3 Takeaways - A British Minister on Why Being a Politician Is the Worst Job Imaginable, Brexit and a View of the US and the World: Rory Stewart (#88)

Episode Date: April 12, 2022

Rory Stewart provides an unconventional perspective on the US and the world, including the mistake of our all-in and all-out mentality, politics without detail and how politicians live in a perpetually paranoid universe and don’t accomplish much in their lives.It doesn't matter whether you're talking about Afghanistan, climate change or populism in the US and Europe, Rory believes the fundamental problem is a problem of jargon and abstraction. Let's take Afghanistan. President Biden left Afghanistan, because instead of focusing on the fact that the US actually only had 2,500 soldiers on the ground, was doing very little fighting and had had no casualties for 18 months, he labeled it a "forever war". And by doing so, he convinced himself and 70% of the American people that we were still back in 2012 in this huge military operation which no longer existed. And the same basic problem underlies all our politics, which is that we are now in a world of politics without detail.Rory also shares an ally’s perspective on the US, what Europeans see as a joke, and the 50% likelihood that China will make an aggressive move to reincorporate Taiwan.Rory Stewart is a British diplomat, politician, author and explorer who has walked solo across Afghanistan. He has served across the UK government as Secretary of State for International Development, Minister of the Environment, Minister of State for Justice, and as Chair of the House Commons Defense Select Committee.This podcast is available on all major podcast streaming platforms. Did you enjoy this episode? Consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts.Receive updates on upcoming guests and more in our weekly e-mail newsletter. Subscribe today at www.3takeaways.com.

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another episode. Today, I'm excited to be with Rory Stewart. He's a British diplomat and politician who has served across the UK government as Secretary of State for International Development, Minister of the Environment, Minister of State for Justice, and as chair of the House Commons Defense Select Committee. In addition, he's an author and explorer who has walked solo across Afghanistan.

I'm excited to find out how Rory sees the UK role in the world post-Brexit and what impact the US withdrawal from Afghanistan will have on allies and adversaries. I'm also excited to hear what it's really like to be a politician, why he thinks it's the most awful life imaginable, and how the business of politics is corrosive and disintegrates politicians' brains, bodies, and souls. Welcome, Rory, and thanks so much for our conversation today. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. Let's start by talking broadly about Britain and the U.S..

How do you see Britain's role in the world post Brexit? I think the first thing to start with is that Britain is on a very dramatic journey. As recently as 2005, the British economy was larger than the Chinese economy. Today, just 17 years later, the British economy was larger than the Chinese economy. Today, just 17 years later, the Chinese economy is seven times larger than the British economy. So you can see the shift in power. So when Britain went into Afghanistan and Iraq with the United States, it still had a larger economy than China's. And the reason I'm saying that is that in a way, what Britain is struggling with is what it means to be a large, medium-sized country

in a world in which obviously nations like the United States and China are operating at a totally different level. The United States has an economy nearly 10 times the size of the British economy. And that goes into the core of all the problems that we're trying to do post-Brexit. Do we have a role in Africa? Do we have a role in the Middle East? How do we work with other nations? Do we really have a military anymore? Are we able to operate independently? And perhaps the most dramatic example of that

was that when the United States left Afghanistan, they had only 2,500 soldiers left on the ground. And traditionally, you would have thought that a country like Britain would have been able to take up that weight. 2,500 soldiers is not very many, but Britain chose not to. And I think that's a real sign, at least at the moment, of lack of national confidence. And what role do you think that Britain can play in the world? As you say, a medium, large-sized country with limited resources compared to some other countries?

I think Britain, like any organization of that kind of size, needs to focus, prioritize. So my honest view is that we shouldn't be talking about Britain tilting towards China and the Asia-Pacific region. That's not where our expertise lies. Our expertise really lies in Africa and the Middle East. So we should be saying to the United States or President Biden, by all means, you tilt towards China, and we will take over some of the roles that the United States used to do in places where currently the president seems to be less interested. That will involve investing more in those places, rebuilding relationships in those places.

I think the second thing clearly that we need to do is try to work out whether it's possible to rebuild what the old West, this alliance of democracies, which was incredibly important really through the whole 20th century, and which is now feels terribly lacking in confidence, terribly fraying. And all over the world, essentially, people are paying less and less attention to what Europe, And all over the world, essentially, people are paying less and less attention to what Europe, Britain, the United States, Canada would traditionally have pushed in terms of values, in terms of approaches. How do you see US foreign policy? I think it's in a muddle. In a way, although there's a lot of talk about a tilt towards China,

we're in a period of isolation. This is the long legacy of Donald Trump's view of the world, that the decision to leave Afghanistan was not a rational decision. It wasn't driven by things on the ground. No American soldier being killed for 18 months or any 2,500 soldiers there. It was a very, very light investment. It wasn't necessary, but it's not as though the investment in Afghanistan was somehow preventing the United States from doing things elsewhere. But it was very, very symbolic because what it suggests is that the United States is giving up, retreating from the position it's really had since the Second World War of having quite a large

presence across the world in unexpected places, Philippines, Colombia, South Korea, Japan, which was for better or worse about the United States having a sense that it was going to play a globally responsible world role. We may not like the idea of global policemen, but at least that the United States stood for things, stood for values, stood for democracy, stood for human rights. And that has collapsed for understandable reasons, partly because many, many Americans, when you say that, will groan and say, oh, come off it. You know, we didn't really do democracy and human rights, did we? So there's a problem, which is there's a problem of external legitimacy. In other words, what do other countries think

about the United States? There's also a deep problem within the United States where America may have lost its own sense of confidence in its mission. And sometimes for quite understandable reasons, which is, of course, like Britain and European countries, the United States, as well as doing a lot of good in the world, did a lot of harm. How do other countries see the U.S. now with its partisanship and divisions? I think we're worried. I mean, that's another obvious problem, which is that if the greatest democracy in the world that's in the business of promoting and exporting democracy seems to be having problems with its own democracy, things do become a little bit more troubling. But of course, populism, partisanship is not a US-only phenomenon. It's something to be very

worried about around the world. So it's very sad. Let's talk more specifically about Afghanistan. From your perspective as a British diplomat and politician, how do you see British and NATO involvement in the war in Afghanistan? Essentially in Afghanistan, we made the mistake of getting into a all-in or all-out mentality. In the early days, there was a lot to be proud of in Afghanistan. United States and its allies went in with very, very few troops, toppled the Taliban government, supported President Karzai, and he was running a country. Now, it had many problems, as you can imagine,

because Afghanistan started from a very, very low base. It was one of the poorest countries on earth. But in those early years, the first four years, Afghanistan did make a lot of progress. The economy doubled in size. Many refugees returned to the country, and particularly in the central and the north of the country, lives got better.

Women went back to school, services began to roll out. The problem really was that in 2005, the US became over-ambitious and perfectionist, as did NATO in general. And they began to say, ah, yes, but there are many problems in the South and the East with corruption and human rights abuse, and Karzai isn't doing a good enough job. And that was really the beginning of these troop deployments. Initially, the foreign soldiers stayed in Kabul in the capital, but they were tempted into difficult areas in South Afghanistan, initially believing that if they went in there, they would be able to improve ordinary people's lives, that they could get rid of corrupt warlords and they could get girls back to school and they

could create security for economic development. But in fact, what happened by trying to do that is they sparked a Taliban resistance, which grew and grew and grew and grew. And finally, in 2014, we came to our senses again and realized that it didn't make sense to try to nation build in that way. So we went back to a light footprint. And from 2014 to 2021, that's what we had. We had very few troops and generally they were not engaged in ground operations and they didn't do very much outside bases. Very few. And actually the development money was increasingly about supporting the Afghan government. But it was just enough to stop the Taliban from taking over the country. And I thought President Biden, because he'd argued for a light footprint back in the day

when he'd been the vice president under President Obama, would embrace this. Instead of which, for some reason, he woke up and said, I'm not prepared to accept even 2,500 American soldiers. Not prepared to do anything to stay in there. And despite the fact that the U.S. has remained in countries like South Korea for 70 years, he said 20 years is quite long enough. We're out. And in doing so, collapsed the whole state so that we are now on the edge of a horrifying humanitarian crisis. Many Afghans will starve this winter. The U.S. stretched NATO into Iraq and Afghanistan, and neither worked out particularly well.

Given this, do you think NATO will be unwilling to take actions outside of Europe? I think NATO will be skeptical, and it'll also be feeling a bit bruised and betrayed. Remember that President Biden didn't really consult in the departure from Afghanistan. Taliban captured Kabul on Sunday. He and Prime Minister Boris Johnson asked for a call with him on Sunday. He didn't bother to speak to him till the Tuesday. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but it is a big deal because, of course, Britain lost nearly 500 soldiers in Afghanistan

and we spent 20 years there with British politicians telling the British people that Afghanistan is the most important place on Earth, that failure is not an option. And then suddenly, our ally gets up and leaves. And what are we supposed to say? And so the United States needs to think a little bit about its allies. What are the British politicians supposed to say to the British people? We've been telling you for 20 years that we're here with the United States. This is an existential threat to global security. We can't leave because

terrorists are going to take over. And we're suddenly supposed to wake up the next morning and say, oh, actually, we've changed our minds 180 degrees. Afghanistan doesn't matter at all. It doesn't even justify having 2,500 soldiers. It doesn't matter if the Taliban takes over. We've got better things to do. So I do think that's going to be one of the problems. How does the U.S. sustain relationships with allies if it no longer has a consistent foreign policy, if it's able to lurch that quickly from position to position? Do you have any insight into why President Biden did not return Prime Minister Johnson's phone call, the call Sunday night night and did not return it until

Tuesday at such a critical time. Well, I think he essentially, intuitively, for understandable reasons, puts America first. It wasn't a priority for him. He had other things to worry about. That's fine. But if you're going to make a big deal out of relationships and allies, these things do matter. Because remember, when America wants you to get into these countries, they can be super charming. So it's a bit brutal when you suddenly wake up and realize that actually, to some extent, the U.S. thinks that nobody else really matters except the U.S. I think at some level, Biden thought, well, if he thinks we should go, everybody else should think we should go. And at the end, there was a very light footprint, as you mentioned, 2,500 U.S. troops. There hadn't been a U.S. fatality in almost 18 months. And NATO

had slightly more than that in terms of number of troops, about 3,500 or so. Do you think it would have been sustainable on a longer term basis to have just those few number of NATO troops in the country? Very difficult for NATO to operate if there had been no U.S. enablers. The U.S. would have had to continue to provide at least some of the contractors to maintain the Afghan Air Force. I mean, one of the problems is the U.S. sold a lot of American planes to the Afghans that can't be operated without American contractors. So if you remove them, you've essentially just sold somebody a $200 million piece of junk that can't really get off the ground or fly anywhere. And they probably would have had to keep some of the U.S. command

and control systems, some of the software IT systems. But yes, I think it's very much with air power, the Taliban could have been prevented from taking and holding a city. What do you think was accomplished over 20 years in Afghanistan? And do you think that those accomplishments will be sustainable? Huge accomplishment in terms of transformation of Afghan lives. Remember, if we don't think in terms of the state, but in terms of millions of individual people, there are millions of girls who were able to get an education who wouldn't otherwise have got an education. And you can't take that away from them. They now can read and write, know those things, have those skills, have worked. And for 20 years, people were able to live in a more open society with proper free

media, with elections, without a real fear, particularly in the cities in the central north of the country of political repression. Now, it's not a simple story, because in many of the villages in the south and the east, the situation remained very, very bad for 20 years. So if you were a woman living in Helmand province, you'd probably say things didn't change very much for you.

You're still in the same mud hut you were in 20 years ago. But that's not true if you lived in the rural areas of the center, if you lived in Hazarajat, Bamiyan Valley. So it's a complicated picture, but essentially many, many millions of lives got much, much better. And the Afghanistan that I knew in 2021 was immeasurably better than the Afghanistan I knew at the end of the Taliban period. You've basically alluded to the military strategy being flawed with the heavy reliance on expensive and sophisticated U.S. military equipment that the Afghan army, the majority of whose members were illiterate, could not effectively use or maintain. And the heavy reliance on massive U.S. spending was another issue. What do you think an effective strategy in Afghanistan would have

looked like? I think the key is the notion of a light footprint. The idea is to accept that, of course, the U.S. and its allies can make a difference. If the U.S. and its allies had not intervened, the Taliban would have just remained. The only reason the Taliban went is because of that intervention. But you need to be modest and realistic about what you can achieve. You can certainly topple a regime. You can do quite a lot to end a war. And you can do quite a lot in development, particularly education, health.

But what you can't do is rebuild somebody else's state. And you can't win a counterinsurgency warfare campaign in somebody else's country. So it's about being able to say, and it's a difficult thing to say. I'm not suggesting it would have been easy, but somebody would have had to hold their nerve in 2005 and say, OK, it's messy. It's not all we wanted. And there's a lot of things in South and East Afghanistan that are very disturbing.

They're growing a lot of drugs. There's a lot of human rights abuses. But the truth is, there's nothing that the U.S. can do about that. And if it tries to do it by deploying soldiers, it's going to make the situation worse, not better. So we're going to hold on to that, and we're going to continue with a few troops and a relatively moderate amount of money supporting an elected government and see how it does. Nation building has been successful in a couple of countries, South Korea, Japan, and Germany. What made nation building in those countries successful as opposed to in Iraq and Afghanistan?

It's difficult to be certain about these things. And there are many, many different analyses. One basic thing is that those were very well-established, sophisticated states before the war that led to the intervention. Certainly in the case of Germany and Japan, they were amongst the wealthiest countries in the world with highly educated populations and incredibly well-developed state structures. In the case of Japan, stretching back many, many, many centuries. In the case of South Korea, a little bit more complicated. But in South Korea, the added element was U.S. patience. We were in Afghanistan for 20 years. 20 years after the U.S. first deployed to South Korea,

South Korea was still a military dictatorship. And the GDP per capita in South Korea, 20 years after the initial intervention, was lower than the Congo. It's a very, very poor place. Now, 70 years later, it's one of the most prosperous democracies on earth. But if we had done what President Biden's done in Afghanistan, we would have been saying goodbye to a very, very poor military dictatorship. The U.S. seems to be very good at waging war and projecting power, but less good, at least recently, at the next steps and staying power. Is the U.S. buying one military and essentially operating another? I think that's right. I think that the design of the U.S. military is difficult. The temptation, of course, with any politician with the military is it's the only bit of government that you can

really deploy. You don't have a standing army in any other bit of government. And that's one of the reasons why when there's a flooding disaster or an emergency and people end up deploying troops or National Guardsmen, because for a politician, whatever the problem, doesn't matter. Could be flooding, could be democratization and governance. It's tempting to reach to the military to do it. And the military are can-do people. So they're reluctant to say, really, our skill is fighting wars. That's what we're trained to do. We're trained to engage with the enemy and kill them. We're not really trained to create democracies or fill sandbags and deal with floods. And that is the perpetual tension. Because, of course, hidden in the background of this is a much more difficult question.

Are there going to be big wars in the future? Part of the military fears there might not be, that they may not be relevant, that there's a use it or lose it phenomenon going on, where they want to continue in order to defend, understandably, their belief that there should be large defense budgets and lots of people, that they are relevant, that they can do things. And it's that tension between them being can-do, wanting to do things, show that they can really do things in the world, and the reality of the fact that many of the things that they're called on to do are not really either areas of their expertise or, in some cases, things that anyone can do. The Biden administration withdrew from Afghanistan unconditionally. Do you think they could have or should have negotiated conditions for withdrawal? And if so, what conditions? I think it was terrible what they did.

But President Biden just wanted to get out. President Trump just wanted to get out. In the end, that was the problem for the negotiators. A lot of effort was put into negotiation with the Taliban. It started in 2008. That had been going on for 13 years, these conversations, and really got going properly in 2018. But the Obama administration had tried hard in 2008, 2016 to reach out informally. But the problem was they really sat down in 2018. And so President Trump made it quite clear that he wanted to get out, in which case, really the taliban calculated that they didn't really need

to make any concessions at all they would be able to take the whole country without conceding anything the only way that you ever would have been able to get the taliban to make any concessions is by keeping your troops on the ground saying we're not leaving background air base we're going to continue to prevent you taking any district capital and holding it and then perhaps yes over time you might have been able to get a peace deal. But if you take out all the force that supports central government, you're not going to have a peace deal. The withdrawal, as you mentioned, the U.S. did not consult with the U.K., it seems like, at all prior to the withdrawal. But apart from that obvious fiasco at the end, were the UK and NATO involved with decision

making in Afghanistan? Was it just a change at the end, a disastrous change? Very involved in the early days, 2005, 6, 7. The general commanding was British in 2005, 6. From the time of the Obama surge onwards, from 2008 onwards, the US military were increasingly in charge because they had 90% of the soldiers on the ground and were spending 95% of the money. Increasingly, the NATO countries became a sort of diplomatic coalition. And yes, the US was very good about including people and sitting around the table. But the truth of the matter was that it was the US general who decided what happened. And there really wasn't much scope for disagreeing with the U.S. view. What impact do you think the withdrawal from Afghanistan has on the thinking

of both allies and adversaries about America, the U.K. and NATO? What it does is it's a real big blow to the notion that there is an American-led alliance of Western democracies, which are trying to campaign for shared values. And I think that's the real tragedy out of this, that it's going to be very difficult to rebuild the foundations, the values of the global system, which has really kept us safe in many ways since the Second World War. People will be watching very, very carefully to see us safe in many ways since the Second World War. People will be watching very, very carefully to see whether America has the energy or the confidence to be involved with the world anymore. Rory, what do you think an effective policy towards China would look like? I think the first thing is to work out things that we haven't really worked out.

Where does this end? What sort of power have we got against China? What kind of leverage have we got against China? It makes sense, I suppose, broadly to diversify away from China. In other words, not be entirely dependent on China for every single thing that you do, because you don't want to be in a position where every single metal in every mobile phone depends on China and where every semiconductor chip ends up and every electric vehicle ends up coming from China. But at the same time, I don't imagine that there is honestly the will in America anymore to really engage militarily with China. I think the administration may pretend there is, and there may be a lot of investment in trying to put those messages across. But I would be very surprised if China were to attack Taiwan, whether there really was US support for sending an aircraft carrier out. And I'd be very surprised if, as seemed likely in that kind of situation,

the Chinese blew up an aircraft carrier and killed five and a half thousand American soldiers, whether the U.S. public would think that that sacrifice was worth it. What do you think China will do in the next, I'm going to say, five to 10 years with respect to Taiwan? I think it's very dangerous. I think Xi Jinping is looking for a legacy. Xi Jinping believes that it is the historical destiny of China to reunite Taiwan with China. He won't want to fight. He'll want to do it peacefully by putting pressure on Taiwan. His ability to do that is constrained by the fact that what he was offering in the past would be a sort of Hong Kong model of one country,

two systems. But of course, the repression in Hong Kong means that if you're Taiwanese, you think, not so sure about this one country, two systems model anymore. But yes, I would be very anxious. It's ridiculous to predict these sort of things, but I would say there is at least a 50% likelihood that China will make an aggressive move to reincorporate Taiwan in the next, let us say, 10 to 15 years. What do you think that the rest of the world can do about that, if anything? That includes Western nations, Asian nations, and other friends of Taiwan. You can't ultimately prevent them from doing it. I mean, they have medium range missiles sitting on the Chinese coast that can just rain down on Taiwan indefinitely. If they actually wanted to obliterate Taiwan from the face of the earth. There's very little that one could do about it. But what one can do is make the costs for China doing it much higher and make them feel

that there would be a period of extreme economic uncertainty. Your best hope is to raise the costs and risks for China doing it so that Xi Jinping would only do it in extremes. As a former minister of the environment, how do you see global warming and world progress toward reducing the rate of global warming? This also goes to this whole question around China. I mean, China and to some extent India are the great elephants in the room here. And there is a very simple dilemma facing President Biden. Does he prioritize climate or does he prioritize the geostrategic competition with China? If it's climate, what he'll want to do basically is to try to make friends with them, find out how to cooperate. And the more he emphasizes competition,

tariffs, and an aggressive relationship, the more difficult it will be to get joint action going. What was achieved in COP? I think probably two things. One of them is that at least people produced a date for net zero and people agreed to meet again next year. And there is more talk about fossil fuels, but it's clearly not the breakthroughs that you would need to limit warming to 1.5% before the end of the century. Rory, let's talk a little about what it's like to be a politician. What is the business of politics like? I think the first thing is that

people need to empathize with politicians. Voters need to. I mean, obviously, we're very angry with them most of the time. We read about the newspaper, we see them on television, and we want to throw things at the screen. But it is the most awful life imaginable.

We think of politicians as enjoying the power and having fantastic privilege. The truth is that it's brutal. I was talking to a U.S. congresswoman who calculated in two years she made 120,000 hours worth of phone calls to donors to try to raise money. And you are treated by the public most of the time as an incompetent criminal. The public basically assume that you're in it for the very worst reasons. And politicians become a byword for everything that we hate. But the public are your bosses. So it's like being managed by somebody who despises you.

It's a very odd relationship. And that's before you get into social media. It's not just the abuse that you get yourself. I was lucky enough in politics for people not to be too nasty to me. But I'm aware all the time that all my colleagues are perpetually appearing on the newspapers being attacked because they said the wrong thing or they did the wrong thing, so that you're in a perpetually paranoid universe. I've spent 10 years as a politician with elected politicians, and many of them are good people. And that's true in the U.S. Congress and U.S. Senate. And if you ask them, they would probably tell their families they're doing it because they believe in public service and they want to help people.

But the truth of the matter is that many of them don't achieve a great deal in their lives, to be brutal. They are not trained necessarily to be great at governing. The training is by being a loyal party activist who communicates well on a doorstep day in, day out. They are not selected for having a profound understanding of international geopolitics or a profound understanding of the operations and infrastructure. Before I ask for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with, is there anything else you'd like to mention that you haven't already touched upon? I think the key thing is that it doesn't matter whether you're talking about populism in the

United States or Europe, or whether you're talking about Afghanistan or whether you're talking about climate change. The fundamental problem we face in our civilization is a problem of jargon and abstraction. We are very, very bad at focusing on the real, the particular, the local example. Let's take Afghanistan. President Biden left Afghanistan because instead of focusing on the fact that actually he had only 2,500 soldiers on the ground, they were doing very little fighting and there would be no casualties for 18 months, he labeled it as a forever war.

And by doing so, convinced himself and 70% of the American people that we were still back in 2012 in this huge military operation, which no longer existed. The same is true with environment stuff. Very easy to talk about sustainability, rewilding, biodiversity, without ever really getting into the detail of what that means in this place. What does that mean for this community in East Kentucky? What does that mean for this community in South Dakota? What does that mean for this community in South Dakota? What does it actually mean in Brazil? What does it mean in India? And the same basic problem underlies all our politics,

which is that we are now in a world of politics without detail. Everything now is three-word slogans. Everything is sort of very vague statement. The real questions are not, does AOC sign off to an infrastructure bill or not? But why on earth are you spending so little, so little on the train connections up and down the East Coast?

Everybody's saying this is a sort of groundbreaking announcement in the infrastructure bill because you're spending a few tens of billions. Right, from a European point of view, this is a joke. We're spending well over £120 billion just on a single rail line heading up called High Speed 2. And yet getting from Boston to Washington on the train, which is the absolute no-brainer, could be done, but it can only be done if we change politics to start thinking about practical, local, specific problems,

rather than getting ourselves stuck in this nonsense of jargon and abstraction. Rory, what are the three key takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? The first one is that, right? Get away from grotesque abstraction and jargon and get down to the specific and the local. Always ask the politician or the policymaker, no, no, what exactly do you mean? What does that actually look like? The second thing, I think, is to believe in your opponents. One of the problems for the polarization and the extremism and populism in politics is that we don't give any credit to the other side.

Assume, if you're a Democrat, that the Republicans that you're talking to are highly intelligent people who've had a lot of experience in the world and have a lot of wisdom to share, even if you disagree with them. Because you have to be able to empathize with the other side. If you're going to achieve anything in politics, you have to assume that the person who you hate and disagree with, from their point of view, thinks they're right and has a lot of reasons, good reasons from their point of view thinks they're right and has a lot of reasons, good reasons from their point of view to think they're right. And then I think the final thing is we've got to think about character in politics again, not rules. We have constitutions that are based on rules. We somehow believe that you can deal with the threats posed by frankly mediocre, thoughtless politicians by having a separation of powers or tinkering with the constitution. The truth is we need to educate people to be people of good character. And being

people of good character means that they need to be able to think about their whole life. They need to think about not just what I do now, but how I will look back on the whole shape of my life. And above all, politicians need to learn how to say no. We're too focused on success, but the most powerful moral statement a politician can make is the negative. I will not do this. I'm not going to go along with this. I may not even stand for election again because I actually morally cannot accept what is happening. Interesting. I would have thought you would have said something more about compromising rather than saying no. I believe that compromise is incredibly important as a

politician. But I think that the secret of pluralism is to have an idea that there is a very, very broad spectrum of things where you should compromise and agree, but that it isn't limitless, that there needs to be ultimately around the edge of that agreement, red lines beyond which you will not go. Thank you, Rory. This has been terrific. Thank you very much indeed. If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new fresh weekly episodes, be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3takeaways.com or follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Note that 3takeaways.com is with the number three. Three is not spelled out. See you soon at 3takeaways.com.