Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 36. William Hague on Boris Johnson, Blair, and Brexit About this episode In a special episode of The Rest Is Politics, Alastair and Rory are joined by former Foreign Secretary and former Leader of the Conservative Party, William Hague.
They discuss the future for Boris Johnson, William’s days facing Tony Blair in the Commons, packing the House of Lords, Putin’s offer to build a gas pipeline to the UK, the Hong Kong handover, Brexit, leaving politics on a high, education, vaccines, and reasons to be optimistic.
Show notes:
The Great Firewall: Wie China das Internet verändert (German language podcast)
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Transcript 9,691 words · 13 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 Alastair Campbell? And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.
0:19 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.
0:42 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?
0:49 Rory Stewart? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
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1:43 Rory Stewart? Welcome to a special edition of The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.
1:49 Alastair Campbell? And me, Alastair Campbell.
1:51 Rory Stewart? We are very, very fortunate because we have managed to, having had so far two guests, Tony Blair and Keir Starmer. Quite rightly, people are pointing out that we're not covering the full political spectrum, so we are very, very fortunate today to have somebody I admire immensely, who is William Hague, who anybody who is listening ought to have a good sense of who he is, but he was, of course, the British Foreign Secretary, and he was the leader of the Conservative Party, in fact, when Alastair Campbell was working with Tony Blair, and he is with us today. Now, let me just start maybe by giving Alistair a chance to reflect a little bit on the more distant days of Tony Blair and William Hague and
2:33 Rory Stewart? Prime Minister's Questions, because obviously William Hague was standing opposite Tony Blair across that dispatch box.
2:39 Alastair Campbell? William, thank you very, very much for joining us, we're very grateful. But I do want to start with those wonderful days when it felt like Labour were going to be in power forever, and we had a huge three-figure majority, and week in, week out, you came along and landed a few blows on Tony Blair, but then come the election thereafter, we had another three-figure majority. And I guess what I'd like to start off with is, we talk a lot on this podcast about the kind of psychology of leadership and how you feel. And I just want to know, what did it feel like when you were up against Tony Blair in his pomp?
3:16 Speaker 03 Well, thank you for that. That's an interesting opening question. Hello Rory, hello Alistair. Great pleasure to join you. It felt pretty good when I was at the dispatch box against him, because then, as you know, that was the one time really that I felt I was on equal terms with him. Or was in my own environment, maybe on more than equal terms, because I had nothing else going for me at all, as Alistair will very well recall, and indeed you were making it your business to make sure I never got anything going for me at all. So whenever I stepped outside the House of Commons, it was pretty hopeless. But there was this one okay, once a week, I could raise morale on my own side and do
4:00 Speaker 03 what I enjoy doing anyway. And I could sense that Tony Blair, he didn't enjoy it really, the cut and thrust of the House of Commons. He was a brilliant operator at so many things, but he didn't really thrive on that, did he? I mean, you must have seen that, Alistair.
4:16 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think he took it incredibly seriously. I never saw him not nervous before PMQs. I think you probably know, he had various superstitions. He had this little red ribbon that he had in his pocket. He always wore the same shoes and he polished them every Wednesday morning for the entire time that he was Prime Minister. I do think, I have to say, I'm not just saying this because you're here, we've talked, he and I have talked about this a lot. I think he felt you were the best at PMQs that he faced. But I do think we eventually got to this point with you where you were so funny that we thought we had to disable your wit. We started to run this line against you that you were great at the jokes but bad at judgment.
4:59 Alastair Campbell? And then we started calling you the bandwagon man and you stopped being as funny. We were very, very happy when you stopped being quite as funny as you had been.
5:08 Speaker 03 No, I think that was quite effective. I take my hat off to, as in so many ways, I think that was pretty effective as a tactic because we did, you know, I used to have in mind the late John Smith. One of the Labour leaders I've most admired in my life was John Smith, who when he was leader of the opposition, used to make us laugh at ourselves on the Conservative side. You know, he once did like a neighbours sketch about Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson in Number 10 and 11. And we were all cracking up on the Conservative side, even though we weren't meant to. And I always had him in mind when I was opposite Tony Blair. How do I make the Labour Party with all this strength, with these 400 MPs?
5:51 Speaker 03 How do we make them laugh at themselves and their own leader? So that's why I used to come up, I used to give a lot of work to these, you know, these spontaneous one line, you know, when I used to say, well, if he was having such problems with the job of London Mayor, why didn't he just split the job and have Frank Dobson as his day mayor and Ken Livingstone as his nightmare?
6:12 Speaker 03 And the Labour Party would laugh, Tony Blair would laugh. But as you were saying, Alison, it didn't do me any good in the long term, you know, the general election was no different. However, think what it would have been like if I hadn't been. Doing that. I did at least in this, in these days of leadership votes of no confidence, leadership challenges and so on. I did get through that for years with the Conservative Party solidly behind me. You know, they didn't know what was going to happen to them, but they did stick with me. And I think that was one of the reasons, actually, that at least on the floor of the House of Commons, we could still beat up the other side.
6:48 Rory Stewart? William, can I, can I come in on this for a second? I'm very interested in the role that debate does or doesn't play now. And it strikes me that something is changing. So in the 19th century, people put an incredible amount of energy into their speeches in the House of Commons. People competed for seats to watch them. They would quote their one liners almost like music hall songs. And I believe Disraeli ran the government from the House of Commons. I mean, he was there in the chamber a lot with his dispatch box, doing his papers. And he really felt he needed to run the whole thing from inside the chamber. By the time I got into Parliament, much later than you, in 2010, I felt that very
7:31 Rory Stewart? few MPs were putting much energy into their speeches. They were writing them pretty quickly. They were reading them out. A lot of people were sitting watching their phones. And I wondered in a sense whether actually part of this wasn't the fact the whole thing had been televised. So people weren't really addressing each other anymore. They were just trying to get a little clip that they could put on social media or for people back home. And any thoughts on how, what changed, how things changed over time?
7:56 Speaker 03 Well, I don't think it's televising the House of Commons that changed. I was there at the end of it not being televised. I actually voted, one of my first votes in 1989, to televise the House of Commons. And I don't think that took away from debate. In fact, those Prime Minister's Questions exchanges we were just talking about, it made, it meant a lot to me that that was on television, that people could see that I could, you know, stick up for myself. Including in the United States. Oh, I know. Oh, people in the United States. Even now, if I get into a taxi in New York, they are talking about that. You know, David Cameron laughs about how somebody said in America, I love your show. Which is Prime Minister's question.
8:39 Speaker 03 And can you imagine an American president subjecting themselves to this in Congress every week? I mean, they wouldn't have a chance, actually. Recent presidents. But, sorry, I'm off Rory's point.
8:53 Rory Stewart? Was this change over time from the 19th century to the...
8:56 Speaker 03 Yes. No, it's a huge change because remember, back in the days of Israeli or Pitt, my hero, the budget, you know, they'd present their budget for four or five hours in the House of Commons. But that was it. If you didn't hear it then, you didn't, you didn't get to know what was in the budget, right? This was the explanation of it. It wasn't all repeated on some television news afterwards. And I think it's the proliferation of other news outlets and then in particular, the rise of social media, which has reduced things to, you know, as in Twitter, to the 140 characters, 280 characters. And we need to get debate back to the longer form discussion, which is actually where you guys come in.
9:40 Speaker 03 This is where podcasts now come in. This is why I've agreed to subject myself to your, you know, your scrutiny or teasing or whatever.
9:47 Rory Stewart? One more geeky thing just before, before I let Alastair come in on more contemporary politics, but on this historical point, because I do think there's something really interesting about this because obviously the word parliament, literally in French, means talking shop and the centre of it all was a debating chamber and that goes all the way back to the Roman Senate. But I felt when I was an MP that it was an empty hollow shell, that it very rarely mattered at all. And one of the reasons for that is I felt that we'd lost our confidence in being able to persuade. And I have an instinct that in the 19th century, even though whips existed, even though people voted on party lines, there was still more of a possibility that the speech in the House of Commons could have an impact. The government might not admit it at the time.
10:31 Rory Stewart? They might pretend at the time that a really powerful speech from the opposition was irrelevant to them, but the whole series of backroom manoeuvres and ways of doing compromises, which meant that it was worth making your arguments, that they could actually change things.
10:46 Speaker 03 Yes, I completely agree. And this is why, actually, these days, debate in the House of Lords, for all the criticism it gets, is often of a higher quality than in the House of Commons because you can make a difference to the outcome. The members, you know, a large proportion of the members don't assume they're going to have to vote for their party, which is the case in the House of Commons. I think the House of Commons still has its moments, though. You were there, Rory, and I wasn't in the in the whole in the Brexit. There was endless votes and manoeuvres about Brexit and the through Theresa May's premiership. And there, the House of Commons did recover some of its role. And you didn't always know what the outcome of a vote was going to be. So
11:30 Speaker 03 it depends. It's more in the time of big majority governments that it withers away, I think.
11:35 Alastair Campbell? I can remember as a journalist, though, I think a lot of this is about the way the media's changed. I can remember as a journalist, sitting in my office in the Daily Mirror, when the enunciator came on, and there were certain names that when it went bong and a name came up, you felt you had to go and hear what they said. And also, most journalists back then, myself included, would start the day, sort of flicking through the day before Hansard. I think the big change now is that journalists have to cover so many different things on a given day. They have to blog, they have to tweet, they have to do their Instagram posts and all the rest of it. And I don't think they have any time really for the debates. And I think that's influenced the politicians way more than it should have done. I think the politicians have been influenced too much by the way the media cover politics.
12:20 Speaker 03 But it's also, remember, the often the way the politicians succeed is through those same social media channels, you know, as we know, in more in recent elections, it's really winning that war on the social media and the Facebook and so on. That counts for much more than having a, you know, having some triumph in a televised debate quite a long time, let alone in Parliament. So I think social media's changed a lot of this. But we have to get back to the big. You know, the the long discussion, I really wish the network channels on television would go back to having the extensive interview, you know, that even in my day, sound like I
13:02 Speaker 03 sound really old now, I used to sit on on the record with John Humphries on a Sunday lunchtime with for like fifty minutes of an interview. And party leaders don't have to subject themselves to that.
13:16 Alastair Campbell? But they but the party because they don't have to Boris Johnson of always being interviewed because he can just do his stuff in his own channels.
13:22 Speaker 03 Right, no, well, exactly. So it's back to the same point. But I think it's it's incumbent upon broadcasters to try to bring that back. Because then, okay, not many people want to watch that. But to those who do, it is a far more searching scrutiny than you get in a lot of today's media, or even than a hostings in with the party faithful.
13:45 Alastair Campbell? You you mentioned the quality of debate in the House of Lords there. Can I ask you what you think of if it is true, which we believe it is, that Boris Johnson wants to pack fifty peers, including a few Russians, it seems, into the House of Lords on the condition that they vote for everything the government proposes, given that he hasn't even been able to fulfill a full term, and he's being handed out of office in disgrace.
14:05 Speaker 03 Well, I wouldn't approve of that at all. I don't approve of adding any more Lords to the Lord. By the way, I'm doing my bit by I've taken leave of absence from the House of Lords. I'm so this is because I'm so busy with the things I do in business and charity and writing worlds. But I don't approve of adding more at the moment to what is too big a house. But I particularly wouldn't approve of this sort of I don't know whether it's true. But yeah, there is this rumored kind of contract where, you know, we won't vote against the party if you make us a Lord. It's totally unenforceable, by the way, because when you get into the House of Lords, you're there for life, and you can do what you want.
14:43 Alastair Campbell? Do you think it's corrupt?
14:45 Speaker 03 Well, it's since it's unenforceable, maybe not technically, but it's not right. It's not right. It's completely against the spirit of it, which is that you go to exercise your own judgment, even if you take a party whip in the House of Lords. So no, I would strongly disapprove of anything like that. But I disapprove anyway of adding dozens more peers. This needs to have any chance of working properly. It needs to be a smaller house.
15:15 Alastair Campbell? If you think back to when you were leader of the Conservative Party, it's a couple of decades ago now. How do you think we've got from where we were then, where, I mean, maybe I did at least feel that we had two serious parties, we had, I did think debate was kind of reasonable, and we do now appear to have been infected with the populist virus every bit as much as some of the other countries that have. I mean, what's your own assessment of how the last two decades have gone and how we've ended up where we are?
15:43 Speaker 03 Well, yes, it is a striking change how similar we were. Of course, one of my problems against Tony Blair was now, when you see it in historical perspective, we didn't disagree over that much, really. You know, it was a terrible time to be an opposition leader. I could have done with some really big disagreement. But, you know, really, I was going to have taxes fractionally lower than Tony Blair, and he was going to have spending a tiny bit higher. And I was against joining the euro, and he wasn't going to join it anyway.
16:16 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, Gordon was making sure of that.
16:18 Speaker 03 Yes, yes, absolutely. We had Gordon Brown to rely on. And so the differences were that when I listen to Tony Blair now, actually, his and my views are quite similar. Both parties have changed dramatically in that time. Now, why is that? Well, again, I'm not going to harp on all the time about social media, but the means of communication have changed. That's partly facilitated populism. But then there's also been this, a certain emptiness, hasn't there, in liberal democracy of, well, now we've done everything, you
16:56 Speaker 03 know, we won the Cold War, and we had a growing economy, and we had globalization arrive at the turn of the century. So everything that we'd always wanted had happened, and yet. There was still a lot of people restless, unhappy, you know, inequality growing and then a global financial crisis and immigration taking off. And so what else were we going to offer people? And I think those of us in the sort of more in the centre of centre right or centre left of politics didn't then have the compelling new thing that we were
17:37 Speaker 03 going on to. Whereas Jeremy Corbyn or Donald Trump or Nigel Farage have had some compelling new things. I wouldn't be too bleak about this though, because notice in Britain how the the main political parties have come much closer back together again. You know, their their economic policies aren't that far apart. The Labour Party, you know, you had Keir Starmer on recently, wants to make a success of Brexit now. So they're actually starting to converge again, aren't they, the main political parties? Oh, Lord. That's really upset Alastair, that thought.
18:11 Rory Stewart? Yeah, it really horrifies him. Really horrifies him. He does not, you would pick up, remotely agree that Keir Starmer should be taking this line on Brexit. One of the things that we've talked about, and we talked about when we interviewed Tony Blair, was the decision back in the day to lean into globalisation. So both Tony Blair's government and Samson Gordon Brown and David Cameron and you when you were Foreign Secretary were at a period where it felt like the world was about getting closer to Russia, closer to China. And of course, we're now in a world where we feel the reverse and where people like Angela Merkel, the the German Chancellor, has now been really criticised for getting
18:54 Rory Stewart? too close to Russia. I wonder whether I could give you a chance to explain what people were thinking at the time, whether you feel that it's possible to make a defence for Angela Merkel, whether we got it wrong, how we got it wrong, what the lessons are?
19:07 Speaker 03 Well, I think it is possible to make a defence because, you know, just because we can look back and see what has happened, doesn't mean that it was inevitable and that we could have known that this was what was going to happen. You know, history does often turn on, to a much greater degree, I think, than people realise outside government, on the decisions of powerful individuals. You know, of course, there are great social and economic and demographic forces driving the world. But individuals make extraordinary decisions and turning points in history. And that's particularly true where somebody gets in sole charge of a country.
19:52 Speaker 03 So China, we can now see, is going in a direction we don't like, that isn't great for our interests, that isn't good for globalization. It's going in a more Marxist Leninist party control direction. It's it's subjugating human rights in Hong Kong. It's building up a much bigger nuclear force. But we couldn't have assumed that 10 years ago, could we? We had to hope it was going in a direction of a, just like the Soviet Union, it would go in a more liberal direction, it would go politically more Gorbachev sort of direction. So we had to hope that, and a lot has turned on Xi Jinping's own decisions here.
20:37 Rory Stewart? You you're right, there was that that argument. Against that, you'd say, but the problem with that, the downside of gambling on hope, is that we became very, very dependent on the Chinese economy for goods and the Russian economy for energy. And that the problem with gambling, that we could have a day time with China, is that it had a real impact on our resilience. We didn't develop alternative networks. We've ended up in a world where 90% of the advanced semiconductor chips are made in Taiwan, which are now very vulnerable, where our dependence on rare earths is immense on China. So I suppose the question would be, why didn't we at the time feel, okay, by all means, let's be friendly or try gamble that we may be able to have a sort of reprobation with these guys,
21:20 Rory Stewart? but at the same time, invest in our resilience, make sure that we have alternatives, that we're not totally running down our industrial production, etc.
21:28 Speaker 03 Yes, I agree with that too. Of course, being friendly and trying a strategic partnership with a country does not mean you should make yourself dependent on them. And the first time I met Putin with David Cameron and the Kremlin, 2011. Almost the entire meeting was him trying to sell us gas. He was trying, he wanted to build a pipeline to Britain. And it's understandable from his point of view, this is when the Germans were agreeing to Nord Stream two. So I'm not in the same school as all the way as Angela Merkel here. And he had this all worked out. It was going to come down the Baltic, somehow under Denmark and across the North Sea. He could draw it out. And we didn't even have to confer or look at our notes. This is not a good idea. We do want to improve relations with Russia at that point,
22:13 Speaker 03 but we were not going to make ourselves dependent on Putin's gas. So actually, we were approaching it in the way you were just describing. On why were we trying to improve relations with Russia? Well, it's not in the interests of the Western world strategically for Russia and China to be teamed up together and to push, to have them in the same corner. And so obviously, it is, it's better on that great chessboard of geopolitics if you can separate them. Now, they're not, due to circumstances beyond our control, they are now driven together, or they've come together themselves.
22:50 Speaker 03 But it was at least right to try to have, to detach Russia from that, from that trajectory.
22:59 Alastair Campbell? Am I right that you were at the handover, the Hong Kong handover?
23:02 Speaker 03 Yes.
23:03 Alastair Campbell? When, which, I mean, I don't know what your memories of that are. My memories of that are very much of thinking, this feels very, very strange and quite dark. I can remember us being dragged over, that the Chinese insisting that even though Tony Blair was prime minister and this was meant to be at that stage still our territory, that we had to sort of go and see them. And it was a very difficult meeting. If you remember, the weather was horrible. It was all a bit wild. And it just felt, and I just remember thinking thereafter, whenever, when I saw Osborne and Cameron doing the big reset, as it were, I do, this isn't hindsight, I do remember thinking, this feels quite naive to me, that these guys are going to take a lot here and give very little.
23:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, now, I think, now, here I have to explain, I left as Foreign Secretary in 2014, and this sort of golden age with China was proclaimed after that. And actually, there were a couple of sort of breaks in the coalition government being applied to total enthusiasm for China. One was me, and one was Nick Clegg, actually. Nick Clegg more on human rights grounds, and me on balance of power in Asia-Pacific. I spent a lot of time as Foreign Secretary on relations with Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, etc., Vietnam, building up our relations with the rest of the Asia-Pacific. I do
24:28 Speaker 03 think, then, that the government got too carried away with the China golden age. So I accept all of those criticisms, actually. But now, you know, now the situation is actually much clearer, and we have a much bigger problem, which is we are heading for a confrontation with China over time. And so now we have to work out how to, how both sides avert that.
24:54 Alastair Campbell? Right, we'll take a very, very short break, and we'll be back in a moment.
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27:00 Alastair Campbell? Welcome back. We're here with our special guest, William Hague. Rory, where do you want to say this next?
27:05 Rory Stewart? William, can I just comment on your resignation as Foreign Secretary? Because that's something that always really puzzled me. There you were. You were Foreign Secretary, which has always seemed to me to be the one job, certainly I would like in British government.
27:15 Alastair Campbell? That's an advert mistrust, if you're listening. That was Rory Stewart. Happy to do it in the House of Lords.
27:20 Rory Stewart? So you could have remained almost forever. I mean, you almost certainly could have gone through 2015. You probably could have been Foreign Secretary for 10, 12 years. And you chose after four years to step down. And I remember talking to you at the time and you were getting frustrated. You were getting frustrated with the fact that you felt that a lot of your job, or maybe I'm being unfair, but I seem to remember you suggesting that you were getting frustrated with the amount of time you felt that you were doing, spending, selling British defense equipment around the world, that you weren't feeling that you were really getting on with the number of foreign policy. But I also felt there was something very depressing for me as a young MP to think, here's this guy who's made it right the way to the top of the tree and is voluntarily deciding
28:05 Rory Stewart? that he's going to go and do other things with his life. Whereas in the, again, my beloved 19th century, you would have stuck there like Gladstone until the very end.
28:15 Speaker 03 Well, several things here. Um, one is that very few people get out of politics and they're on their own timing, on their own terms. And um, I always wanted to do that. But that means you have to go before almost anybody wants you to go. Secondly, I think there is some limit to how long you can do the same portfolio, you know, and um, I became shadow Foreign Secretary back in two thousand and five, so I had nearly five years in opposition doing the foreign policy of the Conservative. And then, you know, Foreign Secretary for slightly more than four years. So I was nine, I was more than
28:54 Speaker 03 nine years into that of relentless travel. And you think, well, I'm gonna lose my edge before too long. So I think there is that. The other thing, on an entirely personal basis, is when I quit as leader of the opposition, two thousand and one, uh, when when Alastair had routed me successfully in that election, I discovered it wasn't the be all and end all in politics. I really loved writing books, uh, writing newspaper columns, being back in the business world a bit, having some free time. Um, I really enjoyed it. So when David Cameron became the leader of the Conservative Party, I thought, right, well, now we've
29:36 Speaker 03 got a sensible leader, I will offer to come back, but for ten years. And I told him in two thousand and five, I will give you ten years. And in two thousand and fourteen, I said, right, that's nine. So now I want to go. In one year's time, I'll do leave the House of Commons on the way out, because I want to get back to all these other things, um, that I was doing. And not, people sometimes find it hard to believe that a politician isn't just so obsessed with politics that they never want to do anything else. Some are like Gladstone or Ken Clark, or so, you know, who will always carry on. But I'm not like that. I think politics is one fascinating thing in life, but it's not the only thing in life.
30:17 Alastair Campbell? Just on David Cameron, William, did you, I've argued with him about this quite a lot, frankly, every time I see him. Did you go along with his assessment that he had to have the referendum?
30:28 Speaker 03 Yes, I did. Yes, I was part of that assessment. Several others were part of that assessment. Because I think there was a major problem in the Conservative Party as well as the rise of UKIP. I think when you, if you think of the 2015 election, I spent much of that election in these conservative UKIP battlegrounds down the Kent coast and the the east coast of the country generally. And the Conservatives would have lost quite a few of those seats without the referendum coming. So then they would have had a minority government with a strong UKIP contingent in Parliament. We would have ended up having a referendum. I mean, I think the, here I have a sort of bone to pick with, well, with either you or Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. I think the failure to have a referendum
31:11 Speaker 03 on the, what became the Lisbon Treaty. And, and the signing up to uncontrolled immigration earlier than necessary from the new EU states ultimately created the irresistible demand on the Conservative Party to have a referendum on EU membership. If we'd had one on the Lisbon Treaty, we would never have had Brexit in the end.
31:36 Alastair Campbell? And do you think we'd have won that referendum if we'd had it?
31:39 Speaker 03 No, I think the, well, probably not. I don't know. But probably the people of Britain would have voted against the Lisbon Treaty. That would have complicated our relations with the EU. They would have thought of some diluted treaty to pass instead. But we wouldn't, we would then have exerted our influence within the EU. And the question of a referendum to leave or stay would never have become so strong. So I think it was cutting people out of decisions about Europe over a long period that then led to Brexit, not some sort of last minute error by David Cameron.
32:18 Alastair Campbell? How do you feel about Brexit and the way it's playing, the way it's panning out now?
32:22 Speaker 03 I don't think it's going very well. Um, you know, I was a euroskep-- as you know, at the time we were sparring, I was the sort of, I was the eurosceptic end of politics.
32:32 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, sure, absolutely.
32:34 Speaker 03 But on the basis of, you know, my slogan, my one successful slogan when I was, when I won the European elections against you guys was in Europe but not run by Europe. And that was always my position in a nutshell.
32:46 Alastair Campbell? I wish, I wish that was the position now.
32:48 Speaker 03 Yes. Um, and now, so I've stayed the same. The whole political spectrum has gone past me so that I'm now a kind of in the soggy centre of, of politics and the sort of left wing end of the Conservative Party. Because it's, I haven't changed, everything's gone past me. And I think that, I don't think it's going very well. I think we've lost some trade. I think we've lost quite a lot of business investment. But here I am with that Keir Starmer speech of a few weeks ago. There's no going back on it. And the question is how to make the best of it. And the surprising thing so far is we haven't done better at making the best of it.
33:29 Alastair Campbell? Isn't that because in this populist era, those who are in charge refuse to admit that anything isn't going well, up to and including the Northern Ireland Protocol?
33:38 Speaker 03 Well, maybe, but it's also making government get down to nitty gritty detail. I've written in my column in The Times this week about how we've become a science superpower, you know, which is the slogan. But it won't be a reality unless you really get down to lots of nitty gritty about having the lab technicians, about having the best regulations in the world on artificial intelligence and other things, about making the visas for scientists as affordable as the, as in other countries. They have to really get down and master the detail in order to make a success of Brexit. And I think that's what hasn't happened yet.
34:16 Rory Stewart? This is the theme, isn't it, in governance, which is a really troubling thing, isn't it? Because of course, the new style of politics, whether you call it populist or simply contemporary politics of the 24 hour campaign, is all about winning elections generally by being very black and white, partisan, simplifying. And that develops habits of mind which are not very suited to nitty gritty, complexity, critical thinking when you get back into the Cabinet Room. And, and I felt this very much with Boris Johnson, he kind of masterful at the kind of big public campaign. But really, really had an attention deficit disorder. He got very bored if you tried to talk to him about the details of how things got done.
35:02 Rory Stewart? And I'm really struck by this because all the way from, and I did this conference with Tony Blair, where we were trying to talk about the centigrade of British politics and how to build it. And as you can imagine, everybody stood up and we all cheerfully talked about how we need to think about climate. We need to think about technology. We need to think about productivity. And then you see Rishi Sunak standing up and saying he's going to bring us growth through investment and innovation and education. And the point is, we've been saying this for 30 years or more. And the fact is, our productivity is still pretty rubbish and our growth is not that impressive. So what's the problem here? How come all the think tanks, all the articles and The Economist or The Financial Times all agree on what we need to do?
35:47 Rory Stewart? And have been saying the same thing for 30 years, but it never happens?
35:50 Speaker 03 Well, I think there's, I agree with you on your criticism of politics as a performance. And I suppose Trump is the ultimate case in this. But Boris Johnson had tendencies of this as well. It's a show that must go on, you know, and that require you constantly have to feed the audience with the controversy or the amusement. And that's what the focus on, rather than delivery, when you think how many, how everybody changed in the Trump administration every six months. And we've had some of that here. Again, I've been making the point this week, we've had four science ministers in three years. Well, you know, you can't deliver if you do it. So there is that. But of course, there's something else, isn't there?
36:31 Speaker 03 When you say, you're quite right about how we've had all these think tanks and we all say what should be done. But we just haven't managed between governments to really tackle some deep seated things such as education in this country. Lots of governments have focused on that. Tony Blair did with Alistair. But, you know, we haven't really cracked that and it's very difficult for politics. That is the key to levelling up.
37:00 Rory Stewart? Let's just talk through education. What are the things that make it difficult?
37:03 Speaker 03 I think it's very difficult because you have a lot of vested interests. You have teaching unions, for instance, who don't necessarily like radical change.
37:13 Alastair Campbell? You have private schools.
37:14 Speaker 03 Well, okay, let's take that, although many of those are very good, of course. And many states like the ones I went to. But you also have, it's very hard to keep education up with the modern world. When you think how dramatically now technology is changing and how amazingly we could revolutionise educational techniques tailored to the individual child, the individual learner. But that would mean completely reinventing the model of how you do classroom education. That's so hard. You can get it wrong. Yes, unions would be against it. Various educational experts would say it was wrong. It's a huge bureaucracy to turn around.
37:58 Speaker 03 You can see how this is very difficult. But it's the failure to tackle one or two really crucial, fundamental building blocks of a more productive and society and economy that is our problem, I think, in this country.
38:13 Alastair Campbell? William, you mentioned your Times column a few times and I read your column a few weeks ago now, where you were giving some gentle advice to Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss, whoever wins. And I think it is going to be Liz Truss. I know you're backing Sunak.
38:28 Alastair Campbell? But you were basically saying you felt they should pretty quickly divorce themselves from any idea that Boris Johnson should kind of hang around. I mean, what's your assessment of his premiership, of his leadership of the Conservative Party? And what his successor should do? Because it always struck me that you were very good at not causing trouble for your successor. Your successors, others have been, I think, the whole Thatcher Heath story, we lived through that. But what's your sense of how they should handle Boris Johnson, once he's, once they're in Downey Street and he's out?
39:00 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, I was alerting them in the column to the fact, this is going to be a problem whoever wins. You know, that even for Liz Truss, who was, who was loyal to Boris, I was pointing out that there aren't any prime ministers in history who've been enthusiastic about their successor. And I'm sure that applies to the one you worked for, Alistair.
39:20 Alastair Campbell? I worked for them both, William, I worked for them both.
39:24 Speaker 03 Okay, well, the one, the main one that you worked for. And, and, and that's going to be true of, of particularly of this performance point, because the Boris performance is gonna, the show is gonna have to go on, right? And that is going to mean writing things and saying things that upset the, the new prime minister. So I'm, I was saying, first of all, we'll get ready for that. And secondly, just they, they have to just not entertain the idea that he can come back, you know, that he should be a, an influential figure in the party again. I was really saying, like Theresa May, when she refused to applaud Boris when he left the last PMQs.
40:07 Speaker 03 We stand out of respect for the office, but we don't applaud anymore. Just don't encourage him. And the whole party has to do that.
40:17 Alastair Campbell? It strikes me that Liz Truss is encouraging him. She's finding it very hard to say a critical word.
40:21 Speaker 03 She hasn't encouraged the idea he could serve in her government if she wins.
40:25 Alastair Campbell? He thinks he can come back, I'm sure. He thinks he's Berlusconi.
40:29 Speaker 03 Well, he might well think, and that is where everybody, even though, even though his real friends have to disabuse him of that, because no one can say it worked out very well, you know, to be hounded from office by your own party, not over policy, but over the conduct of government, is something unprecedented in our country in modern times. And his friends have to say, look, that is, that's the honest truth of what's happened. And there's Boris. Boris has a great gift for writing, a passion for nature, a love of history. Think what a great life he could have if he just said, what the hell with all of that politics? I'm going to do the other things that I enjoy.
41:13 Speaker 03 And he would be far less irritating to his successors. They have to try and steer him down that path, some probably impossible. So they're probably doomed to have him causing mayhem on a regular basis.
41:27 Rory Stewart? As we come to the end, you've been very generous with your time, but let me just get back on to one thing that we talk about a lot, which is the future of world economy. I'm very concerned that we have a high chance that we're going to go into a 10 year recession, that it's going to feel like the 1970s and that there are big reasons for that. One of them is demography, just getting older population. We're not really replacing bringing in young people. I think cost of production is going to soar. I think inflation is going to go up and I think that central banks are going to be reluctant to respond. But I'd like to just, and therefore I feel a bit queasy when I see everybody, understandably, all these leadership candidates and indeed Keir Starmer, all promising that somehow they're going to be able to resolve all these issues and generate growth.
42:11 Rory Stewart? I'm a little bit doubtful about that. I'm a bit more gloomy, but I'd love to hear you on that. And then I'll hand back to Anister and maybe we're heading towards an end.
42:18 Speaker 03 Well, look, you've got, you can't stand for election to lead a major country unless you have some optimism in it. So, you know, that Rory, let me advise you that if you, if you come to that situation, you're definitely going to have to say, we can get through these problems. We can do it together. Britain can succeed.
42:37 Alastair Campbell? William, I tried to, I tried to toughen Rory up as a politician. Rory, I don't think you should go into campaigns, say, what do we want? 10 year global recession, whether we want it now, it's just not a good slogan.
42:49 Speaker 03 No, no, you can't, you know, you have to say, well, things are bad. And I do, actually, I do think that for some, to half agree with you. Political leaders do need to say how bad things are going to be, you know, how tough it's going to be for it to support Ukraine over the coming winter. And to really show people that is worthwhile. They do have to say, we will have to make sacrifices. But there's a reason for that. They have to prepare people for difficult times. But then you do have to show, you know, you've got to show how we can get through that. And actually, we can't, the one thing to cling on to in this, in the wave of pessimism of which Rory is a
43:35 Speaker 03 is part, which is, and easily be justified, is human ingenuity is extraordinary. You know, think of the pandemic we've just been through and how rapidly vaccines were produced. And a totally astonishing thing. And then billions of people vaccinated. And what a situation we would have been in if that hadn't been scientifically and administratively possible. So never underestimate our own ingenuity. And that's why innovation and making the most of that is the, is the one bright spot in this pretty gloomy world at the moment.
44:17 Alastair Campbell? Hmm. And on the technology stuff, you, it sounds to me like this is another place where you're in very similar quarters to Tony Blair, who's obsessed with this idea that sort of the solution to these problems will, will find itself in technology and, and innovation. But, but then I've just been listening to the extraordinary German podcast series about China and technology and China and the internet. And it's frankly slightly terrified me because it makes me think that they are way ahead even of where we think they are. And they're using it in a way that maybe we would not necessarily approve of. So how do you also persuade people that technology can provide the solutions without actually making things even worse than they are?
45:01 Speaker 03 Oh, vast subject. I think you have to point to the breakthroughs, you know, well, I think something people can understand is, again, on the medical side. If you look at artificial intelligence, I think the biggest thing happening in the world alongside climate change today is the rise of artificial intelligence. And there are great dangers in that, you know, weapons controlled by artificial intelligence in the future. But the upside potential, the anti, the new antibiotics that can be discovered by AI, the comprehensive understanding of proteins that AI is now generating that would have taken decades otherwise, means that we are in for the greatest leaps forward in medicine
45:46 Speaker 03 in the next decade that we've ever seen in the whole history of human civilization. So, you know, that, think of that prize and what difference it will make to the quality of life for people. And, and that ought to inspire people to really concentrate on these things, to go into these careers. And we ought to be able to align our universities and our education system with making that exciting for people.
46:12 Alastair Campbell? Well, I've thoroughly enjoyed that. Thank you for coming on.
46:17 Speaker 03 It's been a great pleasure to talk to you both.
46:19 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I hope it wasn't painful. We try, we try, we try and be nice to our guests, even when they're Tories. Although it strikes me that you're becoming less and less of a Tory, William. I'm getting that feeling with this.
46:29 Speaker 03 Or, or maybe you're becoming more of one.
46:33 Alastair Campbell? No, I'm like you, William. I've never changed my views really about anything. But it's been very good talking to you. Thank you very much indeed for joining us.
46:43 Speaker 03 Thank you. Pleasure.
46:44 Rory Stewart? Thank you again, William, very much. And bye bye.
46:46 Speaker 03 Bye.
46:52 Alastair Campbell? Well done, Rory. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to William Hague.
46:55 Rory Stewart? Well, thank you for staying along. Just quickly, I mean, obviously, I, the last one was a bit sceptical about some of the stuff. What would you say the kind of ups and downs of that were?
47:04 Alastair Campbell? Well, it's obviously very different when you're talking to somebody like Keir Starmer, who's, who's, who's current and active and trying to become the next prime minister. I mean, what I found interesting, and I always thought Hague was a very interesting character and thoughtful.
47:17 Alastair Campbell? But funnily enough, when I talked to Tony Blair, I spoke to Tony yesterday, he said, you know, we're going to be talking to William Hague on the podcast. And Tony said something quite interesting. He said he thought Hague was really intelligent, really smart, but he felt that maybe when he was leader of the Conservative Party, he wasn't a fully formed politician in a way that he is now, but he's out of politics. And what I felt was interesting was that he, you know, I thought, for example, we didn't have much time on it, but when we were talking there about science and technology and artificial intelligence, he's still obviously really thinking about this stuff in a way that when he was active on the front line in politics, he was probably thinking less because he was, as you say, campaigning, fighting, trying to overturn this sort of
47:59 Alastair Campbell? behemoth that he obviously felt, you know, we were a bit unbeatable at the time.
48:03 Rory Stewart? I mean, he was also, I mean, crazily young. He was 36 years old and he'd been, I think, it's unfair to him, but I think he was just had been in the cabinet as the Secretary of State for Wales. So it was a very, very rapid thing. It must have been a huge amount of pressure hitting him in that way. I do think, I mean, it's something for us to talk about more and I'd love to hear more from listeners. My instinct is that sometimes it is a bit more interesting getting people who aren't serving politicians. I think we need a few serving politicians on, but I tend to find them pretty boring because I think they are very limited in what they can say, sometimes for good reasons, as we were discussing in that, this whole point about them having to sound optimistic, having to sound as though they've got all the answers, doesn't
48:44 Rory Stewart? really allow them to step back and say, you know, we're screwed, or I don't know what's going on, or I don't really. So it'd be interesting to see how listeners react. But my instinct is that I usually get a bit bored and frustrated by people who are still in office, whereas some of those people who've left, I think, can be more thoughtful about politics in general.
49:05 Alastair Campbell? Even from the limited shot of his book, she's extraordinary. A tidy bookshelf and he gave us a little tour on the laptop of his entire library where he was sitting. He's a very, he reads a lot of books and he studies a lot of stuff and he's, I also found, I mean, I do think that I was, I really enjoyed the first few minutes there talking about how we got the better of him over time in in Prime Minister's Questions, because there was definitely a point where Tony Blair was getting a bit worried that William Hague was, was, was having too many points victories at Prime Minister's Questions. And Tony did, people used to say Tony didn't take Parliament seriously because of the size of our majority. He really did take Parliament seriously. And so did I, because we saw those Prime Minister's
49:48 Alastair Campbell? Questions exchanges as the kind of strategic anvil, where we were working out what are the lines of attack that work best, what are the lines of defence that work best, what are the things that we can say here that are also going to connect with the public. And William Hague was a very good tester of what we were trying to do. And I'm so glad that he accepted that we knocked him off course with his, with the joke start judgement attack.
50:13 Rory Stewart? I guess the final thing is it's very striking how British politics and the leadership doesn't talk about artificial intelligence, doesn't talk about quantum computing, doesn't really talk about robotics and the way in which this is changing the world. And it's been true. I mean, obviously, the world in general, people outside politics have been focused on these things for decades. And it's transforming every aspect of our life. And it's really weird that we have a politics that spends so little time trying to address technology. But I guess it's just difficult to make it appealing to voters. It can sound a bit geeky. I mean, I thought he was interesting on antibiotics and proteins and the way I work, but maybe if you stand up at a
50:55 Rory Stewart? Hastings and Exeter and start banging on about artificial intelligence research into proteins, you lose the audience.
51:00 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but maybe, maybe if Keir Starmer, having said he wants to make growth the centrepiece of his strategy, if he actually said, then went on to develop that, and this is where that would relate to this whole kind of amazing new world of opportunities. And don't forget Harold Wilson, you know, the white heat, the technological revolution. I mean, he, you know, it's been done before rhetorically.
51:20 Rory Stewart? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's a really good, and it really works for Wilson, doesn't it? The one thing we all remember about him, more than 50 years later, is the white heat of technology.
51:29 Alastair Campbell? We remember the Open University.
51:30 Rory Stewart? Open University and the pipe, the pipe.
51:32 Alastair Campbell? We do remember the pipe. And the Gannick's coat.
51:34 Rory Stewart? Right, okay. On that, I think, thank you very much. And that's it from me and... From me. Bye-bye. All the best.
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