Dan Snow's History Hit - The Inside Story of the Brexit Referendum

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

On the eve of the 2024 General Election, we're joined by Tim Shipman, chief political commentator at The Sunday Times, to hear about how things really work in Westminster.Tim draws on his first-hand experience to explain the tumultuous last decade of British politics. How are crucial decisions made in the halls of government? Who can we trust when we get wildly differing accounts of the same event? And why exactly did Brexit turn out the way that it did?Tim's latest book and the final instalment of his Brexit quartet, 'Out', is available now.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and James Hickmann, and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. As this podcast first goes out, it is the eve of an election, a general election here in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It's all about political fervour here, folks. Yesterday we heard about the history of Brexit, which is one of the issues which will motivate people as they go to the polling booths. And I thought this would be a great follow-up and a great podcast for this momentous week. If you want an insight into how decisions are made in the halls of government, then this is the episode for you. We've got the brilliant journalist Tim Shipman with us. He's the chief political commentator for the Sunday Times. He is a giant of the political media world.

He's the author of No Way Out, Brexit, From the Backstop to Boris, and the best-selling books All Out War and Fallout. He loves the word out. In fact, he loves it so much that the final instalments of his Brexit quartet is called Out, and that's due out later this year. He's a man with really just an incredible first-hand experience, the tumultuous world of British politics over the last decade or so. He's the guy that politicians call. They send him WhatsApps. They slide into his DMs when things go wrong, when they want to get their side of the story across,

when they're trying to make sure that they were on the right side of history. He's had brown envelopes filled with papers slid across tables, Tim, in cafes. Tim is going to take us into the depths of government to explain how on earth we ended up with Brexit and how on earth Brexit turned out as it has done. I also want to ask him, how can we know what really happened? Who can we trust? There's a differing account of the same event from people that were all in the room at the same time. How does he disentangle? How does he work out what really happened? This is what it's like behind the scenes in Westminster, folks, from someone who knows. Enjoy. Raise the case. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off.

And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Tim, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Well, I'm a great fan, so it's a delight. Every Sunday morning, because I'm a dad now, you wake up at like 4 a.m. No one told you that as a middle-aged man. The first thing I do, I get my app out. I open your app, I find out what the hell's going on in British political life. It's great. I guess the place I'd like to start is, was Euroskepticism, as we used to call

it in Britain, always a pretty good chunk of the population? Was it pretty mainstream? Or was there a point at which you think it got supersized and became a realistic... Like in 97, I remember as a first-time voter, people complained about it, but it wasn't something we ever really believed would at which you think it got supersized and became a realistic, like in 97, I remember as a first time voter, people complained about it, but it wasn't something we ever really believed would happen. Is there a particular point at which you think it went, it just went mainstream? Yeah, I think Brexit is a kind of sort of historical event with a load of roots. I think it's probably fair to say, if you look back at all the polls, that a sort of general Euroscepticism was pretty

innate and pretty common in the British population. But the people who were that excited about it and interested in it, and for years and years drove it, the people I call the paleosceptics, the people who got hot under the collar about Maastricht, were a very small part of the population and a pretty small part at that stage of the Conservative Party back in sort of 1990, 1992. But they were marginal. And I think Brexit happening is kind of a process where it goes mainstream, it becomes more acceptable. And there's kind of various stages to that. Once David Cameron calls a referendum, it brings it into something where everybody has to have an opinion and then ultimately have to cast a vote on it. But prior

to that, he'd been kind of pushed by the number of those people getting bigger in the Conservative Party. So he was forced by his backbenchers into going for a referendum. And that was because it become more mainstream in the Tory party, though I think for a long time, it wasn't really mainstream in the country even then. And they pushed him and pushed him. And then you had these people defecting to UKIP and you had sort of Nigel Farage going from a sort of figure on the fringes to someone who was suddenly looking like he was all over question time he was all over mainstream television became more sort of part of the scenery and that sort of pushed what had been quite a marginal interest to the fore and then course, I think the campaign itself

just totally kind of weaponises all that. And you go from sort of general sentiment and a bunch of people pushing it to having professional campaigners come in and ramp it all up. Dominic Cummings, whatever you think of him, was an effective campaigner. And it's really Boris Johnson and Michael Gove

that make it go mainstream. Michael Gove gave it a kind of intellectual sort of respectability, and Boris Johnson gave it just a lot of oomph. I mean, Gove's view is that if Johnson had backed it, that would have been enough for them to win. But I think a lot of people think Michael cleared the way for Boris to go and do it. And that's what took it totally mainstream. And the nature of referenda is you need 50% plus one on one day. Because if you go back to 75, it was about 30% of the population didn't want anything to do with it. If you look at the polls from the 1990s, it was kind of between 30 and 40%.

So in a way, you're right, the sort of numbers don't change usually, but I guess the salience, the assertiveness of that minority is what mattered. And then on the day, they managed to just lift it. Well, it's just brought to a moment. I mean, I remember having conversations with Dominic Cummings at the end of sort of 2015, at the start of 2016, and he would still have told you then, 30% really, really want this,

30% really, really don't want this, and the referendum is about trying to persuade more than 20% of the other 40% to go with you. And in the end, they got 22. Interestingly, the poll has sort of almost reverted to the norm. I mean, it's now... It's back where it was. It's back pretty much where it was. Yeah. Yeah. And salience-wise, it's also back where it was in that most British people aren't voting depending on their views about Brexit. No, I think that's absolutely right. And I think that's the problem that the Conservative Party have now. They briefly

kind of captured lightning in a bottle during the referendum and then in the 2019 election. And Boris Johnson effectively put together that Leave coalition again, plus the sort of despairing Remainers who just wanted it all to go away. And basically since, the story for the Conservative Party is that that coalition has broken down and none of his successors have been able to recapture it. OK, so Tim, this is the interesting thing. Do you think any of these big milestones that we all rehearse, Thatcher's rebate, Maastricht, Tony Blair's signing up for the Constitution, did any of those actually matter? There wasn't a point in that spectrum of events that British people went, enough is enough, we've had too much of this creeping federalism, I want out.

You don't think those actually really matter? I think it weaponised various people in the paleosceptics. A lot of them would point to Maastricht where they started out. For some of the sort of newer generation, people like Steve Baker, who was the great backbench organiser for the Brexiteers, it was the Lisbon Treaty. But I think, you know, none of those things ultimately mattered greatly. What you had is a sort of underlying general Euroscepticism of slightly British exceptionalism feel that we don't really want to be told what to do by people in Brussels. Plus a kind of bunch of campaigners who kept it in the news, kept a group of people alive and interested in it. So

that's where those events become important. It kind of keeps that hard core of the Conservative Party interested in the subject. And then at the end, it's all about the campaign. And 600,000 votes go the other way. You've got a different result. And actually, if you look at where do they spend most of the money, they spend it all on the digital campaign. And when do they spend it? The Leave campaign strategy, to give it a bit of historical bent, was called the Waterloo strategy. And the idea was that you would bide your time and then rise up out of the grass and shoot all the French at the last moment. And they spent something like 85%, 90% of all their money in the last 48 hours.

So if you're looking for where did people make their minds up, when were they finally forced to focus and what got it over the line, you can say 40 years of Euroscepticism is important. But ultimately, was it just a huge Facebook blitz in the last two days that made the difference? And that's the fascinating thing with history, isn't it? There's all these causes. There's approximate cause, there's a sort of underlying sense. You know, we need to talk about the 2008 crash, and people felt that they were being left behind. They didn't really think globalization was working for them. That rises the salience of immigration and the sort of sense of otherness. And that's kind of what motivated a lot of people to vote for it. And of

course, it was partly about Brussels, but it was partly about punching the government of the day on the nose and saying, look at us over here, we matter. And I think in 2019, you can say that Boris Johnson kind of listened to them. And if the government get hammered at the next election, it's because they haven't ultimately delivered for those people. There's a gag somewhere in there about winning the Battle of Waterloo this time without the Dutch and the Germans. Quite. But successive British prime ministers kept thinking the Germans

were going to come gluker-like to their aid. Indeed. And the path to Brexit is littered with the corpses of British prime ministers who Angela Merkel was going to save the day for. Or the German car industry. Or the German car industry. I love that one. Let's just unpack that last point a bit as well. 2008, global financial meltdown. We had geopolitical instability, Arab Spring, lots of images of refugees from the Middle East walking through Europe, bribing Germany and elsewhere. Was this referendum about the EU?

I think it was partly about the EU, but it was partly about sort of big trends. I mean, I was talking to a cabinet minister the other day because I'm trying to write a sort of grand conclusion to this whole period. And I thought I'd pick the brain of one of the more intelligent people in Westminster to see what he thought.

And he kind of said, this is all about 2008. And around the world, there were different reactions to 2008. There was a recession, there was a global problem with migration. And in America, clearly, Trumpism is one of the sort of outcomes of that. But there were others, you know, in other European countries as well. And Brexit is kind of our version of that. And it brings together specific concerns about people from elsewhere. It brings together concerns about, am I really getting what I think I deserve from the government of my own country? And it brings together a sort of center and periphery kind of feeling, which is a big deal in lots of revolutions in France and in Russia in 1848 and all of that, as someone sort of raised on all of those historical events, you then see that again.

And that's why everybody who got stuck in London for most of that campaign called it wrong. Because if you went out and went to Doncaster and you went to the Tees Valley, it looked very different from how it looked from Westminster. And so many people, including a vast number of MPs, got it all wrong. So David Cameron, remind me of the timeline here, he promises a referendum. Start of 2013. Whilst he's still in a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. Correct. So it's an easy promise because the Liberal Democrats are never going to agree to it. Absolutely. So actually that looks like quite a good deal. And it's an easy promise because the Liberal Democrats are never going to agree to it. Absolutely. So actually, that looks like quite a good deal. And he's going into an election in 2015, knowing that that's what his party expects him to do.

And in the end, David Cameron's strategic mistake was to do in the Liberal Democrats, win all those seats against them. Fatal. End up with a majority and have to push ahead with the referendum. And it has always been assumed by people like me that he would have thrown that referendum pledge under a bus in a new coalition deal with the Liberal Democrats. Well, Oliver Letwin, who was his point man on all of this, has now confirmed on the record that that was precisely what they were going to do. And they had prepared the offer to the Lib Dems, and that would have involved junking the referendum pledge.

Yes. So for people who don't remember, in British politics, prime ministers very rarely increase their majorities in elections. Almost never. Exactly. So he must have gone in 2015 thinking, I'm already a minority government. I'm going to be in a coalition afterwards at best, hopefully.

And then he ends up snatching this very narrow majority, but in the majority nonetheless, as you say, by putting the boot massively into his coalition partners. Yeah, and they didn't really know it was coming. They spent a lot of time putting money into all these Lib Dem seats. And again, it was a bit sort of Waterloo strategy. Like they kind of rose up as a surprise at the last moment. It was such a surprise.

Liberal Democrats got wiped out. Yeah. Thanks very much for joining us in Coalition of the National Interest. So Cameron, he's got a big problem. He's got to call the referendum. Now, this is why I want to interrupt him because I'm just so excited to have you on the podcast. You know more about how decisions are made and strategy, if that is even a word we can use on this occasion, is kind of hammered out in Westminster and Whitehall. How much long-term thinking is, like, these meetings,

are people just a little bit shooting from the hip and day to day. I mean, like, how long do these decisions take in gestation? I think, I mean, the decision to call a referendum was quite long in the gestation because Cameron wasn't sure what to do. He was sort of forced into it to agree. And actually, as we discovered afterwards, George Osborne, who was his closest kind of political ally, disagreed with it. Michael Gove advised him not to do it as well. Gove was sort of worried, I'm going to have to back this thing and there's a danger we might win. I'd prefer he didn't. And Osborne didn't want him to do it. But yeah, they sort of, a lot of it's hand to mouth. And then he kills the Lib Dems, which means he has to call the referendum. And the second effect

of that was that he then became overconfident. You know, they'd won the 2015 election in a way that they didn't expect to. They'd won the Scottish referendum. Cameron and Osborne were convinced that they were winners, and that they were going to win this as well. And that perhaps meant they didn't really think terribly hard about how they might go about trying to win it, and trying to sort of appeal to key votes. You know, a lot of those leave-backing Labour seats, where David Cameron and George Osborne were completely ill-suited to winning those votes. They kept doing all this stuff about, you know, if you do this, the house prices will crash. Well, in Doncaster or the Tees Valley, people thought, well, that's fine,

my kids will be able to afford a house then. They ran the playbook of the 2015 election, surprisingly successful during the referendum, and it didn't work. Was it a very exciting time to do what you do? Did you see what was going to come? I mean I started as political editor of the Sunday Times in the spring of 2014. I'd spent the vast bulk of my career doing Blair versus Brown and Brown versus Blair and then I had a couple years in the States and doing Barack Obama's first election win and I thought that was the best job I was ever going to have and I'd been at the Sunday Times for about three or four months when we got that poll showing that Scotland might go independent. I think that was in the August of 2014. The whole of Westminster rushed

up there. And I don't think it's really been not crazy since. The 15 election was surprising. The referendum was surprising. The 2017 election was surprising. The whole of 2018 and 2019 were completely bananas. And then you get COVID. And this whole period has just been sort of politics on not so much steroids as crack cocaine, really. And when you're in Whitehall and Westminster, cruising around, politicians who spend their time slagging off the media, they all want to talk to you in private. Do you know everything that's going on? Or do people keep secrets even from you? Well, look, everybody I know who's done a journalistic job who goes into government says they see more in the first two hours across their desk than they have in a career

of 20 years. So we have to be kind of modest enough to admit that there's a huge amount that goes on we haven't got the vaguest notion about, and they can keep quite a lot of stuff secret. That said, bad stuff tends to leak. It's normally in somebody's interest to let you know about things, either because they're bigging themselves up, or they're doing somebody else in, or they disagree with the direction of travel. And really, you just have to sort of put yourself in a position where you become the person that they tell about that. If the first draft is straight, either you don't want to be slagged off, or presumably if your ego says, actually, I'd like my contribution to be recognised here.

Yeah, no, exactly. There were a lot of people, particularly around the referendum, when I got an email this week from someone who claims to have been the person that persuaded Dominic Cummings to talk about Turkey and provided me with the email from 2016 showing that he'd raised this issue. And the number of people who think they were the person who was absolutely pivotal to these events, I did point out that this was probably about eight years too late to send me this email,

but lots of people are still trying to do it. And actually, you can understand some of the civil war in the Conservative Party by people thinking they're really the ones responsible for Brexit. So there are still people on the kind of hardline wing of the ERG who'd been battling away at this stuff for 20 years, some of their advisors and aides who don't think Dominic Cummings or Vote Leave had anything to do with winning the referendum. It was all because they'd, you know, hacked away for 20 years. They'd done the John the Baptist bit.

Yeah, exactly. And they just will not acknowledge that, you know, a quite clever campaign was run that drummed up lots of votes. And those differences over who was responsible for it then become arguments about how you should do it and what it should look like. And they kind of fester and are still festering now. Rishi Sunak was a Brexiteer long before Boris Johnson, but he's seen culturally as a remainer by a lot of the people in the ERG.

And every time he's tried to do a deal, he did the Windsor Agreement and then a sort of update to get the DUP back into government in Northern Ireland. The hardline ERG wing would sort of say this is all terrible because these people don't really understand Brexit. But of course, when Boris Johnson did it, they kind of supported it because he was Boris Johnson. And we should say, Boris Johnson, tell me, the famous, you can, chapter and verse, is it true that Boris Johnson wrote two versions of his article, one suggesting we stay and the other suggesting we leave? Was he ever in two minds? Because he built his brand on Euroskepsin, didn't he? I mean, look, I was the one who revealed that he'd written it. And then if you open the first

book, All Out War, you will see the Remain article, which had not seen the light of day up until that point. How did you get the Remain article? Well, someone gave it to me, who gave it to me for the book. And Boris had no idea that we had it until we put it on the front page of the Sunday Times. I gave him some warning that it was coming, and Boris's reaction was to phone the editor of the Sunday Times and say, I understand you've printed an article with my byline. I think you need to pay me some money.

No. I think we offered a charitable donation, and I'm not sure that that was accepted by Boris. But, I mean, look, the fair account of this is that he... Yes, he was umming and ahhing, he was all over the place, but he had kind of invented the bendy banana school of British Euroscepticism. I think he thought it was intellectually consistent to back it. And it was certainly in his interest to do so. Whether or not he thought he was going to win is a slightly different matter. But if you read those articles, you'll find that you may not

be persuaded by his Leave article, but that was certainly his best effort at making the case. He dashed off the Remain article as an attempt to convince people in his own camp who were telling him to back Remain, like Ben Wallace, who went on to be the defence secretary, but was his kind of campaign manager in those days. And Wallace was a big Remainer, and he was kind of saying, this will all be a disaster, don't do it. So Boris wrote the Remain article to say, look at this shoddy, useless argument that I've put together for Remain. Now, people will come cold to it and find his Remain article more persuasive than his Leave one, but as far as Boris was concerned, it wasn't quite the sort of two equal forces. He wrote the Remain

article, as I see it, to try and convince himself that he'd made the right decision to back Leave. But was he still mucking about until the final hours, sending David Cameron text messages, changing his mind and sort of leaning one way or the other? Yes, of course he was, because that's how Boris Johnson makes decisions. Boris Johnson is a journalist. He was a columnist. And if you read his old columns, you'll see that there's almost an iterative process in the columns where he takes two sides of an argument and then sort of comes down in favour of the one that he prefers. And that's kind of how he did his Brexit decision.

And it's also how he ran his government. And unless you have people with you imposing order on that situation, it quickly becomes chaotic. And I think we all know what came next. You listen to Dan Snow's History. We're talking Brexit, Westminster, Whitehall, Government, with Tim Shipman more coming up. and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends,

murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Tim, what have you learned about the historical process, about how decisions are made, about how things happen? I mean, I think politics is inherently, it's kind of dead simple,

but it's also massively complicated. It's inherently chaotic. Even people who are well prepared, they go into one of those buildings, particularly number 10, and they have no conception of the speed at which events are coming at them. And I think a lot of people in politics don't really think about the craft of what they're doing. They're just surviving hour by hour, day by day. But to be effective at it, you need to have a kind of end goal or a target in mind. And that can come from your ideology.

It can come from focus groups. It can come from all sorts of places. But you need firm goals. You need then to have, either through yourself or through others, clever tactical means of getting there. And then you need the ability to get there and the communication skills to persuade other people to go with you be that your MPs or the public and the number of politicians who have all three of those things is

vanishingly small and if you look at the last four or five prime ministers at various points some of them have had none of those or one of them and that's not enough to get through what has been a particularly chaotic period but I think the main reflection kind of writing journalism and then a kind of slightly posher first draft of history in a book is that just the sheer weirdness of the historical process I've spent years most of my reading life reading history books and reading about what people did in the past. And I wonder how people have been able to construct this stuff. Yes, there used to be lots more on paper. And now we're kind of in a world where you go to the COVID inquiry and there's all these WhatsApp messages, which everyone fixates on, but they're only part

of the story as well. And the sheer weirdness of events. So, for example, the big moment where Theresa May finally gets a Brexit policy, the famous Chequers dinner, that finished at about half 10, 11 o'clock on a Friday night, and I was writing for the Sunday Times. So I then hit the phones. The second it was clear, they'd all come out and got their phones back. Most of them then phoned their special advisors, some of whom then phoned around. I think I spoke to 11 members of the cabinet that night, about half of whom I contacted and about half of whom wanted to contact me to get their side of events across. The totally differing accounts of what was important that night, now obviously everyone

has slightly different emphasis, they're always going to emphasise their bit and the bit that they think where they made their biggest contribution, or the thing that they thought was funny, or the thing that they thought was mildly shocking. Lots of people remember Boris Johnson raising a glass to Theresa May, you know, two days before he resigned. So that was all fascinating. But then about three months later, someone leaked me the entire minutes of the meeting. It was one of those proper brown envelope jobs back in the days before everyone leaked everything on WhatsApp or Signal. We literally went to a cafe and got handed a sheaf of papers, which was great fun. But that, again, is completely different from a lot of the accounts that you saw that night. The meeting where Liz Truss decides to ditch the 45p tax

thing in her mini budget, I've spoken to probably eight people who were in the room when that decision was made. I remember having conversations with eight people who were in the room when that decision was made. I remember having conversations with some of them saying, well, I think this happened, and then that happened. And people would say, no, no, no, no, I don't remember it like that at all. And what they didn't know was I actually had a tape of the proceedings. And I knew exactly what had been said by who and when and in what order. And again, even then, literally a few hours afterwards in my initial inquiries and then sort of a bit later three or four months down the line opinions memories differ really dramatically and

it's been quite an interesting exercise in trying to work out how you do history and how you reconstruct things and does that make it important just because you've got the whatsapp messages now that when you go back and read history books, do you think this is not really worth the paper it's written on? No, I don't think that because I think, you know, as we've been discussing, I think history comes from a lot of different strands and what happened in the room may be the most important thing. It's certainly the thing that tends to interest me

and the thing that I have an ability to write about because my job gives me that kind of access. But is that more important than the 2008 crash in explaining why Brexit happened? I remember Andrew Marr reviewing my first book. It was reasonably complimentary about it, but he said, I don't think any of this is why we had Brexit. I think it's because we had a massive recession and we didn't deal with it properly. So the lingerie and the sort of Marxian view of history that it's individuals are bouncing around like flotsam on the big waves of history, there's something to be said for that.

I do think in moments of kind of massive political stress that the activities of a small number of people are more inclined over the last eight years, the sort of great man theory, where a bunch of people who aren't really great at all have affected things disproportionately. I think you can explain most of what's happened with the decisions and impulses of about a dozen people probably. So that's interesting. The more you've thought about this and watched, the more you're convinced individuals do matter. Yeah, I think they do. And I think they did in this. And David Cameron's decisions mattered. Boris Johnson certainly did. I think Michael Gove, you know, the most intriguing what if in all of this is there is a logic to saying

Brexit was our response to the fallout from 2008, just as lots of countries had slightly different responses to it. There was then a sort of logic to the people who brought that about then taking over in 2016 and Boris Johnson becoming prime minister, and it would have been a different mess if he'd been in charge. But arguably, it would have been a shorter one and a cleaner one. And Michael Gove's decision to do in Boris Johnson in 2016, I think is as important in terms of not necessarily in terms of making Brexit happen, but in terms of deciding the course it then took. I think you're hard pushed to say that a combination of Johnson, Gove and Cummings haven't kind of made as much difference

as those big sort of broad, thrusty kind of trends. Right, yeah, because let's get back on the timeline just quickly here. We got Michael Gove after the referendum, which Leave wins. He bullets Boris Johnson. So you get this strange situation of Theresa May, Prime Minister,

who'd been the sort of Prime Minister in waiting in some ways. Well, she was certainly a live contender for it, possibly. Live contender. But she'd been a remainer. So you had this very odd situation of this unconvincing Brexiteer trying to steer the process. Yeah, and that created a kind of systemic situation where she then had to go more hardline Brexiteer to convince the Brexiteers that she was going to sort of uphold the mission that she'd given herself to deliver Brexit. But she also had a mission to try and deal with what she called the burning injustices, which were her version of explaining why it had happened in the first place. And because she failed to deal with Brexit itself, she was unable then to have the

time and space to deal with the causes of it. But she had to go much harder at the start than I think Boris Johnson would have felt the need to do. And then she began with a position that she then just spent 18 months retreating from. There's an argument that Boris Johnson would have kind of had a period of reaching out to the Remainers. He would have come up with some botched fudge of a Brexit. But he would have been able to say to the viewers... He could have done any Brexit he wanted. He could have said, this is Brexit. And I remember having... EU flag comes down, there you go. What do you want? It's Brexit. I remember having a dinner with some of the sort of ERG people at the party conference in

2019. And there was still a mingling about what his deal might look like. And this conversation went around the table for hours and hours with everybody pontificating. And at the end, I sort of was asked to contribute. And I said, Steve Baker and Mark François were both there. And I said, frankly, whatever Boris Johnson says is Brexit, you guys are going to have to swallow. And François sort of went, yeah, you're probably right, actually. And he could have done that in 2017 instead of 2019, potentially. So I think that's sort of difficult. And as a consequence of it stringing out everybody got radicalized at the beginning there were people on the remain side who were happy to back us off brexit by the end they wanted a referendum and revoke everyone was hot and on and at the beginning

even some of the sort of middling to hard brexiteers were prepared to accept something more modern by the end a lot of them just wanted deal, which is a kind of slightly bizarre deranged position. You're right, that is a really extended nature of that. Because yes, some Brexiters would have had a Norway... If Boris said Norway option done and dusted by three months, people would have probably gone with that, right? Yeah, I think he would have been able to sell that, whether that's where he would have ended up.

But even if he'd ended up where he ultimately ended up, which was a sort of Canada deal with knobs on, at least we would have done it three years quicker and we would have been able to get on with ironing out some of the problems with that and all the rest of it. And there'd have been less, you know, Michael Howards on the telly talking about potential war with Spain. Well, quite.

You're right, the nature of the conversation going on and on inevitably produces kind of ripples. Basically, 60% of people in Westminster couldn't see the wood for the trees. They weren't prepared to compromise in any way. And a lot of people, in all seriousness, got so emotionally engaged. You know, people had a lot of serious mental health issues around it. People were depressed in a proper, serious, clinical way. It was a brutal, brutal time. Book three,

No Way Out, begins with Bismarck's famous quote about politics being the art of the possible. And it seemed to me that summed things up quite nicely. And I thought, I'll Google this. I better get the wording right and all the rest of it. And I didn't know, despite writing about politics for 20 years and reading history books for twice as long as that, that that quote actually goes on a bit. It's politics is the art of the possible, the attainable, the art of the second best. And Bismarck is seen as this totally uncompromising blood and iron figure who kind of rams through German independence through sheer force of will and arms, frankly. And even he's saying, you need to be prepared to take second best. And the DUP, the ERG, the six different blends of what I call the resistance, you know, the people who wanted a referendum, the people who wanted a customs union, the people who wanted the Norway option,

none of them were prepared to vote for the other things that they might have tolerated. And we twice had that ridiculous process of indicative votes. The first time there were eight options, of which I think six were versions of soft Brexit. The second time there were four, of which three were versions of soft Brexit. There was a majority in the House of Commons for a soft Brexit. And on each occasion, every single option was voted down

because people simply couldn't countenance. You know, you had people like Oliver Letwin say, well, I voted for all the options. And almost nobody else did anything like that. And nobody knew their Bismarck. People get upset to think that there's people running around giving themselves mental health crises. It's transactional, it's gossipy, it's kind of college union stuff. Is there any other way of doing politics? union stuff. Is there any other way of doing politics? kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit,

wherever you get your podcasts. I mean, that's a very good question. It's always been a bit like that. I mean, my argument, I guess, is that leadership matters. And there's a lot of people in that swirl. Yes, people are in for themselves or they're out to stop other people. And yes, you need some ideology to give you a sort of natural spine of views that you can fall back on at moments of crisis.

But what really matters is planting your flag somewhere and trying to get people to salute in Parliament and in the public. And I think people just want ultimately to be led by someone who looks like they know what they're doing. The British public is prepared to tolerate a spectrum of views from the soft left through to the sort of relatively middling to hard right at various points in the last 200 years. And they're prepared to be guided there. And Brexit is a classic example of where people, including in Westminster, didn't really know what it meant. And had they been told that this is what it meant, a lot of people would have just gone with that. And the fact that as a political class, they kind of failed to define it for two or three years. Parliament, which is supposed to be the way that you mediate all these debates, was then just deadlocked.

And the Remainers tried to sort of reform the rules of the House of Commons to try and swing things their way. And then Cummings and Johnson used prorogation and all sorts of other stuff to try and swing things their way. And ultimately, in the end, they kind of got there and resolved the situation in a way that means it's dropped back down the list of things that we all have to care about on a weekly basis. But I think unless you've got someone saying, over here, this is the way, it gets problematic. And the pressures on politicians are worse than they used to be. Social media's made everything more virulent and unpleasant. And to a degree, I think we're coming through that a little bit. I see with both in number 10 and in the sort of Keir Starmer operation, a willingness to kind of say, actually, we don't care what people say on Twitter. We're going to do something this way.

That's how we're going to do it. And enough people will salute if we do. And that is, I think, a positive development. It will certainly keep people slightly saner if they're not worrying about what's going on on Twitter or X all the time. But, yeah, there's a lot of pressures on people people and some politicians are ill-suited to that. Theresa May is a very serious and admirable woman in lots of ways, but she kind of categorically refuses to accept that any kind of salesman job is any part of being a senior politician. And that seems to me to the borderline bananas in the current day and age.

Even Margaret Thatcher changed her hair and her voice because Gordon Rees told her to, so she could be sort of appealed. You know, and she's not someone who's generally considered someone who was bowing to the media. And people say, oh, Maggie Thatcher would have been hopeless at the moment with all these interviews and all this social media stuff. But unless you kind of cut your cloth a little bit to that, it's difficult. You know, I think what I've concluded after all of this is that leadership matters and being good at politics actually matters for politicians. And that's how you deliver all the great things that you care about

and the missions that you have in life. And you actually have to be quite good at the game as well. Do any politicians still refuse to talk to you or do they all squeal eventually? There's one or two who think I'm too obsessed with personalities or various people still object to something that you wrote 10 years ago that you've long since forgotten about, but they haven't. But the vast majority of people kind of see the benefits of getting their side of things across. And not everybody will speak at the time. I tend not to be too intrusive. I tend to just drop people a line on WhatsApp and say, you know, it'd be useful this week to have a conversation. And probably the hit rates, 50, 60% of people will call back or others will say it's just a bit difficult at the moment. I think there's a sweet spot about three months after they leave power where they can still remember what happened, but they kind of open up about things that they weren't prepared to tell you at the time. And that's kind of, that's quite nice when that happens.

Once people are liberated, they'll normally talk. And a lot of them actually find it quite cathartic because they've had these sort of hugely intense personal experiences in the room watching all this stuff unfold. A lot of it sort of against their will and traumatically. And they'll go home and a lot of the time when they go home they just want to get away from it or their spouse is quite rightly someone who does something different if people have those sort of interpolitical relationships it's not often good

for the soul and that the spouse doesn't want to talk about the intricacies of what happened in some meeting or even particularly care about the detail. Whereas I kind of understand what's been going on, can empathise and then they unburden themselves. And a lot of these interviews are something akin to therapy for a lot of people. You're in loco of the spouse. A little bit. Tim, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Absolute pleasure. you