasons for not leaving were, it seemed to me, to be more to do with Britain's duty to the rest of Europe, our need to be good partners, our need not to be negative, to be friendly. Those are the things that worried me. The positive reasons for leaving.

• 45:09Steven Bartlett?

  People point at this letter, which was unpublished. You know the letter I'm referring to. The unpublished letter you wrote about the decision to leave or stay within the EU.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  Is this, no, you mean the article?

• 45:19Steven Bartlett?

  The unpublished article.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:21Steven Bartlett?

  Where you said, here's some of the phrases from that piece. Think of Britain, think of the rest of the EU, think of the future, think of the desire of our children and our grandchildren to live and work in other European countries, to sell things there, to make friends, perhaps to find partners there. I like the sound of freedom, I like the sound of a strong democracy, but what are the downsides? And here we must be honest, there is the worry about Scotland, about the possibility that the English-only leave vote could lead to the breakup of the Union. There is the Putin factor. We don't want to do anything to encourage more shirtless swaggering from the Russian leader, not the Middle East, not anywhere. And then there is the whole geostrategic anxiety. Britain is a great nation, a global force for good. It is surely a boon for the world and for Europe that she should be intimately engaged in the EU. Lastly, this is a market on our

• 46:05Steven Bartlett?

  doorstep, ready for future exploitation by British firms. The membership fee seems rather small for all that access. Why are we so determined to turn our back on it? Shouldn't our policy be like our policy on cake, pro having it and pro eating it, pro Europe and pro rest of the world? So when I read that, but then I also, I read the, um, the very vivid description you gave of that night when you're trying to make your decision in your book, uh, Unleashed. And you seemed torn, but the guy that went out and campaigned didn't seem torn. There was a, there was a real lack of nuance in the campaign, but there's such a, a huge amount of nuance in both the moment you were making the decision and the articles you wrote about that decision.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  There are arguments both ways and I, I, I say it in the, in the book and it's certainly true that as I, as I said just now, the, the case for staying is, is I think of one about, um, not seeming to be hostile, not seeming to be detached, but I had to decide. Because the, the, being in the EU isn't like just being in a club that where the rules don't change. It's, it's a project to create a United States of, of Europe with a single currency, with a single parliament and, and so on.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  And I thought that we weren't ever going to get the choice again, the chance again to have national democratic independence. And as I said, and so I wrote, so that article you just quoted was a sort of pastiche of a, of a counter argument, which I wrote for myself as an exercise after I'd already written the piece to, to come out. And I wanted to set them side by side and to, and to think.

• 47:52Steven Bartlett?

  But that's nuanced, but the campaign wasn't nuanced.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  But if you read the, the other article.

• 47:57Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  You, you'll see the points that I came down in favor of. And that was about having full national independence and be able to do things your own way. And the trouble with staying in the EU was that it meant that we were going to become less and less democratic.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  And in the end, you've got to be able to, as a politician.

• 48:27Speaker 00

  You've got to be able to answer the question. Who puts you in authority over me? And how can I remove you from office? And the problem with the EU is there's no way they can answer that question. Because they're not democratically.

• 48:44Steven Bartlett?

  Is there not way you can reform the relationship with the EU while being in the EU? You know, it's interesting because I think I was thinking of a football analogy as you're talking there. And right now, Manchester United, my team are having a bit of struggle, right? And my friends in the group chat are saying, do you think that we should get rid of the manager? And I'm saying, when you think about making a decision like that, you also have to factor in.

• 49:05Steven Bartlett?

  What you do after, i.e. who replaces the manager? So many fans would just say sack the manager. But then the question becomes, but then what? And it was quite clear in your book that although you wanted to leave the EU. You had no idea. What the plan would be thereafter.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  And in fact. But what we need to do is take back control. And so.

• 49:26Steven Bartlett?

  That's like fire the manager. I'm saying, but then.

• 49:28Speaker 00

  No, it wasn't. I was just wanting to win an argument with the public about their democracy. And whether they should control it or not. And I thought that ultimately we had to do that. And I think that if you look at, so going back to. The points that we were talking about earlier to growth rates in America and Europe. You couldn't say that the EU model has been economically successful. Not at all. It's got chronically bad growth rates.

• 50:01Speaker 00

  Very low innovation by comparison with the United States. Something is not working. So whatever they're doing in Brussels to provide this great body of regulation. It's not actually delivering results for the people of Europe. And if you.

• 50:18Steven Bartlett?

  I want to be clear, when compared to America?

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Well, so from 2008 on to 15, take the 15 years, 2008, 2022, whatever, 2003.

• 50:31Steven Bartlett?

  But does that mean that the EU is doing something wrong or that the Americans are doing something right? Because when I think of America, I think of insane innovation. You know, I think of.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  A bit of both, a lot, I mean, a lot of both.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  The Americans, by the way, would never dream of trading away national sovereignty ever anything. They just don't. They never, they never, they never, in any way.

• 50:55Steven Bartlett?

  NATO is a bit of a pact where they've.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  The Americans have complete hegemony in NATO. I mean, you know, that's.

• 51:01Steven Bartlett?

  But they join forces to make the sum greater than the parts.

• 51:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you know, there's no, the EU provides a body of new and a continuously evolving body of new law, which the British Parliament can't change. And so to get back to, so why, I mean, I'm not pretending it wasn't a difficult decision. It was a difficult decision for the, you know, for the reasons that we've gone into. But I wanted the country, our country, to be legislatively free again. And at the heart of the book, you know, you talk about the pandemic being the most difficult thing. It was very, very difficult. But, and it was very difficult to persuade the British public to, very difficult ways of stopping

• 51:48Speaker 00

  the spread of the disease. But one thing we did better than any other European country was vaccinate. And one reason we were able to vaccinate so fast is because we had regulatory freedom of exactly the kind, I mean, it was a complete fluke, but exactly the kind.

• 52:08Steven Bartlett?

  We'll talk about that.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  That I had advocated.

• 52:10Steven Bartlett?

  We'll talk about that.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  And so, and so that for me was absolutely crucial. And then there are.

• 52:14Steven Bartlett?

  We'll talk about that. I just want to, I need to make sure I'm clear. Cause if I'm not clear moving forward, then my audience aren't going to be clear. This idea of like freedom, if we take the analogy of like a parachute, if I cut the cords, I'm free, but I'm also in danger unless I have a paraglider waiting to catch me. And my point here is, I understand the head, all the like, the big emotional words, that freedom and take back control, et cetera. It sounds compelling to me. But as I said with the football analogy, what's the plan thereafter? And I think I actually don't want.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  So you're talking about the parachute, right? And cutting the cords of the of the parachute. Um, actually, it was the other way around. It was because we'd come out of the EU that we were able to equip ourselves with a parachute faster than anybody else. And we were able to to get out of the burning plane faster and to get to ground safely faster. Because we'd taken back control of our of our regulatory freedom. And that meant that by March twenty twenty one, we'd vaccinated forty five percent of the adult population. And of the older people, I think we'd done almost a hundred eighty over the over eighty. We'd done almost a hundred percent. And that was incredible.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  If you remember, we had we had.

• 53:33Steven Bartlett?

  We'll talk about the vaccines in a second.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  Early in those early days, but the two things are connected.

• 53:37Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I understand.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  Early days, we had thousands, you know, up to a thousand people dying every day. And so it was incredibly important.

• 53:46Steven Bartlett?

  Just on this point.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  We were able to give elderly and vulnerable people in the UK a protection from a lethal disease.

• 53:53Steven Bartlett?

  On this point of Brexit, though, in your book, you say you almost sort of disconnect yourself from the fact that you there had to be a plan associated with the decision. Because you seem almost angry that people would expect you to have the plan, even though you led the campaign.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, I mean, I'm trying to make the connection between Brexit and the real world and why Brexit delivers value.

• 54:15Steven Bartlett?

  Was there a plan for leaving?

• 54:17Speaker 00

  So so but on the in twenty sixteen, and I think what you're really saying is, what was our plan for the um, the referendum outcome? So everybody who campaigned to to leave, were we expecting to win? Were we expecting to form the next government?

• 54:33Steven Bartlett?

  Let me quote your book. This is good for promotion for your book. So you're like this. Never at any point in that campaign did we, Boris and Michael Gove, discuss a future leave base government. Because we did not imagine that there would be would have we would have to be in charge of government. The government's stated policy was to implement the referendum result. It was a result. It was a referendum, not an election. We had no plans for government, no plans for negotiations, because it was not our job.

• 55:01Steven Bartlett?

  And in so far as the next few days were chaotic, which they were, it is utterly infuriating that we should be blamed. It was up to the government to announce the plan to withdraw. It was up to the government to begin negotiations. So this is, I mean, this is, this is a huge issue because in the context of business.

• 55:17Speaker 00

  Because when, because when, because why? Because, because I think it's a fundamental misconception. When you, when you, when a government decides to put something to the people in a referendum, the government is not saying, oh, you know, if, if it goes against our, you know, the, any particular position will, will disappear.

• 55:36Steven Bartlett?

  But the government said they wanted to remain.

• 55:38Speaker 00

  In France, for instance, Francois Mitterrand had a referendum on, I can't remember which, I think it was the Maastricht Treaty, or it was one of the treaties that he, he lost the vote. And he didn't resign, he didn't disappear. Plenty of European leaders have had referendums on E, on, on the EU and, and they've gone against them, but they haven't vanished from the scene. And so, you know, let me put this the other way around. Imagine, imagine that Gove and I, or the whole of the Leave team, had been specifically campaigning

• 56:18Speaker 00

  to, in the Leave vote, to form the next government and to install ourselves as the rulers of the country. People would have said, this is not about, if this is, you're plainly, you're, you're talking, all your arguments are designed to advance your political careers. You're not, you're not talking about the issue of Leave or Remain. You're talking about a plan to take over the government.

• 56:41Steven Bartlett?

  I know.

• 56:43Steven Bartlett?

  I'm not a politician. I'm just, I'm just a member of the public.

• 56:45Speaker 00

  So I'm just trying to explain why that, that was not possible.

• 56:48Steven Bartlett?

  I get it. But as a member of the public, I think if you're leading the charge for an outcome, you must have looked a couple of steps further to think about the implications and the reality of this outcome. Like you must have had, okay, we can do it like this, we can negotiate like this.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  I assume that the government would have bring, would have a white paper. That said, that brought, they, they, they were going to bring forward the options for the country and the plan to negotiate and the plan to, and the plan to, to do what they said they were going to do.

• 57:17Steven Bartlett?

  But the government, including your friend David Cameron, said this is a really bad idea. So one would, one would take from that, that the plan is not a good one, that they've looked at all the available options post leaving and there's no good options here. So if the people in charge were saying, we should not leave, there is no good plan, shouldn't we have listened to them?

• 57:37Speaker 00

  Well, no, because I think they were wrong.

• 57:40Steven Bartlett?

  The way that I see it, as a member of public, is I see two, like, two people stood at a cliff edge and you've got one guy called David, one guy called Boris. And David has said, listen, I'm taking you to the cliff edge because it's your right to, to make this decision, but do not jump. And this other guy called Boris is going, jump. I would assume that Boris knows something about how we survive once we start falling. But to find out that Boris had no plan and thought David was going to pull out the parachute, for me is like.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  Well.

• 58:07Steven Bartlett?

  David, David Cameron didn't have a plan.

• 58:09Speaker 00

  The problem, the problem was that I, I then, we then had to, we then had found ourselves, because David, Prime Minister Cameron, then disappeared from the scene immediately. As I, as I describe in the book, we then, we then had a chaotic period where we had to work out what the hell we were going to do, because it was clear that we were going to, somebody was going to have to take over and, and lead us through it.

• 58:35Steven Bartlett?

  Did David Cameron react badly when you told him, when he thought that you might be voting to leave? Because you talk about in the book, he swore to leave.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  Yes, I did. But I mean, but, you know, I describe it in the, in the book.

• 58:48Steven Bartlett?

  What did he say to you?

• 58:49Speaker 00

  He said, he said, um, he said, I, well, I said, look, I have, I was really struggling with this because I didn't see how I could consistently, because he'd offered me, he said, if you come out and support Remain, you can have a top five job in the cabinet. I couldn't work out what a top five job was. And then, and then he said, um, and then I, he, I said, well, look, I was finding it very difficult, because I'd written lots and lots of articles that were pointing out the democratic problems of the, of the EU. And, you know, finally, we had a chance to, to resolve this. And I was thinking of, of coming out for leave and I, you know, didn't know how to put it to him, but that was the, the truth. And he, he said, this isn't about articles, this is about the future of the country. I said, well, I agree with about the future of the country, but I was still thinking come out for leave.

• 59:33Speaker 00

  And he said, well. If you, if you, if you come out for leave, he said, I will, and I, you know, I apologize for using the same. He said, I will, I will fuck you up forever. And which I thought was quite a big, big, you know, sort of promise to make.

• 59:48Steven Bartlett?

  He said he was gonna fuck you up forever.

• 59:49Speaker 00

  Forever. And so I immediately um went back home after, I went back home after that evening and uh and cycled back from my office in, in, in City Hall and talked to my, my family, my kids. And one of my kids uh said immediately, well, you know, he got no choice and you'll have to come out for leave. So um.

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  I mean, I put that in to, I put all that in really to, just to show you that um.

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  There were very good arguments for having a quiet life.

• 1:00:24Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know what's interesting in that is when I read that part in your book, there was two things that I thought. The first was him offering you a top five job if you followed his opinion. Is that not bribery? And is that how the jobs are dished out in the government at the moment? If, if you, if you do what I say, I'll give you a top, for like, if you do what I say, I'll make you health secretary or defence secretary.

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that's kind of nice.

• 1:00:47Steven Bartlett?

  But it seems like from, as a, someone who's not in government, it seems like a really corrupt way to dish out jobs. Like if you, if you go in with.

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  No, it wasn't clear. It wasn't clear. You've got to be fair to Dave. It wasn't clear what job he was offering.

• 1:00:57Steven Bartlett?

  But top five is what defence secretary, health secretary.

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I don't know, they, they, you know.

• 1:01:02Steven Bartlett?

  PMs were top five jobs, so there's what, three, four remaining. It's probably, you thought in the book, you talk about potentially defence secretary.

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  I don't know, but yes, but yeah, I mean, look.

• 1:01:09Steven Bartlett?

  But, but is that not a bit corrupt? Is that not like the definition of corruption? Cause if I was to.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  My, my view, I think it's a, it's a huge mistake to do that kind of thing because there are always far more people that, you know, you end up. You know, thinking that you should be making a promise to them, there are jobs you can possibly give. So the best thing with those second things is to say nothing.

• 1:01:34Steven Bartlett?

  I I've I've always wondered this about government and I've never understood it is. How does someone become the head of a department when they have no prior experience in it? Like you made Matt Hancock Health Secretary.

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  How did how did Margaret Thatcher become Prime Minister or Secretary for Education when she had no previous experience?

• 1:01:52Steven Bartlett?

  You tell me.

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  How did Tony Blair become Prime Minister?

• 1:01:54Steven Bartlett?

  No, the Prime Minister thing I understand.

• 1:01:55Speaker 00

  But how did how did Tony Blair become, you know, a shadow minister when he had no experience?

• 1:02:02Steven Bartlett?

  You tell me, do you think this is a good system?

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  Well, I'd say this is a really, really important point because I think that there is a.

• 1:02:16Speaker 00

  I do worry that it's quite hard to persuade, you know, really good administrative types to go into to politics. And, you know, you you see it the whole time, it's called diary of a CEO, right? And you see it the whole time, you see loads and loads of.

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  I think plenty of examples of top business people who tried to get who tried to become politicians. And it just doesn't seem to work. And I I don't know, I mean.

• 1:02:47Steven Bartlett?

  Can I can I have a guess?

• 1:02:49Speaker 00

  Go on.

• 1:02:50Steven Bartlett?

  Well, if I look at the data, I go if thirty five percent of them come from one school, Eton. And then there's jobs being dished out based on if you take my opinion, I'll give you a top five job. I go, I understand why I could never get in, even if I was the best candidate, because it's not being done based on who's the best candidate. It's being done based on like the old boys' club, but I'll do you a favor, I'll if you.

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  Well, not not not under the Labour Party, presumably, or, you know, or or any other party and not not not not under the. I mean, most most conservative cabinets.

• 1:03:17Steven Bartlett?

  So just under the Tory party?

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  No, I I think under under any party, I think I think that. Business people do for three reasons I find hard to put my finger on. They don't necessarily flourish in in that environment. And.

• 1:03:33Steven Bartlett?

  Who flourishes?

• 1:03:34Speaker 00

  What I what I worry about is that. The only people who are really going to start doing it are people who are willing to go through a lot of.

• 1:03:44Speaker 00

  You know, public. I think because I.

• 1:03:47Steven Bartlett?

  Sociopaths.

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, well, the fact, so look, one of the interesting things that's happened recently is that social media has become very, very virulent. And I don't read it myself, but I think it it becomes very oppressive for politicians and also for journalists. And I think journalists,

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  you know, they get a lot of shellacking and a lot of abuse if they're not thought to be taking one line or the other, or, you know, going easy on someone. I mean, there's somebody who was going to interview me for this, this book.

• 1:04:30Steven Bartlett?

  Laura.

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. And you look at, and she's a very, very good journalist. But you look at the stuff that she gets online about, you know, you know, her being an inquisitor of mine or whatever. It's appalling. It's really appalling. And I think, so I think that, and I think that it's also the same for MPs. I think that they get very, they think, they think that if it's a choice between having a life where I can, you know, avoid this sort of stuff and, you know, having a wonderful existence, doing something else, or putting myself through this.

• 1:05:10Steven Bartlett?

  On the point of that I said, thinking that it's related to the fact that people have got their hands on the scales, they're pulling their friends up, it's a bit of a boys' club. Is there any truth in that?

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

  I think, but I think, I mean, look, I'm sad to say, Steve, I think that it's probably been the way politics has been since the dawn of time. I think that politicians, I think politics has tended to be factional since the dawn of time. I think it's tended to be just sad, but I think true. The good thing is that in the end, the people who are really successful are the people who get things done that the people want done.

• 1:05:49Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think it's a magnet?

• 1:05:50Speaker 00

  And so, and so, and so, so it's a, it's a.

• 1:05:54Speaker 00

  It's a magnet for very determined characters who are willing to put themselves through a lot.

• 1:06:01Steven Bartlett?

  Sociopaths and narcissists.

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, have I used those words before?

• 1:06:07Steven Bartlett?

  No, no, but that's the kind of person.

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  You're making me sound like you're quoting me about politics.

• 1:06:11Steven Bartlett?

  Maybe, maybe you are.

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

  But yeah, but.

• 1:06:14Steven Bartlett?

  The kind of person I think would be compelled and succeed in such an environment.

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  I think, I think you have to have a pretty thick skin.

• 1:06:25Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  But the, but because of the, because of the way it works, the people who actually succeed are the people who really can drive something forward and deliver it.

• 1:06:39Steven Bartlett?

  Closing off on Brexit, sixty two percent of British people view Brexit as more of a failure, according to YouGov, and nine percent consider it more of a success. According to YouGov as well, forty six percent of British people say there should, there should be a second EU referendum in, in ten years compared to just thirty six percent that say it shouldn't be. And according to.

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:06:59Steven Bartlett?

  Let me just finish the stats so you can respond. According to the UK's Real Gross Added Value, the GVA, a measure of the size of the economy, they say there is approximately a hundred and forty billion less in two thousand and twenty three in the UK economy compared to if the UK had stayed in the single EU market. According to the same thing, they say that three hundred billion has been wiped off the value of the UK's economy by twenty thirty five. And my last stat here is a report from the Centre of European Reform in two thousand and twenty three estimates UK GDP was five point five percent smaller by mid two thousand and twenty three compared to a scenario where the UK had remained in the EU. This equates to an economic loss of about forty billion annually. And just as a business owner myself, I was looking at some stats around what business

• 1:07:43Steven Bartlett?

  owners think, and about thirty three percent of small businesses reported that Brexit has made it harder for them to trade with the EU due to increased paperwork and things like this. And the London School of Economics said that Brexit added six percent to food prices between twenty twenty and twenty twenty three. With all of this in mind, do you regret Brexit?

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  Not at all. Not at all. I mean, honestly. So we've outgrown Germany, France, since twenty sixteen onwards. Sorry, certainly outgrown Italy since twenty sixteen onwards. Last time I looked, Germany and Italy were both members of the of the EU. And the statistics that you give, I mean, they are dwarfed, for instance, by Covid.

• 1:08:30Speaker 00

  You know, even if you accept that, which I don't necessarily, that Brexit has caused problems. It's also caused massive opportunities. Because we were able to come out of the lockdown earlier than any other country. Remember, we came out of lockdown in July twenty twenty one. We ended all restrictions. And that meant that we had the fastest economic rebound of any G seven country. And that would not have happened, in my view, without the assistance of Brexit freedoms.

• 1:09:12Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know the OECD? Do you know what that body is?

• 1:09:15Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 1:09:16Steven Bartlett?

  They say the UK is the only major rich economy that remains smaller, poorer than prior to the pandemic. And Brexit may be a factor in that. And the government's independent watchdog, which I know you know, the Office for Budget Responsibility thinks the UK will ultimately be four percent worse off than it would have been had it not voted for Brexit. Do you know, in business, everything is a trade off. Everything is a trade off. So you must be able to identify the trade off that the UK has made for all of the upsides that you claim Brexit has delivered. So I think it's intellectually honest of anyone to be able to identify both sides of the argument here. So what is the trade off? What has Brexit cost us?

• 1:09:53Speaker 00

  I just give.

• 1:09:54Steven Bartlett?

  What's it cost us?

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  What's it cost us?

• 1:09:55Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  I think that it's certainly true that.

• 1:10:01Speaker 00

  The the way that some of it is being managed by some of our by our European friends is unnecessarily bureaucratic at the moment. I think that will get better. I I I I accept that criticism. I don't think it's the end of the the end of the world. But I do think ultimately the advantage of being free to do your own thing, free to run your own country to control your own.

• 1:10:26Steven Bartlett?

  You didn't tell me a trade off.

• 1:10:28Speaker 00

  No, I have.

• 1:10:29Steven Bartlett?

  But the impact for us in the UK.

• 1:10:31Speaker 00

  So bureaucracy.

• 1:10:32Steven Bartlett?

  But for me, as an average citizen, what's the what's the what's the trade off?

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  What's the downside?

• 1:10:35Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  Well, I think, you know, you I mean, it's certainly true that some some businesses are finding it harder to there. There there is paperwork that I don't think there needs to be. And we need to fix that. But I think that the tech we have technological solutions to that. I don't think that we need to be part of a European empire of law, could get an ever denser and more detailed empire of law, controlling our freedom and stopping us.

• 1:11:03Steven Bartlett?

  Is there an economic trade off?

• 1:11:06Speaker 00

  I I don't think I think that ultimately we will be richer as a result.

• 1:11:09Steven Bartlett?

  But in the near term, we're going to be poorer.

• 1:11:11Speaker 00

  But I, you know, again, people were very emotional about this. And look, can I just remind you where before the referendum, people said that, and no one ever holds these people to account, people said that there would be millions more unemployed, right? Do you remember that? People said there would have to be an emergency tax raising budget if the people voted to leave the EU. Actually, when I ceased to be prime minister, unemployment was at a fifty year low. And we had six hundred and twenty thousand more people in paid employment than before the pandemic began.

• 1:11:44Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, but my point was about the the economic near term.

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  I'm just saying that people people make all sorts of prognostications about Brexit.

• 1:11:52Steven Bartlett?

  But do you the stats that I read you, do you believe them, that there's an economic struggle in the short in the near term?

• 1:11:57Speaker 00

  People said that we would be we would have a million people on the goal queue because of Brexit.

• 1:12:02Steven Bartlett?

  I'd find, but do you believe that there's a in the near term?

• 1:12:04Speaker 00

  But then I was then I was saying, because then I was it's it's confirmation bias, right?

• 1:12:10Steven Bartlett?

  No, but you said we will be richer eventually. So I'm saying in the in.

• 1:12:14Speaker 00

  I hope that we will if we do the right thing.

• 1:12:15Steven Bartlett?

  Sure. So in the near term, do you think there's a little bit of struggle to get through economically as a result of Brexit?

• 1:12:21Speaker 00

  I think the I think that will that's certainly the case if we make the mistake. Of staying, I mean, which is what Keir Starmer Labour Party is, you know, wants to is staying in alignment with the EU. They basically want to be us to be rules takers.

• 1:12:40Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:12:40Speaker 00

  I think that's a huge, huge mistake. We should go for freedom.

• 1:12:44Steven Bartlett?

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• 1:13:29Steven Bartlett?

  Just so you can try juicy peach yourself. Go to perfectted.com and at checkout, put in the code diary40. I'm going to leave that up for some time, not forever. That's perfectted.com and then use code diary40 at checkout. When you try it, make sure you tag me on Instagram and say, Steve, you were right. It's banging. The next big thing was the pandemic. This was once you'd become the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

• 1:13:54Steven Bartlett?

  And you have this pandemic begin to roll in. I was looking at your, the way you described that situation in late 2019, early 2020 in your book. And it appears that you had no idea of the severity of this virus that was rolling into the shores. When was the first time you heard that there was a virus that had come in from China?

• 1:14:15Speaker 00

  Whatever the date was, I think it was either end of. Twenty nineteen, beginning of twenty twenty, I can't remember exactly when, but there's a day when I'm walking through the lobby of the House of Commons with the Health Secretary and he says, you know, I'm worried about this Chinese virus.

• 1:14:35Steven Bartlett?

  Was that Hancock the right person to be handling that? Because that is a generational, once in a lifetime health issue.

• 1:14:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:42Steven Bartlett?

  And in hindsight.

• 1:14:43Speaker 00

  Look, I think he did a very good job, yes. I think he was very energetic.

• 1:14:46Steven Bartlett?

  Was he the best person to be handling it?

• 1:14:49Speaker 00

  I think he did a very good job and I think that.

• 1:14:55Steven Bartlett?

  Was he the best person to be handling it?

• 1:14:58Speaker 00

  Look.

• 1:14:58Steven Bartlett?

  In hindsight?

• 1:15:00Speaker 00

  Well, I certainly think that he, well, yes, because I think, yes, I think that he had the right mixture of energy and realism.

• 1:15:14Speaker 00

  Don't forget, we didn't know about the disease, we didn't know how lethal it was, we didn't know how contagious it was, and we didn't know exactly how it was transmitted. There was a lot of stuff we didn't know.

• 1:15:29Steven Bartlett?

  Some quotes from your book here. You said, "The problem wasn't that I was ignorant to zoonotic diseases, the problem was that I felt I knew all about them."

• 1:15:40Steven Bartlett?

  After more than thirty years of writing about or dealing with new zoonotic diseases, I felt I knew my SARS and my Ebola, so to speak. And I concluded two things. First, that these novel zoonotic plagues tend to sort themselves out. And second, that the greater risk of destruction from attempts to stop them by politicians

• 1:16:02Steven Bartlett?

  was their sort of attempts to contain the diseases, that the prevention would probably be worse than the cause in some respects.

• 1:16:11Steven Bartlett?

  So when Hancock started talking about a new coronavirus, possibly from bats and the risk that it would sweep the country, it was hardly surprising that I felt I'd heard this all before.

• 1:16:22Steven Bartlett?

  Little did we know.

• 1:16:26Speaker 00

  Yes, I mean, so I think that's, I guess, I'm being very honest there about, about, as I am throughout Unleashed, about the, my state of mind, because, you know, I'd, I'd covered in great detail, the

• 1:16:43Speaker 00

  salmonella and eggs panic, when millions of chickens were slaughtered needlessly, I'd covered the, the bovine sponge form encephalopathy panic, mad cow disease, when a vast proportion of the UK dairy cattle herd was slaughtered, probably needlessly, livelihoods of farmers were destroyed, I'd been mayor of London when we, we were threatened with the, with a bird flu.

• 1:17:13Steven Bartlett?

  So you didn't think it was a big deal?

• 1:17:14Speaker 00

  And we'd laid, we'd laid on stocks of tamiflu, which turned out not to be, to be necessary. So I'd seen SARS come and go, Ebola and so on. And in each of these cases, what, what seemed to have happened was that there'd been a rational anxiety about the risk of a zoonotic disease, often from Asia or wherever. We would get in a real, we'd do our best to get ready, and then it mysteriously leave us almost completely unaffected. I remember the swine flu.

• 1:17:55Steven Bartlett?

  Is that what you thought was going to happen in this case?

• 1:17:57Speaker 00

  And I didn't know. Of course, I didn't know. But I was, what I was trying to do was to give you.

• 1:18:03Steven Bartlett?

  Context.

• 1:18:04Speaker 00

  The context and the state of mind that I think a lot of people were in when they, they heard about, about Covid.

• 1:18:13Steven Bartlett?

  When did you call China? February, I had it, it's February 2020, there was a call you made to the leader of China.

• 1:18:19Speaker 00

  To Xi Jinping.

• 1:18:20Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I would have called him. I mean, it'll be in the, it'll be in the, it'll be in the book.

• 1:18:24Steven Bartlett?

  And you were sending supplies.

• 1:18:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, at that stage, we were, we were still sending.

• 1:18:30Steven Bartlett?

  Supplies to help them.

• 1:18:31Speaker 00

  We were sending.

• 1:18:32Steven Bartlett?

  What did he say about the virus?

• 1:18:34Speaker 00

  Well, I said.

• 1:18:40Speaker 00

  I look, I remember the conversation is hazy now, but I, I, I think I, you know,

• 1:18:48Speaker 00

  congratulated him on what seemed to be his efforts to control the disease, but said I was, I was anxious about the, what was happening in these wet markets, because at that stage, we were given to understand that these, the disease had, had occurred

• 1:19:04Speaker 00

  spontaneously in a, in a market in Wuhan.

• 1:19:07Steven Bartlett?

  What did he say?

• 1:19:08Speaker 00

  And I can't remember what he said to, to that. I don't, I, I, I, look, I mean, he's a, he's a president of China. I don't think he wanted to particularly the implication that China was in any way at, at, at fault. And I can't take, understand that. But I now think that probably wasn't right. I know. I think there was certainly it was a a lab accident, or it was as a result of something that went wrong in that lab.

• 1:19:35Steven Bartlett?

  Can I ask about this? Because this started as a conspiracy theory that is now widely accepted as the probable likely outcome. Why were they messing around with a virus in a lab in Wuhan?

• 1:19:46Speaker 00

  Well, you may well ask. I mean, I think, I think they were.

• 1:19:50Steven Bartlett?

  Why do you think they were? As someone that is so far away from why people do these such, such a thing?

• 1:19:53Speaker 00

  I, I, I genuinely don't know, but I think that they were, they were, you know, science, the, the point of science is to keep pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge everywhere and to see what you, see what they could do.

• 1:20:07Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think it was a weapon?

• 1:20:08Speaker 00

  I don't, I didn't have any reason to think so. I didn't have any reason to think so. I think it was a terrible accident. I think the thing escaped from the lab. I think that, you know, that, that they, they were looking at engineering these viruses, assuming a function gain of the, of the, of the virus and, and ways that they could manipulate it. And sadly, something went wrong. That's, that's my best guess. And a lot of people now seem to think that.

• 1:20:37Steven Bartlett?

  You called Trump around this time as well to speak to him about it?

• 1:20:40Speaker 00

  I did, yes.

• 1:20:41Steven Bartlett?

  What did he think?

• 1:20:44Speaker 00

  Well, I, yeah, I mean, he took the, the firm view that, you know, China had a case to answer, but so did a lot of people.

• 1:20:53Steven Bartlett?

  And in the book, you talk about the World Health Organization's response being seemingly hesitant because they are, wanted to keep Beijing in favor.

• 1:21:02Speaker 00

  Yes, I think a lot of scientists were anxious about cheesing off the Chinese. And I think a lot of scientists, you know, because China is very heavily involved in the support and sponsorship of a lot of academic research and so on. So there was a sort of hesitant, I felt, I mean, I might have been wrong about this. My impression was there was a sort of gingerliness about seeming to finger the Chinese too much.

• 1:21:29Steven Bartlett?

  On lockdowns, it's interesting that I was reading in your book that around the eighth of March, you start to see what's going on in Italy. And I think we can all vividly remember those scenes from those Italian hospitals where there was patients in the corridors being pushed around on trolleys and there was not enough beds. And I think for me as well, that was one of the big moments where I realised, watching it actually play out on Twitter, that this was an incredibly serious situation, something that I'd never seen in my lifetime before. Was that the penny drop moment for you, that this wasn't just another bird flu or?

• 1:22:02Speaker 00

  I was very anxious about it because I knew the Italian healthcare system. I thought it was broadly excellent. And I remember when, you know, one of our, one of our kids had a, fell into a swimming pool in, in Italy once, when everybody was having a lion, you know, most shattering thing that could ever happen to you. And the Italian pronto, of course, so came and they were unbelievably good. They were so fast, they were, they were so, and I thought, you know, if the Italians are having problems with this thing and, you know, frankly, our population is about as elderly as theirs, then this could be very, very serious. So I think that, I think, I think that did really register with me.

• 1:22:42Speaker 00

  And so if you look at the, and obviously I defer completely to the inquiry into, into all this under Dame Heather Hallett. But if you look at what happened from then on in, you see a series through, through March, up till the 23rd of March, you see a series of intensifying steps to try to get people to take precautions.

• 1:23:02Steven Bartlett?

  What I, what I observed, I saw that in the book and you kind of have the stages that you break down, that you went through from that moment onwards. What I observed though, and I think this is probably a fair estimation or a fair description of what happened, was there was indecision.

• 1:23:19Steven Bartlett?

  Because it seemed like there was facts coming from one ear, facts coming from the other ear, and there was almost a bit of paralysis. And when you look at the rest of the European numbers, which I was looking through yesterday, about when different sort of European markets made that decision, the UK appears to make the decision to lock down much slower than all the other European nations. Slower to close the schools, the shops, and events seem to be later than our European counterparts. And Matt Hancock went on to say that-

• 1:23:49Speaker 00

  They were ahead of us in the epicure of any way. So you mentioned the Italian situation.

• 1:23:59Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:59Speaker 00

  And they were already ahead of us. And, you know, we could see that we were going to have to bring in measures. But, you know, again, this would be for the inquiry to comment upon, but it's pretty clear to me that we couldn't reasonably have instituted these measures in the UK, which would novel and draconian in advance of the scientific advice or opinion. And that's what it would have been.

• 1:24:32Steven Bartlett?

  Them being ahead of us isn't relevant, because the chart I have here shows how many days it took us to take decisive action after the third death. And it shows that for all of the European nations. And when I was reading about the information you were getting from scientists on this end and from other people in politics, it was so contradictory that I think I was guessing that that's what caused the indecision. And also your own sort of philosophy towards shutting down society.

• 1:25:00Speaker 00

  We had this group called the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies, right?

• 1:25:03Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:03Speaker 00

  The Sage. And they were, so we were going to be led by the science. And we basically had to, I decided that we had to follow what Sage advised. And for a long time-

• 1:25:23Speaker 00

  To your point, they hesitated about schools because of all the dis-benefits. And if you remember, the argument was that if you went too early, then there was a risk that you'd have to keep doing it. Because, you know, the public would lose patience with the lockdown. And there was a second argument, which would then be bounce back. If you went too early and you kept on for too... You'd then take the measures off and the virus would flare up again. And which indeed did happen throughout the course of the pandemic. So there were...

• 1:26:08Speaker 00

  The scientific advice was... I mean, it wasn't... I wouldn't say it was particularly confused at that stage. I think they were struggling to assess exactly what to do. And there were different views within the scientists about certain things like...

• 1:26:27Steven Bartlett?

  Matt Hancock said that we could have saved 30,000 lives.

• 1:26:31Speaker 00

  Masks and so on.

• 1:26:32Steven Bartlett?

  Is that true? Matt Hancock said...

• 1:26:35Steven Bartlett?

  If we'd locked down earlier.

• 1:26:38Speaker 00

  I can't say that for sure. I've no way of knowing that. But what I can say is that the...

• 1:26:50Speaker 00

  To have locked down earlier would have been to have

• 1:26:57Speaker 00

  gone beyond to have anticipated the scientific advice. It would not have been something... And I'm not an epidemiologist, I'm not a scientist. I was being asked to...

• 1:27:10Speaker 00

  What was on the agenda was imprisoning the whole UK population.

• 1:27:15Speaker 00

  It wasn't something the scientists were yet recommending.

• 1:27:17Steven Bartlett?

  In the book, you seem to question whether those lockdowns really even worked.

• 1:27:21Speaker 00

  So I'm not saying that. What I'm saying, so to put it mildly by work, I think that they certainly did...

• 1:27:32Speaker 00

  Have a role in

• 1:27:36Speaker 00

  stopping the spread of the disease and they helped probably to turn down the the curve of the of the disease, probably, I I've, you know, almost certainly. What I find very difficult to gauge now, and, you know, again, this is for for Heather Halid, is to what extent was it the lockdowns what did it? And to what extent was this going to happen naturally a result of the the natural parabola?

• 1:28:05Steven Bartlett?

  And you suspect it was going to happen anyway?

• 1:28:07Speaker 00

  I'm not, I what I what I'm saying is that to some extent, to some extent or to a large extent, it was perhaps going to happen anyway, perhaps. And given that it was perhaps, or it was to a large extent, perhaps going to happen anyway. The question is,

• 1:28:25Speaker 00

  did the benefits of lockdown outweigh the very, very severe damage done to kids, life chances at school, which we talked about earlier?

• 1:28:36Steven Bartlett?

  What do you think the answer to that question is?

• 1:28:38Speaker 00

  I think that we did the right thing.

• 1:28:39Steven Bartlett?

  You think we did the right?

• 1:28:40Speaker 00

  I think we did the right thing. But I but I'm conscious that there are lots of people who who disagree. And what I hope is that the Covid inquiry will will say that, yes, we did do the right thing.

• 1:28:52Steven Bartlett?

  In your book, when you talk about those those measures, you refer to them as bonkers. There's the sort of different areas.

• 1:28:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's that's a bit that's later, that's by the way, that's when we got to the tiering system.

• 1:29:02Steven Bartlett?

  The tiering system, you talk to it as bonkers, and you seem surprised that people would follow this stuff and that they wanted to follow this stuff. Which is strange hearing it from the guy that put the rules in place. You think it's the tiering system was bonkers and you're surprised.

• 1:29:17Speaker 00

  Talking about the hindsight, right?

• 1:29:18Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:19Speaker 00

  At the time, at the time, it seemed, so we had a situation, so coming out of the first

• 1:29:28Speaker 00

  the first

• 1:29:30Speaker 00

  lockdown, so in in the summer of of twenty twenty and going into the into the autumn and things start to get more difficult again, they have a situation where in some parts of the country in, I don't know, places like Leicester or West Midlands or wherever.

• 1:29:50Speaker 00

  North West.

• 1:29:51Steven Bartlett?

  Do you have the tiers?

• 1:29:52Speaker 00

  You've got a problem, which is that some areas haven't really seen a, you know, the Covid really go down anything like as much as it went down, say, west country, Cornwall.

• 1:30:04Steven Bartlett?

  Was that a bad idea in hindsight?

• 1:30:05Speaker 00

  And so you had people saying, you know, why the hell should pubs be closed in Cornwall?

• 1:30:11Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:11Speaker 00

  Uh, when there's no Covid and just because there's, there's transmission in, in, in Bolton or wherever.

• 1:30:19Steven Bartlett?

  So was that a bad idea in hindsight?

• 1:30:20Speaker 00

  Well, no, it was a good idea in principle because, because, because after all, um, it was, it was crazy, it seemed. But the, the problem, the problem was that it was very, very difficult to draw the boundaries. And as soon as you, as soon as you said, you know, well, this bit of Leicester's in tier, whatever, or, or.

• 1:30:39Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it was, it was impossible.

• 1:30:41Speaker 00

  People went crazy.

• 1:30:43Steven Bartlett?

  Can I ask about?

• 1:30:43Speaker 00

  It was very invidious and it seemed, and.

• 1:30:46Steven Bartlett?

  On, on a human level, when you're leading the country during a pandemic and you've got, you're getting these numbers every day that people are dying and that people are sick. And then, you know, I know you got sick yourself. What, is there a mental toll on you throughout that period?

• 1:31:00Speaker 00

  Well, I think it was, so as you will discover unleashed, I like it when I can go forward and when I have things, the positive projects to do. So it was very, very difficult when I was constantly having to shut the country down, constantly trying to stop the transmission of the disease by these very, very crude methods. But once in, by end of 2020, we had the prospect of a vaccination, then my mood totally changed. But because then I had something.

• 1:31:35Steven Bartlett?

  My question was about you as a human being, when you're dealing with tragic news and this escalating pandemic, what, what's the human toll? If I'd been a fly on the wall in your hardest moments of that pandemic, what would I have seen?

• 1:31:48Speaker 00

  Well, I think the, I think it was certainly pretty tough. I had a bad bout of Covid.

• 1:31:53Steven Bartlett?

  What was the hardest day outside of the, getting the illness yourself? What was the hardest day for you throughout that period?

• 1:32:00Speaker 00

  I think that.

• 1:32:03Speaker 00

  Ah, boy, I think it was.

• 1:32:06Speaker 00

  There was a lot of tough times, but I think having to. Having to go probably the, I mean, to go back into lockdown in, in, in the, in the end of twenty twenty. It's pretty, pretty awful because we, we, we'd really, really hope that cheering would work. And, you know, some people still think it could have worked. Um, but it just wasn't, you know, we, we couldn't, I couldn't take the risk.

• 1:32:31Steven Bartlett?

  The quote from your book that I pulled out, which really shocked me was the real question, I suppose, is why on earth the public so avidly crave these rules? And why they were so willing to have their doings circumscribed in such a rabbinical detail? In their complexity, they were also like a kind of religion, detailed rituals you just obeyed, Leviticus, Leviticus like in the hope of salvation. Because science was slow to help us. On the thirteenth of September, twenty twenty one, your mother, Charlotte, passes away. While at the same time, you're dealing with all of this fallout and the recovery from the pandemic.

• 1:33:09Steven Bartlett?

  That's a tough moment.

• 1:33:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that's the same for any person and any, um, in any walk of life, you know, that's always a, a very, very tough moment.

• 1:33:20Speaker 00

  I think that.

• 1:33:24Speaker 00

  You know, to your, to your, to your point about the, the people, why do, why do people obey the rules so much? And, and my, my feelings about that, I think.

• 1:33:33Steven Bartlett?

  No, I'm asking about your mother here.

• 1:33:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, sorry.

• 1:33:35Steven Bartlett?

  Your mother passed away in September twenty twenty one. And you, you don't touch on it so heavily in the book, the circumstances of that. But that must be a particularly tough moment for a person that's dealing with all of these other social issues and political issues at the same time.

• 1:33:49Speaker 00

  Yes, I know, but I mean, I think, I suppose the point I make there is that is our, our common human lot, isn't it? And yes, it was.

• 1:34:00Speaker 00

  Tough for me and my, my brothers and sisters, my family.

• 1:34:06Speaker 00

  Very, very, very tough, you know, we, we miss her to this day, uh, all of us, but, you know, um. A lot of people were suffering a lot throughout that pandemic. And a lot of people lost loved ones and.

• 1:34:23Speaker 00

  You know, I I had to be, I had to be very, very mindful of of what was happening every day in in households across the country. And and I had to try to, and I had a desperately difficult, because one of the interesting things about being prime minister is is the way it works now is how much of it is just funnelled upwards. And, you know, there's, you have to take those decisions. There's nobody else who can do it for you.

• 1:34:48Steven Bartlett?

  Do you remember where you were when you found out that Charlotte was had passed away?

• 1:34:53Speaker 00

  Oh, God, I think it was, I was driving, driving into London. I I'd been, I'd been out on a visit.

• 1:34:59Steven Bartlett?

  And was it unexpected? I pass.

• 1:35:02Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, you know, um. She'd had, she'd been ill for a long time with um with Parkinson's. And she had various complications associated with Parkinson's.

• 1:35:17Speaker 00

  And she'd had a bad scare about a year previously. So no, I couldn't say it was, you know, um medically. I could not say it was medically totally unexpected, no.

• 1:35:29Steven Bartlett?

  Did you have a chance to grieve her passing?

• 1:35:33Speaker 00

  I certainly did grieve her passing, um.

• 1:35:38Speaker 00

  But, um.

• 1:35:42Speaker 00

  If you, if you mean, did I sort of?

• 1:35:45Steven Bartlett?

  Process it, mourn it?

• 1:35:47Speaker 00

  I, I, you know, to, to the best of my ability, yes.

• 1:35:51Steven Bartlett?

  Are you good, are you a natural at that sort of thing, that sort of emotional? I guess, connection with yourself?

• 1:36:08Speaker 00

  I think it's probably go back to some of the earlier things we were, we were saying. I mean, I did grieve and, you know, I do miss her, like all my brothers and sisters, I do, I do miss her today. But, you know, um, I also had a huge amount to, to think about and to get done. And.

• 1:36:27Speaker 00

  We just have to, we had to do it.

• 1:36:29Steven Bartlett?

  Many members of the UK population were also mourning and grieving at the same time. And I think that's why the the party gate scenario, which you talk about in the book, was so enraging for many people. Because as someone who, again, is not very close to politics like myself, it's optics here. You know, and I think that's really the issue when you've got people who are unable to see their their loved ones because of the situation with funerals and the pandemic. Even the suggestion that there was a rave going on in Number Ten is the most enraging thing that I think anyone could say.

• 1:37:04Speaker 00

  But there wasn't a rave going on. And you'll find it all that, you'll find it unleashed. And then what, and I feel desperate about it, and I really do. And I understand, and I understand, you know, completely why people got so enraged. I really do understand that. And I did my, I did my best to to try and, you know, I think I mishandled the whole thing. The the revelations, such as they were.

• 1:37:25Steven Bartlett?

  But also reality.

• 1:37:27Speaker 00

  But, you know.

• 1:37:28Steven Bartlett?

  Because at the end of the book, you do seem to to highlight that you could have done things to.

• 1:37:33Speaker 00

  Well, what I could have done was, what I could have done, I think, so I I wonder why I commissioned Sue Gray to conduct an investigation into it. I mean, I was informed that she was, you know, politically impartial and a model of sort of, you know, obsessed with with probity. And and neither of those things now seem to me to be true.

• 1:37:57Steven Bartlett?

  I've got a picture here.

• 1:37:59Steven Bartlett?

  There was seventeen parties that were alleged during the the the sort of party gate timeframe. And one of the pictures that leaked to the public was this picture of you enjoying some cheese and some wine, I believe. Um, at Ten Downing Street. Now, as again, a member of the public, I look at this, I look at some of these key dates. I know you were fined for one particular date, which was your birthday, I think, where you were raising the glass of wine with some colleagues.

• 1:38:22Speaker 00

  No, I wasn't. Uh, uh, the, but you see, again, you see, people say this kind of thing, and it.

• 1:38:28Steven Bartlett?

  Was it the AIDS leaving drink that you were fined for?

• 1:38:31Speaker 00

  No, I wasn't fined for that.

• 1:38:32Steven Bartlett?

  What were you fined for?

• 1:38:33Speaker 00

  I was fined for my, for going in to stand at my desk in the cabinet room between meetings.

• 1:38:41Steven Bartlett?

  With the glass of wine?

• 1:38:42Speaker 00

  Not with a glass of wine. And several.

• 1:38:47Speaker 00

  Members of staff were also there, but they were people I saw throughout the working day anyway.

• 1:38:52Steven Bartlett?

  But this picture.

• 1:38:53Speaker 00

  And just, just because people think that I had a cake.

• 1:38:57Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:58Speaker 00

  And that we, we didn't have a, I didn't have a cake. I, I didn't even see a cake. To say it was a party is a complete travesty. It was about the most lugubrious event in the, it was, it consisted of people who were part of my normal working life. That, that picture that you're, you're pointing to there was the, the Metropolitan Police did look at that, but they decided there was no offence committed because what you've got is people sitting outside as, as people tried to do during those times because there was much less risk of infection.

• 1:39:36Steven Bartlett?

  Let me just read some of the stuff. So 15th of May, 2020, cheese and wine at Downing Street, approximately 349 people had died from COVID that day in the UK. Mr. Johnson was photographed sitting with his wife Carrie and some staff at a table with wine and cheese in the Number 10 garden. At this time, COVID restrictions so that people could not leave their home.

• 1:39:55Speaker 00

  But I just, I've.

• 1:39:56Steven Bartlett?

  Reasonable excuse. Let me just read this and then I'll.

• 1:39:58Speaker 00

  But we, we, I was, that, that's my, that is my home.

• 1:40:00Steven Bartlett?

  I know, I know.

• 1:40:01Speaker 00

  That's the garden I was supposed to be using.

• 1:40:03Steven Bartlett?

  I understand that. May 20th, there was a bring your own booze party on the same day that 308 people died from the, from the pandemic and you attended for about 30 minutes. You say it was 25 minutes. And then the 19th of June was your, your birthday.

• 1:40:16Speaker 00

  Okay, can I just go back over there? I mean, you know, none of this washes with the public because they all think that we were, you know, having, dancing around and getting wrong.

• 1:40:24Steven Bartlett?

  And the last one was 12th of April, Johnson announces that he's been fined £50 by the police. Do you know what it is though? It like, it's all about, it's all, it's all about leading by example, isn't it? And you know this, yeah?

• 1:40:40Steven Bartlett?

  I think my opinion is that whatever's going on at number 10 needs to be the extreme demonstration of the perfect example, the extreme demonstration. Because you're, of course, you're going to be attacked, you know that.

• 1:40:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:40:53Steven Bartlett?

  Of course, if you sneeze, you'll be attacked.

• 1:40:54Speaker 00

  I say that, I say that in the book.

• 1:40:55Steven Bartlett?

  That's what I'm saying, so.

• 1:40:57Speaker 00

  So what we should have done, and I, I say is, we should have, I should have said to everybody, look, people are going to say, you know, matter of, because it was in fact, as I tried to explain, impossible to maintain perfect social distancing in the, the office environment that we were in.

• 1:41:17Speaker 00

  People were working around the clock.

• 1:41:20Speaker 00

  And I, I think that I should have said something to the staff, like, people are going to be out to get us, for God's sake, you know, do not only obey the rules, but be seen to obey the rules. Now, we had, you know, all the signs in the corridors and, and stuff like that.

• 1:41:41Speaker 00

  I think that there were a lot of people by that stage who were perhaps not altogether friendly to me, who wanted to stitch me up.

• 1:41:49Steven Bartlett?

  That's, that's fine, that's fine, but honestly, I, I can't help but believe, because I try and remain pretty impartial on these things. So I try and apply common sense as like a business person, but it was.

• 1:41:57Speaker 00

  Do you really think I was deliberately partying and breaking the rules?

• 1:42:00Steven Bartlett?

  For me, for me, seeing that photo, when one of my friends can go to their grandmother's funeral, and seeing that there's people drinking and have, appearing to have a whale of a time, just in this photo, but also the other photos where you're cheersing with wine, I go, you should never have allowed that to happen. Do you know, and I think you agree with me, you agree with me.

• 1:42:19Speaker 00

  Actually, no.

• 1:42:20Steven Bartlett?

  Because you said at the end of the book, you said, I should have said to my whole team, don't even let them appear to be breaking the rules.

• 1:42:28Speaker 00

  In, in, in the course of.

• 1:42:32Speaker 00

  Almost two years of people working around the clock in Number Ten in conditions of great proximity to each other.

• 1:42:44Speaker 00

  There were going to be moments when, of course, when colleagues are saying are going away. When you raise a glass to them, unless you're going to ban that.

• 1:42:52Steven Bartlett?

  I think you should have.

• 1:42:53Speaker 00

  Well, that's a point of view.

• 1:42:54Steven Bartlett?

  Because I just think.

• 1:42:54Speaker 00

  If you banned alcohol in nineteen forty, we wouldn't have won the Second World War.

• 1:42:57Steven Bartlett?

  I think Prime Minister during a pandemic, I think you'd just have to be the most extreme example.

• 1:43:02Speaker 00

  But what's sorry, but we got to ban on alcohol in this country?

• 1:43:05Steven Bartlett?

  No, I think I think I think genuinely.

• 1:43:07Speaker 00

  Sorry, yeah, if we if we if we banned alcohol in Number Ten in nineteen forty.

• 1:43:13Steven Bartlett?

  I think all gatherings should have been banned at Number Ten because I think.

• 1:43:15Speaker 00

  Sorry, but we were gathering, we that means banning meetings. What do you mean gatherings?

• 1:43:21Steven Bartlett?

  Gatherings with alcohol and music and cake, I think should have been banned.

• 1:43:25Speaker 00

  I've tried to explain to you there was no cake or I saw no cake. I was at no event where there was there was music or dancing, that total nonsense. Now, maybe those things took place, but they certainly didn't take place when I was there. I think one of the problems, one of the mistakes I made was beginning the whole thing by issuing this general apology. And so what happened was so that the people think that there was.

• 1:43:53Steven Bartlett?

  Do you still apologize?

• 1:43:55Speaker 00

  There was.

• 1:43:56Steven Bartlett?

  Do you still apologize?

• 1:43:57Speaker 00

  I don't apologize for allegations of vomiting or fistfights because they turned out not to be true.

• 1:44:02Steven Bartlett?

  Apologize for.

• 1:44:03Speaker 00

  And well, insofar as people broke the rules on my watch, as far as I'm responsible, of course, I apologize for that. But what I was what I'm saying in Unleashed is that

• 1:44:15Speaker 00

  the problem with leading with a blanket apology was that it then meant that absolutely any allegation that was, you know, you've said, you've just said, made a couple of yourself. You know, any allegation that was then made about in Sue Gray's initial report that she had to to change it, she said there were there was a, you know, violent altercation and vomiting and somebody, but that both of those things turned out not to be true.

• 1:44:42Steven Bartlett?

  You said you made the mistake in the in your book, you say you made the mistake of issuing pathetic and grovelling apologies over the scandal, which made it look as though we were far more culpable than we were.

• 1:44:51Speaker 00

  Which is just the point I've just made. Because I think because it may it looked as though. But by issuing a sort of universal apology, it meant that any subsequent

• 1:45:04Speaker 00

  allegation. People assume, well, that must be what happened. And you, and you, to be fair, I kind of get the feeling that's what you think. And

• 1:45:14Steven Bartlett?

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:45:16Speaker 00

  That was largely my fault because I seem to be

• 1:45:21Speaker 00

  inadvertently validating.

• 1:45:22Steven Bartlett?

  The apology is, is, is not, not issued.

• 1:45:24Speaker 00

  I seem to be validating everything that people said about what was going on. And what was actually going on was that people were working unbelievably hard round the clock to get a lot of very difficult things done.

• 1:45:38Steven Bartlett?

  I know, for me.

• 1:45:39Speaker 00

  And, and actually, what the, the things that they were successful in are very creditable. And I, and so, and so I feel, I feel badly about them because they deserve praise.

• 1:45:51Steven Bartlett?

  On page seven hundred and five of your book, you say, in retrospect, I should have done more to protect myself and the rest of Whitehall against party allegations. I should have said to the entire staff, perhaps in a letter, about the vital importance of not only obeying the rules, but also to be seen to be obeying them and reminding, and I think that, that is actually my point, which is apologies, I think are good things. I think people should apologize.

• 1:46:12Speaker 00

  No, but you, but you, but I'm trying to explain, if, if you apologize in advance, the, the, the problem was that a lot of things were said about staff in Number Ten that weren't true and weren't fair to them. And my blanket apology looked as though I was validating and accepting all those criticisms.

• 1:46:30Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:46:31Speaker 00

  Which, which I think was not, in retrospect, I think I should have waited to see exactly what people, you know,

• 1:46:39Steven Bartlett?

  great.

• 1:46:39Speaker 00

  said, and I, and what was established to be true, and then I should have apologized for what, what actually happened. You see what I'm saying?

• 1:46:45Steven Bartlett?

  I understand.

• 1:46:45Speaker 00

  And, and also, I want to stick up again for those officials

• 1:46:49Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:50Speaker 00

  who were working round the clock to

• 1:46:54Speaker 00

  Sort out the government's and the country's response to Covid. And when it came to it, did an absolutely outstanding job. And I don't know, I don't.

• 1:47:02Steven Bartlett?

  I understand, I understand.

• 1:47:03Speaker 00

  I know you've been very, you've been very patient with me. You know, you've, you've allowed me to talk for almost two and a half hours. And what I thought was going to be an hour's show. So you've been heroic in putting up with.

• 1:47:14Steven Bartlett?

  We're wrapping up now, but I just wanted, wanted to ask you a few more things. These are personal questions that I have. So, um, um, one of the things that no one knows about you is how many kids you have. Why is this such a widely debated subject? I've never sat with a guest on my show where.

• 1:47:29Speaker 00

  I don't know why they should say widely debated. It's a matter of, I've eight children.

• 1:47:32Steven Bartlett?

  You have eight children.

• 1:47:34Speaker 00

  Matter of public record.

• 1:47:34Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, I don't know why people, why is everyone so obsessed with, with the kids you have?

• 1:47:38Speaker 00

  Search me, girl.

• 1:47:39Steven Bartlett?

  Charlotte Owen, you're not related, Terry?

• 1:47:40Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:47:41Steven Bartlett?

  She's not a former level?

• 1:47:42Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:47:43Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, I asked my friends some of the things they want to do.

• 1:47:45Speaker 00

  So she's, but it's in the book. Read, read, all about it in the book. She is a, she is a very capable advisor.

• 1:47:52Steven Bartlett?

  And what happens next for Boris Johnson? Are you going back into politics?

• 1:47:55Speaker 00

  I live a life of blameless rustic obscurity.

• 1:47:57Steven Bartlett?

  Do you want to get back into politics?

• 1:47:58Speaker 00

  I, I think that, as I say in Unleashed.

• 1:48:02Steven Bartlett?

  The chance of the frisbee to cover it. Yeah, I get it.

• 1:48:04Speaker 00

  As I say in Unleashed, you should, you should only do things if you genuinely think you can be useful at the moment. I think the most, I'm loving, I do a lot of painting, I'm having a great time living in, you know, in the countryside. I, I got my hands full doing all sorts of things and.

• 1:48:20Steven Bartlett?

  Next question, quick fire.

• 1:48:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:48:23Steven Bartlett?

  Trump or Kamala and you can't sit on the fence.

• 1:48:25Speaker 00

  All British prime ministers, including ex prime ministers.

• 1:48:29Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:29Speaker 00

  Are constitutionally obliged to be friendly with whoever.

• 1:48:32Steven Bartlett?

  Who's the best for international relations?

• 1:48:34Speaker 00

  Whoever, whoever the, um, the, the American people decide. And that is, that is the right thing. And you're a dwindling audience, would not expect.

• 1:48:44Steven Bartlett?

  Who, who's best for stopping the wars? Who's better for stopping the wars, Kamala or Trump?

• 1:48:48Speaker 00

  I mean, you know, if you read Unleashed.

• 1:48:50Steven Bartlett?

  I did read it.

• 1:48:50Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:48:50Steven Bartlett?

  And I saw your interview on GB News and you seemed to think that Trump would be a better.

• 1:48:54Speaker 00

  Well, I think, what I'm saying is that you should beware of some of the kind of anti-Trump. Prejudice about his handling of foreign policy and they're a very good, you know, they're very, when he was president, he took some tough decisions and, and, you know, projected a sense of American strength and purpose and that, you know, but I make no, no further comment than that.

• 1:49:19Steven Bartlett?

  And we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to leave it for.

• 1:49:24Speaker 00

  Oh, right. Okay.

• 1:49:25Steven Bartlett?

  And the question that's been left for you is, success often comes at a price and one of those is the relationships we lose along the way. Which relationship or person did you lose in the pursuit of your success?

• 1:49:39Speaker 00

  I mean, um, you seem to, well, the longer you live, the more you realize, you know, you can have what seems to be a complete terrible sundering and then lo and behold, things cheer up and you're, you're, you're friends again. And, um, so, I mean, look at, look at, look at Michael Gove.

• 1:50:07Steven Bartlett?

  You've got to answer the question. Which relationship or person?

• 1:50:10Speaker 00

  Well, the answer, my, the answer to your question is I don't, I don't, I don't regard any of the termination, any, any rupture. I don't regard any rupture as.

• 1:50:19Steven Bartlett?

  No one's ever swerved this question. So you're not going to be the first.

• 1:50:21Speaker 00

  I don't regard any rupture as violent.

• 1:50:22Steven Bartlett?

  Which relationship or person did you lose in the pursuit of your success?

• 1:50:25Speaker 00

  They are not lost. I didn't, I didn't.

• 1:50:28Steven Bartlett?

  Give me a person. Give me a name. We've never had it. This is a longstanding tradition. No one's ever swerved this question.

• 1:50:32Speaker 00

  I had a, clearly I had a rupture with Michael Gove, but then, um, in 2016, but then with heroic optimism, I, I, I put him back in the, in the cabinet and, and, you know, there you go.

• 1:50:48Steven Bartlett?

  Boris, thank you. Thank you for your time.

• 1:50:52Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:50:53Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm going to link this book below. So anyone that wants to read.

• 1:50:55Speaker 00

  Unleashed.

• 1:50:55Steven Bartlett?

  Can, can get the book. It'll be linked below. Um, it was, your, your, your writing style is exceptionally engaging. I think everyone that's interviewed you from the ITV to GB News has said the same thing. Um, the book is linked below. If you're interested in the subject matters we've talked about, but many more, it's an exceptionally long book, some 700.

• 1:51:14Speaker 00

  I don't know. I got it right. I think it's over 700.

• 1:51:17Steven Bartlett?

  771 pages, 772 pages.

• 1:51:20Speaker 00

  With the, with the index and the, and the, and the thanks.

• 1:51:22Steven Bartlett?

  An incredibly detailed, um, book into all of the key issues that have happened over the last. Five, six, seven years and some touches of what happened in your life before. Link down below Boris Johnson unleashed. Thank you so much, Boris.

• 1:51:37Speaker 00

  Thank you very much, Steve. It's been an honour. I think I do I get a prize for I think that must be that was a that was how long was that interview supposed to be?

• 1:51:44Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know. They're always two, usually they're four hours. Sometimes they're four hours.

• 1:51:46Speaker 00

  I see.

• 1:51:51Steven Bartlett?

  Isn't this cool? Every single conversation I have here on the diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you'll know I asked the guest to leave a question in the diary of a CEO. And what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home. So you've got every guest we've ever had, their question, and on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the person who answered that question. We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered the question. The brand new version two updated conversation cards are out right now at theconversationcards.com.

• 1:52:36Steven Bartlett?

  They've sold out twice instantaneously. So if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly.