Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us here at the Mishcon Academy Session. I am Katy Colton, I’m a Partner here at Mishcon de Reya, I’m the head of our politics and law group. I am absolutely delighted to welcome our quest here today Rory Stewart. After serving as a diplomat in Indonesia, the Balkans and Iraq and setting up and running a charity in Afghanistan, Rory was first elected to Parliament in 2010 in a seat of Penrith and The Borders. In Parliament he held many ministerial positions including Minister for the Environment, Africa Minister and Prisons Minister before being appointed Secretary of State for International Development by Theresa May. Rory stood for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 2019 before later resigning from Cabinet and then being sacked from Conservative Party for opposing Boris Johnson’s Brexit legislation. I am sure many of you will know that Rory now hosts two very successful podcasts with Alistair Campbell, The Rest is Politics and Leading and Alistair Campbell is actually a former guest here of the Academy so it’s nice that we can now welcome Rory here as well. Rory joins us here today to discuss his book, ‘Politics on the Edge’ which is brilliant and I would highly recommend it. In candid detail he discusses the inner workings of Parliament and the sometimes brutal realities of political life. In the book Rory recounts that Liz Truss once told him to, “Stop being interesting.” I think there’s no risk of that happening here today. In terms of the structure for today’s session, we’re going to be… I’m going to be talking to Rory for about 40-45 minutes and then I am going to open to the floor to questions. So Rory I want to start with one of the most heart-warming aspects of the book I think is that the way you talk about the deep affection you hold for your late father and that he was so supportive of you in your career but you say that the one role where he was slightly more reserved in his support was in relation to the becoming an MP. Can you explain to me why you wanted to become a Politian?
Rory Stewart
It’s a bit of a mystery to me um so I, I’d obviously been briefly a soldier and then a British diplomat and I became very irritated particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan with what I perceived as politicians making the wrong decisions and we were always telling ourselves in those contexts that we were implementing policies made by politicians so I had this idea that Tony Blair or Gordon Brown was sort of sitting there doing things that seemed to me to be crazy and I thought if I become a politician I can stop these kinds of things happening and I suppose I had a bigger idea, I mean Iraq and Afghanistan I, I assumed was just an example of what was probably going wrong inside the United Kingdom as well. So I think I thought of it as being a sort of more senior civil servant, that it was a kind of way to interact again directly with Government and to bring change. I didn’t understand political parties. I wasn’t a member of a political party. I was literally a, I was a Professor at Harvard, I was teaching human rights to Harvard and I read in the New York Times that David Cameron was looking for people who’d not been involved in politics before to become politicians and I said to my friend, Indrani in the diner, “do you think this is a good idea?” and she said, “no it’s a very, very bad idea” um, and so yes I joined the Conservative Party only very, very briefly before I was elected through something called an ‘Open Primary’ and became an MP and the result was that I turned up in a Parliament in which Liz Truss who, who we were just mentioning had been actively involved in the Conservative politics from her early 20s, had run in 2005; some of my colleagues had run unsuccessfully in ’97, 2001, 2005 and 2010. Jacob Rees-Mogg for example had run and been defeated in 1997, Kwasi Kwarteng I think had run in 2001. They were very much a family of tried but very, very loyal Conservatives. Most of them had been, well not most maybe but close to a majority had been local counsellors, they’d spent years pacing streets, sticking leaflets through doors, making sure their fingers don’t get bitten by the hidden Yorkshire terrier that jumps up and gets you um and I thought it was more like, I don’t know, joining a law firm or something, that I would sort of turn up, there would be a kind of induction, I’d meet my new colleagues, I’d be given my job and I’d, I’d work hard and be promoted. It turns out it’s not like that at all in case any of you are considering it.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
I think you know, you describe Parliament in many ways in your book but there’s a real sense of your deep frustration once you got to become an MP and you describe Parliament as “inert, depressing and shallow”, “a chamber of hungry ghosts in which no one was at ease” and “a boarding school stripped by scarlet fever of most of the responsible adults and all of the nicer, kinder of pupils.” I know they are some of the nicer things you say about Parliament. Why have you become so frustrated by Parliament, what is it about the system that drain the energy from you?
Rory Stewart
We yes, that metaphor of ‘why do I think about Parliament as a boarding school that’s been stripped of its best pupils and its best teachers’, I guess it would be um a number of things happening. Firstly obviously it does feel like a boarding school, I mean it looks like Hogwarts in terms of its architecture, it’s highly formalised, it’s highly ritualised. We are spending many, many hours together. We’re voting you know, on a Monday until past 10 at night, sometimes to 1, 2 in the morning. Secondly, I have a sort of idea of a better sort of boarding school. I have an idea of a place that might have responsible adults, that might have nicer students um and it did feel like a rump, it felt as though historically sometimes in my imagination at least I don’t know, would Gladstone or would Attlee or at some points in the past there were people that would have been inspiring, wonderful to work with. And I’d been in jobs where that was true you know, I’d been brief in the Army and then I was in the Foreign Office I was based with the military, in the Balkans I was based with a unit from Hereford and I had been with um organisations which were full of incredibly competent, focussed, reliable people that I felt I could trust and that I admired and suddenly I am in Parliament and it’s very, very interesting. I mean you know, a polite way of describing is as diverse. I mean it is very diverse. You know there are large numbers of you know, my friend Heather Wheeler I think was a non graduate probably aged 60 who had been a deputy leader of Derby Council. Another man elected in my intake who came in age 66 for the first time, who’d started his career aged 15 on the Woolworths shop floor on the sweetie counter. On the other end of the extreme there was sort of Zach Goldsmith who was a kind of billionaire Barachach playing glamour boy. There were you know, Colonels from the, full Colonels from the military, there were three doctors from the NHS so in some ways you could tell a story that this was quite a sort of diverse interesting group of people and certainly in terms of gender, in terms of ethnicity, it was much more diverse than anything we’d ever had before. But as soon as we entered Parliament we became much, much less than the sum of ourselves. We became very, very quickly, very bad versions of ourselves and I noticed that there was a sort of almost mathematical certainty that if you reached 10 years in Parliament you were no longer a human being. And I think you know professions distort you in different ways, I mean um you might think for example that, that being a High Court Judge can be a bit distorting of the personality, that there are forms of professional deformation connects you to certain kinds of jobs. You know primary school teachers end up talking to adults as though they are 8 years old, er, priests may become a little bit pompous er, Judges may become a little bit pompous but politicians it is beyond imagining. There is a lovely phrase from a W A Shoredon where he says, ‘private face in a public place is better than a public face in a private place’ and politicians after 10 years are simply public faces in private places. There’s no depth, nuance, introspection to them. They are a what you see is what you get and what you see is Liz Truss, Grant Shapps, Priti Patel and it’s a very strange environment.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
I think you get a real sense from the book that you’re not questioning, I think it links to what you’ve just said now, that you’re not questioning the talent of people who enter or the talent of all the people who enter, maybe you are questioning some of them but a systemic problem stems perhaps from party politics and the question of loyalty and there’s a great quote that you include, you say that David Cameron once said, ‘that I divide the world between team players and wankers, don’t be a wanker’ and in the team players you included Liz Truss, Priti Patel and Matt Hancock. Do you think that – I am leaving that there. Um do you think that the system can be reformed to allow better quality debate whilst the, the Whips are so powerful and the party political structure remains?
Rory Stewart
Well I think part of the problem is structural. I mean I think there is a problem with individuals and there is a problem with the system so I think the system is problematic, the party is a problem because it controls the selection of all the candidates and that realistically means in most constituencies if you are a Conservative, two or three hundred quite elderly right wing people of whom about 40 or 50 are active are determining who your member of Parliament is going to be in a safe seat where the vote doesn’t matter too much. The Whips are problematic, I mean the Whips absolutely reinforce the sense that all that matters is doing what the Prime Minister wants, that it’s all about loyalty and you really mustn’t scrutinise the legislation, you mustn’t worry about whether this is the right thing to do, you follow the three-line Whip and there’s a three-line Whip increasingly at every vote, there’s a three-line Whip. If you’re a Government Minister you literally cannot vote against the Government. If you vote against the Government you resign. So this thing that some of you may have seen on social media called ‘They work for you’ where they are like, yeah this seems like a nice guy but look at his voting record as though they have sort of uncovered some amazing secrets about what you really think, all they’ve uncovered is that you are Conservative MP right, they might as well say, ‘you might think he’s a nice guy but he was a Conservative MP’ that’s all that’s really going on here. Um, but, but really addressing these things, reforming them could involve changing our electoral system so it may be PR coming in or more of a New Zealand style ballet system, we could change the length of time which Ministers sit in office so we could say there should be a minimum of 2 years for a Minister to be in office unless there’s a huge scandal er, that would stop you know, Grant Shapps has had five Cabinet positions in just over a year and that’s very, very odd. I mean very difficult to, I mean you know I am sure he’s a bright guy but I mean literally he takes over a section say for defence, he does not know the difference between a Major and a Sergeant Major, a typhoon and a harpoon, he doesn’t know that the ships on aircraft carriers belong to the Royal Navy as opposed to the Royal Airforce, I mean this sort of stuff of course he doesn’t know, he’s had nothing to do with it you know, two seconds ago he was doing transport or housing or you know whatever else he’s done. Um but these things in and of themselves um are just symbols of a deeper problem and, and the deeper problem was summed up in Cameron’s view that there are team players and there are wankers and the people David Cameron promoted most rapidly were Matt Hancock, Liz Truss, Priti Patel – why? What is it he saw in them? Because they were not loyal to him right, given half a chance they flipped, changed their positions, endorsed Brexit, backed Boris Johnson, joined the direction of tearing the Conservative Party well away from the kind of Cameron centre toward a much more populist right so what is it he sees in them? What he sees in them is they will always do what they are told, they will always be loyal until it suits them to be disloyal and they will always repeat the line, shamelessly. They have no sense of embarrassment, they don’t worry about going on radio and saying seven times in a radio interview, ‘the long term economic plan is working, the long term economic plan is working’. Um and the question is, is that what you want your top team to consist of those kind of people, is this a good way of running a company, is this a good way of running a law firm to say the people I really want are the kind of the Bulgarian communist party apparatchic.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
There were times in your book where you, where the reader is quite shocked or I in particular was quite shocked about the level of experience of governance that there just isn’t valued over pure loyalty and I think that comes out in relation to the appointment of Ministers as we’ve just discussed and you’ve said that being a Minister is almost as if you’re performing 37 roles, you’re not given a handover, you may have no experience of the brief; you found that when you became prisons Minister. Can you describe what life is like as a Minister?
Rory Stewart
Yeah, yeah um, so I mean let’s take a small example. I mean there are much bigger examples, you know Wes Streeting is about to take over the entire National Health Service, right in about four weeks’ time he will be responsible for or somehow managing 1.2 million people you know, tens of millions of patients’ visits a year, tens of thousands of GP clinics, hospitals, ambulance services etc., and I think, I just want to begin with that because the, presumably were I to say to almost anybody in this room in four weeks’ time you are responsible for running the entire NHS, hopefully you would be sane enough to say to me, ‘no’ right, ‘I have no clue what I am doing, that is I am not qualified for this job, I can’t do it’ right but the point is that MPs don’t think like that and so let me take my job, my first job I was made… well maybe, no let’s take a my third job okay. So I had been the environment Minister, then I’ve been the Minister for Middle East and Asia and then Boris Johnson becomes Foreign Secretary and Teresa May suggests I go and talk to him about which region of the world I am going to be responsible for. And so I go in to see this man who is sitting in this enormous office and his office is large than this room you know, just for him right and er, I say, ‘Foreign Secretary’ you know, ‘congratulations and the Prime Minister asked me to check with you which part of the world you’d like me to be responsible for’ and he said, ‘well, well what would you like to do?’ and I said, ‘well look I, I don’t really mind but you know, I spent the last year and a half working on the Middle East and Asia, I speak three Asian languages, I’ve written two books about the region, I lived in Afghanistan and Iraq, I served as a diplomat in Indonesia so I suppose Middle East or Asia’ and he says, ‘how about Africa?’. So I say, ‘but Foreign Secretary I literally I know nothing about Africa, I mean I, I you know I’ve been there once on holiday’ and he says, ‘come on Rory, what’s the capital of Uganda?’ so I say, ‘I don’t know what the capital of Uganda is’ and he says, ‘you’re joking, it’s Kampala, you’ve got the job right’. So then I, so then I find myself um not very long afterwards at a despatch box. I am now responsible for I think it was 43 countries and I am at the despatch box and MPs are popping up on either side, I mean one of them will pop up and say ‘will the British Government commit to er to bring peace to Cameroon?’ and I kind of pop up and I go, ‘thank the honourable member for his question, we call on all sides and Cameroon both Francophone and Anglophone to respect the constitution and to understand that the only solution to the current troubles is a political solution’ and I sit down and the next person jumps up and says, ‘will the honourable member commit to ending the Civil War in Burundi?’ right so again I get to my feet and I say, ‘I call on all parties to respect the Arusha accords and to work with the former Tanzanian prime minister’ and sit down. I don’t know anything, I don’t know what Arusha is. I don’t know who the former Tanzanian prime minister is, I don’t know what I just said, I mean literally what are the Arusha accords, what is respecting the Arusha accords mean right but the person asking me the question knows even less than me. I am too polite to point out to the person asking the question we don’t even have an embassy in Cameroon or Burundi. We’ve never had an embassy in Cameroon or Burundi right and we have no budget, no staff, no influence, we’re doing nothing in Cameroon or Burundi right but on it goes right and I can do this, I promise you with 43 countries, you can try me. Uh so what does it mean to say that I’m running this department? What does it mean? You know I was there, here we are just to cheer you all up right um, I was made the Minister of State in the Ministry of Justice. I am, I can reveal here not a lawyer right. I rung up Dominic Raab before I took over and I said you know ‘should I take over prisons or courts’ and he said, ‘oh definitely do courts, prisons is an absolute disaster’. Luckily I did prisons right because I know nothing at all about courts and I have some sort of sympathy for prisoners but I was also responsible for sentencing so David Gauke and I together worked on the first draft of getting rid of short sentences to the fury of many, many Magistrates who do not want us to abolish sentences under 12 months right. Uh what are we really doing when we are making that decision, what do we really understand about the texture of these Courts, these decisions. Oh sure somebody has presented a bit of data, I’ve got a, you know I’ve got some academic has said that re-offending rates are lower for people who don’t get a custodial sentence compared to people that get a short sentence and therefore we’re keeping the public safe but what do I really know about community sentences and how well they operate um okay so I’m sort of going to pause there but I, I want to sort of put this out there because we are about to get a Labour Government coming in, you know Bridget Phillipson is about to take over education, Wes Streeting is about to take over health, I don’t even know who is about to take over defence, I am just like scratching my head but anyway this whole team will arrive, predominantly pretty young people, predominantly people who’ve never actually run anything in their lives, predominantly there because they have been unwavering loyal to Kier Starmer and haven’t said a word out of line in 18 months and they are taking over a country with very profound structural changes where we have an expectation of leadership which they will be entirely unable to provide.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
Well this is positive. I think this brings in to play the question of the role of civil servants because they are the continuity um and there is some frustrating passages in your book where you are trying to get things done and you face civil service jargon, people saying no um there’s an episode where you try to stop funding a development programme that is giving money to um Syrian Municipalities that are run by Jihadi’s and it takes you months to work out who’s actually making the decision and miraculously it stopped um and if it was also a surprising moment when you go for lunch with Dominic Cummings when you are going for the Leadership of the Conservative Party you agree on lots including reform of the civil service um and so do you think that it does need reform and what aspect would that take?
Rory Stewart
The civil service is in a sense what really matters because of what I have just said about Ministers and MPs, really the country is run by the civil service so if you want a better country you need a better civil service. I mean the real people who are running the NHS are not Wes Streeting, how can he possibly manage 1.1 million people. I mean day by day the people actually running it are the people running the hospitals, running the ambulance service and this is all about quality and delegation but the theory of the thing has to be something as big as the NHS is that you can’t run it from London you have to delegate down to foundation trusts and let them get on with it. Then everything is about the leadership and management of that level. The same would be true in the Ministry of Defence, the same would be true in the Environment Agency right. So if you really wanted a better Britain in 20 years’ time you would be focussing on recruiting better civil servants, training them better and promoting the best of them to the key jobs and unfortunately we are not doing that; we’re not recruiting the best of the best, we are not training them very well and even of those we get the people who get promoted are often not the best either and it is very understandable that they block what Ministers do – the reason they block what Ministers do is that they think we’re a bunch of politically motivated short-term lunatics and amateurs who are going to be re-shuffled at any moment so the best thing they can do for the country is to stop us making things worse. Block us. Complete rational but unfortunately our system has a very, very confusing ambiguous relationship where it’s not clear at any level who is really in charge, who can take a decision, who can spend money, who’s got the responsibility. Um, how many people in this room thought about joining the civil service? Very good. How many people in this room considered being a Member of Parliament? Far fewer yeah, three, three I think yeah. Um well if we had longer I’d like to get in to, I mean I am extremely worried there is only three people considering to be a Member of Parliament, that, that troubles me a bit um, because I think if we had this conversation 30 or 40 years ago in a room like this, many, many more people would have thought about being a Member of Parliament. Um, I am encouraged that so many people thought about joining the civil service, that’s really good uh but I am then confused about why you are here and not in the civil service. If I had more time, I’d try to get my head around what that was yep, yep.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
Um, I think you touched on Labour and if they come to power um, we can’t presume um, whether they can actually get something done, anything done and I think that touches on the question of leadership and you have a podcast called ‘Leading’ but you’ve also experience many leaders during your political career and the Secretary of States you’ve served under are Liz Truss, Priti Patel, Boris Johnson and David Gauke um…
Rory Stewart
David was good.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
Yes, we’ve also had him here. We like David. Um, what did those experiences teach you about what makes a good leader?
Rory Stewart
It’s so difficult because very, very unusual I mean David um was able to do things which were deeply unpopular, you know, re-nationalise the probation service which Chris Grayling had privatised. Take back privatised prisons under public control, these were very unconservative things to do which really were not popular with the Daily Mail, were not popular with Cabinet colleagues and civil servants thought that no Secretary of State would be brave enough to do it. He was happy to get behind me when I was trying to reduce violence in prisons despite the fact that there was no particular political upside, nobody really cares about prisoners, why put all this energy into reducing violence in prison when it’s not a major issue in focus groups and David did it because he trusted me and he thought it sounded like a good thing to do and he was happy to put money behind it. Um, the problem partly though is that David is barely known compared to the three that were mentioned before. We’ve not heard of him and when I tried to suggest he run to be Prime Minister people laughed at me and I just couldn’t quite understand why, he’s the best Cabinet Minister I knew and had been the front line of politics for 7 years and nobody was evening considering him for the role. I don’t know, it would be as though you had some stand out senior partner who for some extraordinary reason despite performing very well for 7 years, nobody would ever consider for a big leadership role because there’s something else going on. What’s going is that Liz Truss is very good at having lunch with journalists and being indiscreet and gossipy and in return those journalists write her up as a future leadership contender. Uh and David who is more discreet and is getting on with his job and doesn’t create these kind of jolly stories um, is perceived as lacking charisma, lacking… I mean this extraordinary moment where I finally challenged Cameron’s Chief of Staff on Liz Truss becoming Secretary of State for environment, food and rural affairs, she made it very clear to me that she had no interest in the environment, no interest in farming and didn’t believe there was such a thing as rural affairs, you know. The same occasion she said to me, ‘the one job I would never take is foreign secretary because I think foreign policy is a complete waste of time not sure it really exists’ right. Sure enough she becomes Foreign Secretary right. So I said, ‘why did you give her this job when she doesn’t like this field, she doesn’t want to do the job’ and the answer in 2014 is ‘she’s a great media performer’. That’s an extraordinary statement, I mean anyone who’s seen Liz Truss, how can you possibly think Liz Truss is a great media performer – what does that mean right? What it meant I think is they thought ‘oh she’s jolly, she’s got a bit of hutzpah’. It’s not serious, I mean none of this stuff is serious and this is the problem and I think there is a… the rot begins with David Cameron I am afraid because at some level he’s not serious. He’s not serious, he’s not sitting there thinking ‘who are the best and most serious people I can put in my cabinet’. He basically despises I think a lot of the MPs, doesn’t take any of the Ministerial jobs seriously and is just using them as ways of signalling to the media, balancing the party, ‘oh I’ll bring in Priti Patel because that will kind of strengthen me with the rights and I’ll, you know Matt Hancock is jolly, energetic and polite to me and is kind of an energising bunny so I’ll give him something because that will make George Osborn happy and Liz Truss seems jolly so’ you know, I don’t know.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
But also you were told that um, there’s a sense that topic experts don’t make good Ministers but the, your belief was that the leadership just didn’t want to be questioned so you don’t park people who are experts in the role because they would question the policies of the leadership. Do you think that there was a sense of er, lack in confidence in leadership that they didn’t really question?
Rory Stewart
Yeah, well it is a very odd thing, I mean it runs all the way through the system. I mean I found it first when I was a back bencher. I was MP for Cumbria, the northern part of Cumbria and I was very embedded in the question of rural communities and these sort of Cameron big society projects which were supposed to be about communities building their own broadband and getting renewable energy projects off the ground, community housing sort of thing and they brought in legislation, a bill on localisation and I said to the Whips I’d really, really like to be on the bill committee because this is something I’ve put a lot of energy into and sure enough I was not put on the bill committee and an older MP of course explained to me that I’d said exactly the wrong thing. He said ‘if you say to the Whips that you are interested in a subject it guarantees you can’t be in’. Sarah Woollaston who was a GP was not allowed to be on the health committee and when they then appoint Ministers they send um, Phillip Lee who is a doctor to the Ministry of Justice and then they send a lawyer to the Department of Health right and again with Boris Johnson. I mean why is he making me Africa Minister? Presumably because I just, he knows that I know a lot about the Middle East nation and he doesn’t want me to be in a department where I know what I am doing. He wants me to be somewhere where I don’t know what I am doing uh and that is presumably all about unsettling potential rivals and keeping control. Yep?
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
It seems that people who are governing want to give the perception of doing things rather than actually doing things, would you agree with that?
Rory Stewart
Yeah. The whole thing is a sort of um, like one of those very strange medieval Japanese plays, kind of people miming in masks moving around with strange gestures. It’s very ritualistic. You are not, I mean look at Prime Minister’s questions, it’s a, it’s a very odd thing. If you just step back from and close your eyes, just hear the ‘hear hear’ you know, ‘will the right honourable member commit to support for my local primary school that has just got a blah blah, blah blah’ you know, or look at the debates that we just had between Kier Starmer and Rishi Sunak which we are about to have again tonight. Everybody in this room will at some time in their lives be involved in hiring people right and this is a job interview that’s going on with Rishi Sunak and Kier Starmer right. All of you guys are interviewing them for a job. Is the best way of interviewing two candidates for a job to make them stand on two podiums and have 45 seconds uh each, to shout at each other for an hour and then finish, okay now who am I going to pick. What have we learnt from this process about which one of them is going to be better at managing the National Health Service? Nothing right, what we’ve possibly learnt is that Rishi Sunak had some kind of debating skills maybe, maybe um but the link between those kinds of debating skills and they are very narrow, it’s not, it’s not um we’re not in ancient Athens right, we’re not talking about profound rhetoric, this is not Aristotle’s vision of logos, pathos and ethos that are kind of reason, emotion and ethical er character coming together. This is, you still haven’t answered my question on the £2,000, someone answer my question on the £2,000, I mean this is kind of… how can… so the question I guess to all of us is how do we allow a system to emerge which is so bizarre where an alien landing would just be like, well he’s like some sort of weird priesthood or some temple of some dead religion where we no long remember what these rituals were for and a lot of it is like there is a kind of Mace at the end of the House of Commons. What is this Mace? Even I don’t know, I am very interested in history, I’m not quite sure, was, was it literally for clubbing people round the head presumably but it doesn’t look like it’s a very practical way of clubbing someone round the head and why is it put on the table and what does it matter when it’s on the table or under the table in terms of…
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
It’s just very British isn’t it?
Rory Stewart
Yeah.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
We love a symbol.
Rory Stewart
Yes except they are symbols which presumably at some point were symbols. I mean a symbol has meaning. They are now empty rituals, they’re, they’re signs that don’t signify.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
I know the question of TB debates sits quite sorely with you after the, potentially from the book, after the Conservative leadership um election where the first debate you were the winner of the debate when Boris Johnson was there and then you came in for the second debate and you seemed to have a target on your back. And it does seem to be quite reductive to sound bites and get Brexit done and you talk about wanting to show the reality of politics rather than fairy tale politics. Do you think that the current election is based in reality or fairy tale politics?
Rory Stewart
The current election is based on fairy tales but to be fair to the politicians there’s a reason for that. You know, it’s very tempting to imagine all of us that you know we would go on to that stage and try to be honest and what you find is when you’re actually in that television debate if you try to talk in a way that I am talking to you now, which is very tempting right, and I think okay I had a jolly chat with these people at Mishcon and they said to me, ‘would you raise taxes?’ and I say, ‘absolutely not, our public services are’ and ‘sorry would you cut taxes?’ I’d say, ‘absolutely not you know our public service is in a terrible situation, we can’t cut taxes we’ll have to raise taxes’ right and you all are like ‘yeah that makes sense’ right but when I’m at the BBC studio and the Conservative activist says, ‘I was a conservative member for 30 years and I’m now thinking of voting UKIP and which taxes will you all cut’ and they go down the line and Boris Johnson says he’s going to cut this tax and Sanjana Jatav says he’s going to cut that tax and Michael Gove says he’s going to and then it comes to me and I think oh this is my moment where I am going to be real grownup and I am like you know, ‘I don’t think we should be cutting any taxes because you know our public services are in a terrible situation and you know I’m a fiscal conservative who believes in balancing the budget and not spending money that we don’t have’ and literally you can see everybody looking at you thinking, this guy’s gone mad. You know what kind of conservative is he? Does he not understand who our voters are. Our voters want taxes cut, they don’t want some pompous buffoon sitting there treating this thing as though it’s a University seminar, lecturing people on fiscal balance right. Look at Rishi Sunak to answer your question. He has just announced 19 billion, 19 billion pounds worth of tax cuts. 19 thousand million pounds worth of unfunded tax cuts. He had a Spring budget, he had an Autumn statement, he’s had any number of opportunities. He has no fiscal head room at all and he has announced he’s going to find it from stopping tax evasion and cutting down on welfare cheating which presumably he’s, I mean what have they been doing for the last 14 years. I mean there’s been 19 billion pounds sitting under the sofa every year for the last 14 years, they haven’t even bothered to get it out right and now in the election night right and then on the other side Labour. It’s completely demented deposition. Right, they have basically announced that they are going to track the Conservatives inch for inch, we’re not going to raise income tax, we’re not going to raise VAT, we’re not going to raise national insurance, not going to raise corporation tax. Those four taxes are basically all the taxes. I mean there are other taxes but that is 80% of the entire Government revenue that they’ve just said they’re not going to raise. And yet they are signalling to junior doctors that they are going to pay them more, they are signalling to teachers that they are going to invest in schools, they’re signalling that they are going to have a proper infrastructure project, there’s going to be some new green project, there’s going to be a Biden style investment project, there’s going to be all this sort of stuff and there’s no money anywhere and so poor Paul Johnson at the IFS, he’s going out every day and saying, ‘if you are going to hit your fiscal targets’ because they’ve all committed to reducing debt as a proportion GDP, ‘you have two choices’ right, ‘you can raise taxes or you can cut spending, you can raise taxes or you can cut spending’ and all the parties in the election are going to neither cut spending nor raise taxes and it’s all going to be really good for the country right. Um so then the question is how, why, why is this the case and the answer is, that the public at some level um, we’re not good at telling the truth right. I think the way I’d put it is it would be very uh misleading to say that my mistake in that debate is that I told the truth. My mistake in that debate is I didn’t work out how to tell the truth in a way that was appealing, emotionally engaging and funny. There must be a way to do it right, we can’t give up on the idea that you can tell the truth um but my goodness what you can’t do is do what I did, which is sound like a kind of austere technocrat preaching grim news at people. That’s not going to mobilise anyone.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
You say that but in the initial campaign there was an authenticity about you that was very appealing so you had, had the circus tent where you made your big speech and if it was the general population you were leading the poles, it was just when you were part of the structure of the TV debate and appealing to that very tiny minority of the country that was actually voting in the MPs to get down to the shortlist though it didn’t work that way and I think it raises the question of populism and authenticity that people find so appealing in today’s democratic, well in today’s world and how do you think the main fiscal party should react to the rise in populism? I am not saying you are a populist.
Rory Stewart
No, no.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
Just to make that clear.
Rory Stewart
But I think they, they need to be very, very careful. Very, very careful because um, look what’s happened in Germany, look what’s happened in France, look what’s happened in the Netherlands, look what’s happened in Italy. Essentially we are now in a situation in which in the major countries of Europe there is some optimistic news out of the European elections but Germany, France and Italy are the biggest populations in Europe and they are now in all those electoral results leaning hard into populous right wing parties and there’s a problem which is isolated Giorgia Maloni may not be a problem, isolated Viktor Orban in Hungary may not be a problem but there is a problem of critical mass, there’s a snowballing problem. If you end up with Maloni and Marine Le Pen and an AFD leader and Oban and Hererot Fildbusin of the Netherland and Austria tacking for the far right, that you know, you begin to give permission for things which would have been unimaginable 20 years ago in terms of constitutions, in terms of civil liberties, in terms of a tax on the media, in terms of tax on universities, in terms of basically the crushing of many of the most fundamental liberal democratic values we have and so politicians have to find out how to take risks and speak a little bit more truthfully. I’m not saying unnecessary truth. I’m not asking them to be saints that’s not realistic but we have to find a way of being a little bit more truthful and a little bit more complicated as well as doing it in a way that’s engaging. What I fear with Macron is that as the years go on he’s becoming increasingly sort of pompous and high minded and he’s probably going to blow the French election by patronising people and seeming arrogant um.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
So I am going to ask one final question before I open to the floor and to the iPad. Um which is we’ve discussed a lot about the systemic problems in, in politics um and the rise of the far right and populism but do you think there is anything to be hopeful of in politics?
Rory Stewart
Yes, I mean there are many, I think, I hope and um and fear is about trends and balances so there are many things that have happened since 2020 which are causes for cautious optimism. There are also many things that have happened since 2020 which are reasons to be absolutely terrified and what we have to do month by month is, is measure these trends and work out what we can do to try and shift a little bit more in one direction against the other because of course the picture in life is always very, very mixed so on the pessimistic side since 2020 we have had populist elections in Latin America, we have had the re-election of Modi, the re-election of Erdogan and the apparent resurgence of Donald Trump. On the optimist side, Britain has got rid of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, they are very bad polarising choice and has now produced a slightly boring lawyer against a slightly boring banker right and we should be grateful right, whichever one of these people wins it’s not going to be terrifying. It will probably be underwhelming but it’s not going to be terrifying right. Um, France, Macron beat Le Pen. There is a big but there but he beat her in the Presidential election. Biden beat Trump and again he outperformed in the mid-terms. Again a big but there. Australia the Teal Independents came through. There was a remarkable victory in Poland where the Law and Justice party that had dug themselves in since 2015 and corrupted the media and corrupted civil society were defeated by Donald Tusk. In India Narendra Modi stock has fallen dramatically. Oban’s stock is falling now in Hungary. Erdogan in Turkey lost almost all the major cities to the opposition in a very, very shock result. So this thing called populist has got a lot of advantages, it’s got an advantage that people are enraged by the economy, they feel that democracy is not delivering prosperity, social media is whipping it all up and our international relations are a joke and all those things encourage people to vote for populist but at the same time it seems to be true that often people don’t like being ruled by populists and that provides a little bit of a countervailing force um.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
And that’s great. I’m looking, I’m really looking forward to being underwhelmed um thank you so much.
Rory Stewart
But not terrified.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
But not terrified so that’s, that’s great. Um so I think now we are going to open the floor to questions with a roving microphone. Um which is an orange microphone which is great, on brand.
Audience
Um so this election going, the election campaign going on at the moment, the first one in Britain is happening primarily in the digital forum er and as someone who works in digital campaigning for a Conservative MP, I’m really worried that this represents, I’m witnessing and represents a step away from the subject of the conversation being serious policy as you discuss here to being this rather tabloid-ish discussion of people and often through the sort of internet meme format and leads to a, usually a deliberate over simplification of the policy which should be the main conversation and clearly this is done because it’s within their electoral incentive so in your discussion of seriousness earlier in reference to that, how do we then re-align the electoral incentives to incentivise seriousness?
Rory Stewart
Yeah well its true I mean social media is the end of quite a long development of politics becoming increasingly simplified you know, the average length of a sound bite er in American political debates and communications in the 1950s was up at about 90 seconds. By even the late 1980s it had come down to about 15 seconds so this was the pre social media, it was already going in that direction. But my goodness the social media thing, I mean when I was running as an independent to be Mayor of London that’s where most of the money is going. I think Labour spent close to a million pounds on social media ads in just five days in the run up to the beginning of the formal electoral process and that’s mostly actually being targeted at Facebook and X but also quite a lot on TikTok. Um what’s happening there, well one of the problems is that and you can see it in what’s happening with the Lib Dems and Ed Davey. Ed Davey is pursuing a campaign where he goes round uh making an arse of himself in various sorts of holiday resorts; he falls of paddle boards, he goes down water slides, he gets on a rollercoaster and it will feel to the Lib Dems as though they’ve struck on a sort of thing of absolute genius right that they are getting attention but the problem is that the – without sounding too theoretical about this – that there seems to be a problem about the medium and the message which is that it’s very difficult actually to tilt from ‘I’m falling off a paddle board’ to ‘I’m now setting forward a kind of very serious detailed analysis of macroeconomic policy’ and the space for those conversations and debates is extremely limited. It’s not non-existent, I mean if I take uh you know if I take our podcast for example, so our podcast now has more listeners for big episodes than CNN has viewers and that’s come out of nowhere and these are quite detailed, long, sometimes 2 hour conversations with politicians where we don’t interrupt them very much and there is clearly a bit of an appetite for that um but at the same time if you look at the most successful TikTok campaigns at the moment um you are not getting a lot of detailed information across and it’s not just that it’s simplifying, social media also polarises, I mean the algorithms of social media can lag us apart. They turned what was graph of public opinion like a bell jar where the votes are where my fingers are and there no votes where my elbows are into a world where it becomes more like a U shape right, the votes are where my elbows are they are no longer where my fingers are.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
I think there is an extraordinary statistic in the book where you say, ‘during the height of the divisions on Brexit that 50% of people who were Brexit we talked to remainers and there was an extraordinary, I think it was 25% wouldn’t want their child to in the sense, marry out to marry someone from the other side and that is how do we get…
Rory Stewart
And that was true in both directions?
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah.
Rory Stewart
Yeah, yeah. Not just the Brexit remainers but the remainers to the Brexits as well yeah.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
Yeah. Um so I am going to take a question from the magical iPad um which is from Cameron Footer and he asks if the Conservatives lose the election what do you think the future of the Conservative party will be?
Rory Stewart
I fear…
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
45 seconds!
Rory Stewart
…that they’ve, I can do it in 45 seconds but I can see the clock, here’s my 45 second answer okay. Um they have put themselves on an electoral course where they believe that the way that they would win is by stealing votes from the Farage party, that’s why they have leant hard into questions like immigration and national service. Farage has now re-entered the race. They won’t get those voters, four fifths of Reform voters have said they will now, have made up their minds and they are not coming over to the Conservatives. They will therefore lose catastrophically on the left and the right but it is the loss on the right that they will remember most because that’s where their strategy was oriented and they will conclude incorrectly that what they should have done is been more right wing. We can therefore anticipate after the election that it is the Suella Brotherman, Liz Truss, Kenny Badenoch faction that will take over the Conservative Party and it will therefore remain in the wilderness and the tussle with the Reform Party for some years to come – 50 seconds.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
And linked to that I am going to take a question from me. Do you think that there is a serious threat of the next situation the Conservative Party committing to a policy of withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights?
Rory Stewart
Yes a very serious possibility. I mean they are looking for culture wars and unfortunately the Convention on Human Rights has the word Europe in front of it which makes it sound good and it has somehow become associated in peoples’ minds that the legal immigrants coming over, it’s been something the Conservative Party have been interested in for some time. If you get really bored you can watch on YouTube my 1 hour 45 minute debate on this with Jacob Rees-Mogg in the House of Commons where I am defending the European Court of Human Rights and he is attacking the European Court of Human Rights in 2012, so 12 years and so yes very likely they will come back to that. I am getting good at my 40 second answers now.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
Have we got another question in the room. Quite a few – at the back.
Audience
Rory firstly thank you um I really enjoyed the book, I listened to it uh on the audio book and uh apart from my own enjoyment the other bit of feedback I have is that I startled all the other inhabitants of my village when I would suddenly exclaim ‘what the…’ when I was walking the dog but that’s not the question. Um in our industry a bunch of the very large law firms based here in London or with offices here in London are now paying their brand newly qualified lawyers more than the Prime Minister earns. Does the way that we remunerate politicians both Ministers and ordinary members scream out the best and the brightest because their earnings potentially are so much greater outside of public life, does it screen in people who really care and have you know, sort of passionate issues that they want to be involved in the public discourse around and therefore they don’t worry too much about how much they earn because there is a sort of more important thing going on that they want to be involved in? How does that work and what’s your sense of that?
Rory Stewart
Well it’s a very good point. I mean I think to some extent uh politics has become a low status, low pay, high stress profession which means that it will attract a very odd combination of the very wealthy, the saintly and the crank um and er this has been going on for some time. I mean I left University in 1995 and even then it was clear to me that er a very, very large number of my contemporary’s wanted to be lawyers or management consultants or in those days, investment bankers, I know no one wants to be an investment banker anymore but um and they did not particularly, you know what struck me as natural which is joining the Foreign Office was not something that was deeply appealing to people in a way that it would have been I think 30 years earlier um so it’s been going on for a long time, sort of going on for 30 years. There are other countries, Singapore pays its Prime Minister well over a million a year and pays a lot of its Cabinet Ministers well up there um, it’s a problem also for corruption because they get themselves in financial trouble and then they are tempted to lobby and if they are not tempted to lobby when they are in Parliament, they are certainly tempted to take strange consultancy jobs when they leave Parliament uh, so Chairs of select committees will frequently pop up with consultancies from seven companies in relation industries a year after they leave Parliament. Ministers will often do the same um so I think it’s problematic but it, it’s not just about politics so I suppose what I am trying to say is that this is true for all forms of public services. You know I live in a, I live in a fancy area of South Kensington and my father bought the house in 1968 and when he bought it you know, he was a civil servant, our neighbour was a GP, there was a Colonel in the Army down the street, a professional area which, this is Soho Square right opposite the V&A. From the early 19th century to probably the early 1980s you could live a very comfortable life as a doctor, a teacher, an MP, a civil servant, you could probably put the kids in private school, you could probably have a skiing holiday once a year, you could afford a nice house in central London. That old definition of the middle class, or maybe we would call it kind of lower upper middle class, has kind of been wiped out. None of those things are now possible unless you are earning the kind of money that you can only earn in the sort of professions that I mentioned and that then means that a very strange division has emerged between a lot of the brightest, most ambitious people who want to live that kind of lifestyle and the people who then occupy a lot of the key positions in our society.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
Right I am going to take one more from the room and then one more from the iPad. Joanna?
Joanna
It seems to me you have a strong commitment to public service and you’re not sure who Kier Starmer is going to put into the position of Defence Minister. If you get a call for a little place in the House of Lords, and to act as the Defence Minister for Labour – would you even contemplate it or is it…?
Rory Stewart
Oh I’d definitely contemplate it, I mean I think I’d find it very, very difficult to say no um I think it’s difficult though because you know I am somebody who is Conservative, even though I am independent, if I suddenly pop up as a Labour Minister people may raise their eyebrows but equally um obviously I, I love this country, I think it is an enormous privilege to do those jobs and but I think it’s inconceivable he’d offer me the job.
Joanna
But should it be conceivable because would you not get a more balanced politics if you had…
Rory Stewart
Yeah or maybe, what I am trying to pitch to Labour at the moment, not very successfully is to say you know, I’d love to chair an independent commission on something you care about, the NHS say I where we can actually make a cross party commission. Maybe you don’t have to go as far as putting me in the House of Lords and making me a Minister but I’d like to get my teeth into policy in some way. But I’m not sure they’ll do that, I am not sure they are interested in cross party working that way.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
I think they also for the Labour Party have to deal with keeping their own ship in order.
Rory Stewart
Yeah, yeah.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
Their own internal politics.
Rory Stewart
Yeah, yeah a lot of it is about that yeah.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
And so to end on a light hearted note, we’ve got a question from Dan Webster which is ‘who outside the world of politics do you think would make a great politician’?
Rory Stewart
So difficult to know until they are doing the job I mean, Parliament is littered with people who are successes outside Parliament and then enter and it doesn’t really work for them um, Glenda Jackson for example, the most you know, really genuinely one of the greatest actresses in British History you know, Oscar winner and astonishing was, was not a tremendous MP. Archie Norman who’s now one of the great titans of the city was kind of not very successful Conservative back bench MP so generally one gets these things wrong. Um and I am not certain, I mean the temptation is to imagine some very charming footballer uh who’s campaign on I don’t know, school meals or, or funds a successful podcast might be the way, that person to come in and do this um…
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
Marcus Basher does have some time on his hands this summer.
Rory Stewart
Exactly. Um I um, I think probably your best chance is to try to have a system where you get the better people promoted out of who you’ve got rather than hoping that some saviour is going to fly in from outside. It’s such an odd job, so difficult to float in from the outside. I mean, that’s part of the story with me, I mean I am perfectly plausible giving big speeches to big crowds but I’m not an awfully good politician um and why that’s the case is partly to do with the structure and the culture of politics. I think the hope is to say you know, how does one make sure that Hilary Benn gets a more prominent position in the Labour Government rather than trying to imagine the arrival of Superman.
Katy Colton
Partner, Head of Politics and Law Group, Mishcon de Reya
Thank you, Rory thank you this has been an absolutely fascinating hour, I just wish we had longer because there were so many good questions that we would still have. I just want to say that Rory has generously said that he is going to stay around for a few minutes to sign books if anyone is interested and just a plug if anyone is interested in news and content about the General Election please had to our Mishcon de Reya General Election hub for some insights on the manifestos and general policy updates. So thank you so much for everyone, the room is absolutely packed, this has been a really fascinating hour and thank you to Rory.