The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart)

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

Why do the wrong people become MPs? How can we transform Westminster into a modern day workplace? How did Simon Hart’s time at The Countryside Alliance inform his politics?  Rory and Alastair are joined by the ex-Tory Chief Whip, Simon Hart, to discuss all this and more.  Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics  Twitter: @RestIsPolitics  Email: [e-mail] Video Editor: Josh Smith  Assistant Producer: Alice Horrell Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to the restispolities.com. That's the restis politics. Welcome to the restless politics leading with me, Roy Stewart. And with me, Alistaird, Cammell. And with us very patiently sitting in the studio, we struggle with amazing technical problems. Alistair and Simon in person and me down the line. And Simon Hart has just published a book, which I think is probably the first book ever written by a Chief Whip, giving us the real inside line and the diaries of somebody who was right at the front line. Quick introduction to Simon. Simon is somebody who joined Parliament with me in 2010. It's a conservative MP. He came from background of being the chief executive of the countryside alliance. And he was somebody who was, I think, generally very, very much liked.

trusted. But it wasn't, I think, and he can correct me on this, until 2019 that he became a minister under Boris Johnson, at which point he rose very, very rapidly, Secretary of State for Wales, and then the centre of the book, which was as Chief Whip under Rishi Sunak, at this amazing moment when the Conservative Party went into one of its periodical periods of total implosion leading up to the disastrous defeat in the election. So, Simon, thank you. Thank you for being our first chief whip on the show. Thank you. Well, Roy's triggered me in his introduction to maybe kick off with some of your past occupations. And I wonder what was it like for you when we were in power under Tony Blair, when it strikes to me that two of the things that we were doing were probably driving you to absolute distraction. One was banning fox hunting.

and the other one was trying to get rid of the wretched hereditary peers. You're still in favour of killing live animals for fun, and you're also still in favour of keeping these wretched heredatories. Well, 20-something years old, Alastair, and the debate is still raging, so I don't know whether that speaks volumes from my effectiveness or your ineffectiveness at the time, but yeah, it is weird, isn't it? And when you look at what else are going on the world, I have to ask myself, why are these things even still really on the political radar?

I mean, I remember thinking back in 1997 or 98 when it was, surely this new, vibrant, lively Labour government, that's how it was described to us by you, I think, had a greater set of priorities. So I thought it was a bit of a waste. I thought it was a bit of a distraction then. And I think it's a bit of a distraction now. Including the peers. But you still think there's a place for the peerage peers. It's a difficult argument and don't get me wrong. But I think of all the things that the current government and your government should have been doing, actually, is it the thing which people, when I.

you know, the classic cliche here when I was knocking on tours of five general elections, I was and four weeks, the number of people who said, you know what, you know, the thing which is really troubling me the most about my future and my life, my income, my standard of living is the existence of 92 hereditary Pits, was never once ever racist. What about the state of democracy, though? Whether it was in that description or mine, it didn't actually ever come up. Nobody said, I'm worried about the state of democracy. That was never, that was never an issue.

I think I'm worried about it for lots of reasons. that's probably not one of them. Hold on a bit. The title of your book is ungovernable. Yeah, that's a state of politics. But it does not refer either to the House of Lords, by the way, who've risen above all of that, or whether the hunting ban 2003, whatever it was, was effective.

But the one thing I suppose I should say is that, you've kept me occupied for 20 years plus, so I suppose I should be grateful for that. So this has been a sort of wonderful introduction to a sort of micro bit of British politics, for everybody. I've never seen Alistair so animated. Four times he pointed to me to ask the right next question and four times he couldn't resist coming in again. And we realize in the end that somehow, you know, these two people I'm looking at who broadly speaking share the same politics in a huge

number of things. You've voted Renéin. You know, Simon comes from the left to the conservative party. You come from the right of the Labour Party. And so the thing that really divides you in the end is basically culture, isn't it? No. It's that you don't like. like regulatory peers. You don't like private schools and you don't like fox hunting. And it's all about class, isn't it, Addiston? No, but you see, Simon was the boss of the countryside alliance. And you do this, Roy, let me say. You go on about, I'm a conservative because I believe in the beautiful landscapes. I love the countryside. My dad was a farmer. My whole family is from an agricultural background. I just don't like people dressing up in silly clothes, going

around, blowing Tallyho hordes and killing animals. Absolutely true. Because Alice, it triggered him back in 1997. Alasdek's extraordinary effect like sort of electrodes being attached to it. There are lots of things we should get excited and agitated about and feel strongly about. But it's always been a sort of weirdly totemic issue for LAPA. It was never a totem. I wish the whole thing had never happened. I never tried to conceal that.

But for Alice and I, I think John Prescott was in your gang at the time. Tony, though, you know, you're much made. Tony was much more sanguine. about the whole thing. And I think when he wrote his diary, he said it was one of the biggest mistakes he ever made. So I suspect one of those things in another 10 years will still be having the same argument. And 99.9% of the population who might be listening will be saying, what on earth are you going on about? Can I sort of move it on from fox hunting to another thing, which is dear to your heart, Simon. And that is rural areas, farmers, upland farmers, small

farms and my sense that Britain is moving away from them, that politics is moving away from them, the NFU is moving away from them, the National Farmers Union, the environmental movements moving away from them, the government's moving away from them. Can you try to explain what that issue is, what she thinks happening in the world? Why something, and the Tory party moved away from that. That's another thing. Sorry, I'm not trying to land this on Alistair. Even when I was the Deferam Minister, I could feel that the Tory party was moving away from the views of people like you or me or Richard Bennion about the importance of small farms and upland farming. What do you think is going on in the world? I think one of the things which has been at the heart of this

is that it has been tempting for politicians to try and sort of subdivide rural Britain into it. You know, you're either a farmer or you're a rural business or you're somebody who supports hunting, whatever it might be, in each of these categories they've tried to separate. And I think they've made a fundamental mistake in this. And the fundamental mistake is that actually all of these things are deeply intertwined. And they are very much part of a sort of DNA makeup. And not necessarily of people who just live in the country. I think, again, the idea that these passionately held beliefs about farming or country

or countries, whatever it might be, only exist in rural areas. There are people who identify with and sympathize with that dotted around every conurbation, every city, every village, every town in the UK. So it's a much more fluid population that we think. And I just think it's a mistake. You know, people talk about farming as if farming is the only thing or they talk about landscape management as if that's the only. All of these things are deeply intertwined. What's the big difference do you think between the US and Britain? I mean, it would be completely unimaginable, I guess, in most of the...

mid-Republican states to think about banning, shooting, hunting. I mean, these things are very, very central to American rural identity. And yet they're less so in Britain. What's the big difference there? I think there might be a really simple geographical explanation of that, which is simply one of scale. Britain is a very, very dense, compared to the areas you're talking about, is very densely populated. I sometimes used to ask myself, is there such a thing really as rural Britain in terms of

population anymore. And the answer is less and less because, as every village, every town is within an hour or two of a major city of a conurbation. So COVID probably accelerated the pace at which people were moving about, working from home, living in rural areas. First generation rural residence is something which I think has been transformed recently. And I just think, you know, whether it's Australia, whether it's America, I just think scale makes a big difference to that because there is less interaction between rural and urban in some of those large countries and there isn't ours. Now, I'm just recovering from the fact that Rory thinks that's the first time I've ever been animated. So I wonder if I can go to another subject that was in his introduction about you, which is Brexit.

So you were, like me and Rory, voted Remain, but then you went down a very different path, sort of to both of us, but I think especially to me who felt that this was going to be such a disaster that we had to do what we could. democratically to reverse it. But why were you so convinced that this had to happen even at the cost of it doing fundamental damage to the country? I think going back to 2016, when all of the, and this had been brewing for some time, clearly, and I think it was entirely legitimate that the question of the membership of the European Union should be put to a public vote. I can completely understand why David Cameron was persuaded of that. For me at the time, and I remember without any great sense of genius foresight, I remember thinking if this is going to be a referendum, I was a big question whether that was right or not, but we'd gone into it on the back of referendums, I suppose that was logical.

I remember thinking that the one thing we have to do in a democratic society is observe the democratic will of the people to sound rather pompous. We can have an argument whether the people got it right or not. I used to find that deeply condescending. I think the idea that there was a section of society represented by some, which is it was of a higher intellectual plane who knew what was happening and therefore, you know, could speak on behalf of the 55 percent as it turned out who actually wanted to leave the EU because they'd missed it. They'd been conned. They'd been led down the garden path by Boris Johnson or whoever it might be. I thought I was a very condescending argument.

So I said right at the outset, if this happens, we have to go with it. No, my voting position, it wasn't really based on a very deep knowledge of what the economic consequences might be, but it was based on the fact that I knew that almost every single thing we did in our lives, every single day, of every week, of every year was deeply intertwined with Europe, either legally, socially, economically or politically, and therefore unpicking that was probably going to be to the Conservative Party's very great discomfort for a very long time. So let's just come back for a second and then we'll whip forward to you as chief whip and into the horrors of the parliamentary management.

But tell us a little bit about your childhood. How did you come to be who you are? You look like, for those who aren't viewing you, a sort of bucolic conservative member of parliament from central casting. Thank you, Laurie. Very much. But was that your childhood? Was that how you grew up?

Before I answered, I should say, I was Alistair's intro, you know, portrays me as this sort of right wing head banging, fox hunting Tory. And yet, within a few short years, I was then described by the Express as the wokeest Chief Whip ever. So I don't know whether I've made the transition or the rest of the world did. But anyway, but thank you for the, thank you for painting that picture.

I've definitely about my accuracy against the Express any day in a week. Thank you for painting the picture. I'll be like that, Rory. I mean, almost everything that happened in my life, happened by accident. I ended up in the countryside alliance job. You know, love it though I did, completely by accident. I was covering for somebody's maternity leave up in the Midlands for a bit.

And then I took over as the chief press officer because the one before me had got sacked for some reason. And they suddenly said, are you busy? So I said, well, not particularly. They said, right, you know, do this job for six weeks. And I ended up, I think, seven years into it. And then I got to the end of that in 2000 and about 2007, 2008. It was literally a case of where the hell do I go from here? Nobody in my family had ever been into politics. sort of followed the sort of party. What did they do, Simon? What do you, what do your parents do?

Yet more common ground between Alastra and me, actually, because my mother side of family were, my mother was born in India. She was a daughter of a brigadier, a royal engineer in based in India. So that was her background. But my father came from her farming family based in Wiltshire. So I, you know, farming was never very far away from the horizon. We very much saw ourselves as, you know, rural people. And politics wasn't really, you know, wasn't something we ever talked about.

I mean, I don't think I joined a political party until I was in my in my 30s. When did you know you were basically a Tory? Later than you might think. Had you ever voted anything else? I think probably quite early on I didn't vote much at all. I think I'd probably thought of myself the story. I think I was one of those people I'd sort of hold my hands up in, you know, in shame now, who thought that I come over who said this, but it definitely wasn't me that, you know,

I tried socialism and I tried capitalism, but capitalism was more fun. And I think I was sort of in that category. I just thought that, you know, to be a Labour member of Parliament required you to be almost permanently angry about everything all the time. And to be a Conservative Member of Parliament meant actually you could have a sense of humour and, you know, you could go to the bar at half or six at night and nobody would have a go at you. So I think my judgment, my judgment was probably a very, very cheap idea. You people just deal in caricatures which suit your narrative, don't you? I mean, isn't that the problem facing all of us? I mean, I think we could say that

other political parties meet that challenge equally. And comedy writers over the years have always depicted, and it's always been quite annoying. Labour MPs and Labour politicians and conservative politicians and now probably reform and Lib Dems and with a certain, there's a sort of certain character when you see them appear on screen, you think, ah, that's the Lib Dem, you know.

And it's easy and cheap and lazy, and it's not always accurate, actually. I don't know whether it's right than no chief weapon has ever written a book. I'm sure Bob Mellish wrote a book, but just we talk a lot on our podcast about whips and we two kill a question from people saying, you know, what is a whip? What do they do? So just for our listeners who aren't necessarily deep into Westminster in the way that we three had, what does the chief whip do? I think a lot of it is quite mundane. I mean, it is, you know, the single sentence that encapsulate the role of the whips office is to get the business of the

government done. So it is our job to make sure that legislation, gets from, you know, the starting point to the finishing point in both the commons and the Lords. That's really what we're about delivering them, you know, the manifesto commitment plus, plus, plus. There's a whole load of other stuff. And some of it's HR, more of which are non-being. That's quite a minefield these days.

It's also unbelievably mundane stuff. The Whips Office is responsible for allocating offices around the parliamentary estate. It's responsible for providing advice to people who might be on a particular, elect committee or something like that. It does leave of absence. So if somebody wants to, they need a hospital appointment or they need to go to their kid's school play or whatever it might be, you know, that application for absence, if you like, goes through the WIPS office. And then there's the most sort of publicly visible bit of wippery was sort of courtesy of Michael Dobbs and Houts of Cards and, you know, that sort of application of discipline. I think that's changed. I mean,

there is a, obviously there was a role where the, where the WIPS office was always charged with getting as many people as possible to vote in support of the government and to try to use mainly legitimate means of ensuring that that was the case. Well, I felt, and it was actually a reflection. I would be deferential for the reason that I entirely believe it about Rishi here. Rishy was very keen when he and I started on the same day. he wanted the Whips Office to reflect a modern workplace as far as it was possible to do in somewhere like the Palace of Westminster. But he wanted us to be a modern and welcoming and empathetic workplace. And so the idea of sort of dangling people over the Thames and forth and the vote, you know, that wasn't our style. Yeah.

So let's just get to that. So just to again explain, the complaint that often came from colleagues when I was in Parliament is that there was no proper. HR or personnel function. There was nobody really, if you were, if you were a sort of super confident kind of Boris Johnson type, you didn't worry about this stuff. But if you were slightly shy, you were new to parliament, there was nobody really to give you career advice, to give you support, very little support on mental health, very little support on where things go wrong. And I remember particularly a couple of the more senior women really saying this is a massive. problem in Parliament. A lot of these people are very, very damaged, strange, under a huge amount of pressure. And the problem, I think, is the obvious people to turn to was the Wips Office,

which is what you're saying, and that's what Rishi Sunak obviously wanted you to be. But part of the problem is there's a little bit of a conflict of interest. I mean, in a normal business, you separate the HR department from the kind of performance management driving bit. In your case, You're both trying to get loyalty, drive people into vote, which might make it quite difficult for someone to come in to see you and say, I've got a drink problem, I had a nervous breakdown. I can't bear this party anymore. I think this is a huge problem. And it used to worry me daily that we were being asked to opine on HR matters for which we were willing and we wanted to do what we could do to help. put, we weren't necessarily, you know, but we were a bunch of MPs. We weren't necessarily HR experts or financial advisors or drug counselors or all of the various

other things which came our way. And you're right that what used to trouble me was that, you know, people might be elected and particularly in the landslide election where people get in who really weren't expecting to sort of pay per candidate type things. And they come in and instantly, it's often quite young, often then suddenly given quite a lot money by way of a budget to hire staff to run an office in the constituency and in Parliament. And they're basically told, right, you're on your own pal. Get on with it. Don't screw up. Because if you do, we'll be all over you like a rash. And then, oh, by the way, in a couple of

years, the Prime Minister might give you a ring and offer you a job in a department, multi-million pound budget, a whole array of civil servants at your disposal. And, oh, you're doing the media around tomorrow morning. So you better be in Horsbury Road at 5.30. And again, you know, somebody will tell you what to say, but don't screw up. I think that that put an extraordinary amount of pressure on some really good people. And I think a lot of the stuff I talk about in the book where the wheels fell off are not because people were malevolent or trying to get one over on the voter. It's because there wasn't sufficient backup and support to help them. I mean, most people who go into a ministry job and job as a minister, as you recall, Rory, don't have a day's training, not even an hour.

You're just expected to pick it up. we have the nerve to complain, oh, well, you know, the civil service rule the roost. Well, I'm sort of not surprised. We're putting people into these roles. And then what is the civil service expected to do other than to try and make sure that, you know, the difficulties that come with that are compensated for? And I just feel that we probably didn't quite provide the support and the mentoring and the training after people had been appointed. And I think that contributed to some of the, you know, the more colourful crashes that people were involved with further along the way. So the title of it is ungovernable.

And I get the feeling both reading it and listening and talking to you earlier when we're trying to sort out the tech, that you have a worry that politics is kind of attracting the wrong sorts of people, a bit of a mess. And I think that's possibly one of the motivations if you do in the book. And yet I wonder if somebody who reads it Who doesn't know about apologies reads it and thinks Jesus, I don't have anything to do with that I think that is a risk

That is a risk It is a legitimate I mean there's not many workplaces where people crap on other people's heads No That's right But don't forget I mean

Come on always be so difficult here But it wasn't It was a big It's a small comfort I suppose in the overall Sense of things But ungovernable was I'm deliberately provocative

Because I think a lot of people Thought well I must be talking about Tory party. Actually, I was talking about Parliament. I was talking about, as I said, look at, you know, Kirstama comes in last year on the back of a huge majority. And already, and I have such, so much sympathy for his chief whip, Alan Campbell, there are scandals and he's had to suspend the whip from people. And then, you know, Mike Amesbridge triggered a by-election. These things are not unique to one party or another. And I think they're a, they're a similar. That is about the people. But it is. And so, you know, By shining a light on it, which I've done, knowing that it'll be uncomfortable reading for some,

I think in some ways, unless we do that, we're never going to correct these secrets. We're just going to continue to bury them. And I think that if we are to make Parliament an attractive place where anybody can think, do you know what, you know, I've just retired from my business, so I've just done 30 years in the NHS or in the Army, whatever it is. I'd love to go and do that. I think there's a lot of disincentives for people who are looking. People have been saying to me for years, God, I wouldn't do that job for all the tin time. So unless we address this, unless we give people confidence, actually it is a good place to work.

It is an honourable profession. And by the way, there is support. So if things do get difficult, there's somebody to turn to. And it might not be a whip. I personally think it probably shouldn't be a whip. I think there's parliamentary authorities are miles better than it used to be. And unless we do that, that is a very real problem. So I know on the one hand, people will be thinking, bloody hell, this is worse than I thought.

but actually I think that if this even turns the dial a little bit in favor of a more contemporary workplace, that'll be a good thing. I mean, I feel that the likelihood is it's not going to shift. And I just wanted to sort of understand why. I mean, because to some extent, I was trying to do the same thing as you. I was trying to also describe how many of the things in Parliament were just far worse than I ever could have imagined. And I sort of hoped that this would help get a movement going to try. try to improve these things. Just putting on a slightly cynical hat for a moment, how would you explain to someone why change is difficult and what sort of things are likely to mean that even in

10, 15 years' time, many of the fundamental things haven't been fixed? I used to think sometimes with the changes that we occasionally talked about in Parliament, whether it was sort of sitting hours or the way in which the sort of the workload is set out by the party managers and by the by the web's office was not very conducive to progress. And I think we all thought there was some, like some magic pill, there was some magic reform that we could instigated anyone, which would transform everything. It's much more evolutionary than that. If you actually look at the changes which have been made over 10 years, say if we take the period of time, Rory that you and I were involved, there are numerous small changes which have actually made things better. Whether they've

kept up with the pace of change in the rest of the workplaces of the UK, complicated by COVID is a different point. I still think there's a long way to go. I would add to that, I mean, for example, the current government, the last time that Labor was in office, social media did not exist. It was not something that anybody had to contend with. Now it is. And I think that that has made some of these changes all the more urgent, because some of the pressures which are being imposed on MPs, as a result of a very different media focus and relentless media focus. And there was, you know, even when we started. Just to go back to the role of Chief WIP and the kind of personal management stuff,

so if you take something like Rory, as he said, came in with you, now most people would look at Rory and think, well, he's quite a talented guy and he's a very bright and he's a good speaker and he writes well. And he's a co-presenter of the most successful podcast in the UK. He's obviously got enormous talent. Why did it take somebody like Rory so long to get his foot on the ministerial ladder? Is that about who you know and what you know? I think the reasons that you read out were probably better.

Too clever. That's a good enough. Too clever by half. Yeah, exactly. One of the most fascinating things about the last few years for me was seeing how reshuffles work or don't work. And the multiple. Well, you've been there a million times. I mean, because they're not very simple.

It's like having a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces. And you always ended up with more pieces than you had spaces for on the table. And you had all sorts of other considerations other than talent, geographical spread, diversity. There were people who were perfectly qualified but didn't want to do a job, who were not perfectly qualified who did want to do a job. Nothing was simple about a reshuffling. There's a consequence of which you always ended up in a suboptimal position. And there were some brilliant people who didn't get on the ladder.

And there were some less brilliant people who did. I suspect that's possibly the same in other workplaces too. I think it's more visible than ours. Is it quite the same, though? I mean, would you have ended up with Lestrusses as the CEO of a major company? Absolutely. Would you end up as Swellabravman as the sort of number two on the top board? I think that there is, there's a missing group of the various rather, you know, probably,

well, thought out solutions that I've come up with. I do think that the way in which we select, all parties this is, by the way, the candidate selection could be, I suspect, improved in that I think we should spend more time going out looking for people and less time relying on people coming to knock on our door and saying, by the way, please, may I join your party and become an MP? Commendable, though that is, we get some brilliant people. But I do think we're probably not maximising the gene pool as much as we should. We're not going out and saying, you would be a brilliant member of parliament. Have you even thought about it? I don't think we do that at all. Although, I mean, it's a bit more complicated, isn't it?

Because Liz Truss was famously on the A list. She was sort of targeted by David Cameron to be part of the new talent. She was the first person from your and my, you know, you didn't get and become minister for nine years. She was in the cabinet within, I think, four and a minister within two. What do you think is going on in David Cameron's head, the chief whip's head when he's massively accelerating somebody like Liz Truss up to the ranks who, in my experience, frankly, was. totally unsuited to be any form of cabinet minister, looking back at it, I've said this to a few people who came my way and said, you know, why'd they been overlooked?

And I remember saying, you know, my phone didn't ring for nine years. You know, count yourself lucky. Because maybe politics is unique or in this regard, that you have got multiple considerations when you were forming a government. And I remember when we did ask when Rishi was elected in the November of 22, I think of course, that I thought he was correct at the time. Don't forget we were just coming off the back of that difficult 49 days with Liz. And Rishi did want to make sure that the government that he put together consisted of a broad range of people.

Some who'd supported Boris, some would supported Liz, some would supported other leadership candidates, as well as all of the other criteria that you're trying to include when you form any government. Someone, can you jump in there? On your jigsaw, when you were doing that particular jigsaw, surely some of you must have said to him, listen, Rishie, Sir Lerbramman is bad news added to which she's just been done for breach of a ministerial code. Are you really going to put her back in a position of power? That was crazy. So default to a sort of very defensive position here. But there were always extensive going. In fact, they seem to go on forever sometimes with the advisory team around Rishi. He didn't get involved, as I suspect, in your day, you know, Tony probably didn't either until quite a long time down the line there. No, Tony always took an interest. But we were always on the second or third incarnation by the time we got, you know, dragging where she upstairs into the room.

But what would have been the thinking behind putting her into such a big job? There were numerous considerations around how the government should look overall. And we were very keen, I can't remember the precise deal, but we were very key to make sure that nobody could say, at the time that particular sections of the party, you know, had been cast aside, you know, even if people might have raised an eyebrow, we need to be able to say, no, we were above that kind of thing. We have, this is the broadest possible church we can put together. You know, sometimes those things work really well.

Sometimes. Sometimes they don't. So you're going to have to tell me the truth here, Simon. Three women were promoting. Wait a minute. Three women were promoted in a particular reshuffle. Michelle Donnellon, Lucy Fraser and Kemi Badenock, one of them, Rishi Sunak, who appointed them to the cabinet, one of them he described as fucking useless. Now, which one was it? Well, I'm going to have to give you. I'm going to have to. Is she currently in the lead of the party? I'm going to have to give you the same answers I've given everybody else. My big regrets of this is by trying to be clever by anonymising the story and just making it all a bit opaque. All I've done is excite people like you into speculation. I say literally what I've said in about 10,

previous occasions. If you think or want it to be Kemi, you're wrong. It definitely wasn't. Could I have worded it more carefully? I think you're barking up the wrong tree with such a limited number of suggestions anyway, but it's not who you would love me to say that it is. I might even believe you. Okay, quick break and then back for more. Hello, I'm William Durhampool. And I'm Anita Arndon, and we are the host of Empire, also from Goalhanger. And we're here to tell you about our recent miniseries that we've just done on The Troubles. In it, we try to get to the very heart of the violent conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted from the 1960s all the way up to 1998.

It's something that we both lived through and remember from our childhoods, but younger listeners may not know anything about it. And it's the time when there was division along religious and political lines. Neighbors turned against each other. Residential city streets became battlegrounds. Thousands were killed and the IRA bombed London. It seemed as if an end was out of reach, but in 1998, a peace process finally brought those 30 years of violence to an end.

But the memory of the troubles is still present, not only within Northern Irish communities who experienced it, but in international relations and political approaches to peace. And new audiences are starting to understand this national trauma through films like Belfast and kneecap and TV shows like Derry Girls. In fact, our guest on the miniseries is Patrick

Radden Keith. Now, he's the author of the non-fiction book that inspired the hit TV drama Say Nothing. It's one of my favorite books. It's, I think, the kind of ink-co blood for our generation, extraordinary work of non-fiction. To hear the full series, just search

Empire wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers, The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, cancer research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lung Vax, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer. It builds on TracerX, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer

cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs. Lung Vax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying 40 cells before cancer develops. So it's not treatment, but preventative with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about cancer research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancer research UK.org forward slash the rest is science. Hi everybody, it's Dominic Zavarach here from The Rest is History.

Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics, when Rory was away, and I was filling in and enjoying Alastair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Restis History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise. People are arguing about Europe. The government has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is

really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues. And people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alastair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson

and we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts. Just for listeners, one of the lovely things about the diary is that Simon's now adopting a sort of frightfully discreet position.

But actually, the diary is frequently much more outspoken. Enceweller, for example, which she was sort of working around gently. You describe her as over-promoted. you say, I really need to see the PM to explain, and let's just take this as an example of part of the job of the chief whip. Why Suella is not his friend. The problem we have is that the WIP's office is seeing the real Suella, but number 10 sees the more house-trained version. We see the leaks, the tea room briefings and the general lack of solidarity. Troublesome MPs think we don't know, but fail to understand that almost everyone is talkative. They all tell a friend who tell a friend who tells a journalist or even a whip. Okay. So help us. Let us understand at that moment. What's going on there when you're saying Suella isn't his friend and you need to tell him and what was she doing that wasn't friendly? There are two things, Rory, one of which is my attempt to be faithful to the concept of a diary, by the way, which is how I felt on a certain day, not with the benefit of hindsight. And when I look back at stuff, I think, God, did I really think that? Or did I really say that? But I was putting pressure on myself to be, no, this was, if it looked like it was written at half-past eleven on a Wednesday night after particularly punishing day, it probably was.

But to your main point, I think in at around that time, I can't remember the date exactly when it was, at around that time, it was becoming more and more obvious that there were not particularly subtle attempts to undermine the regime. There was lots of talks of leadership bids, letters into Graham Brady. There was lots of talk in some quarters about defections. We got to defections later in the process. Simon, I'm going to interrupt for listeners to explain letters into Graham Brady so they can understand what. the stuff is. In order to trigger a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister or the leader of party, there had to be, I think the number was 53 letters into Graham Brady. Who was the chairman of the... And chairman of the 22 committee who would commence the process

to have a confidence motion in the leader. And there was every weekend, there was another sort of Sunday newspaper speculation about how many letters Brady may have received. And Brady was famously discreet about that. As it happened, when he wrote his memoir. I think he fessed up to the fact that I think there were about 13 or 14 letters in. Our assessment was near a 20, but he was the one keeping the number. So we weren't a million miles apart. And this is intended to be, you know, again, complimentary about Rishi's attitude to these things, which was to, you know, rise above the tittle tattle, to keep our focus on the things that really mattered, not to get dragged off course by people who were just sort of making noises off. And he used to quite

frequently sort of take me to task on that, tell me to basically wind my neck in. And I think that I felt that it was particularly over Rwanda, actually. Not everybody's sort of favorite piece of legislation, but nonetheless, we were doing our very best to get it on the statute book. And we were frustrated that we thought that there were forces at work. We're trying to make that as difficult as possible. And I think, you know, number 10 probably were taking a rather more sort of objective view

about what was going on than I was. I was obsessing about the noise, and they were quite rightly focused on the outcome. And that's what that diary entry referred to. You're obviously very complimentary about Rishi Sunak. You're also, I think, one of the few who kind of survived most of the time in the same job under Johnson when you were Welsh secretary. And I just wondered what that was like working with him. And also, you were one of the first ministers to resign towards the end. but I always felt when there was that sort of avalanche of resignations over the Pinscher scandal, which is a kind of sexual harassment thing that Johnson seemed not to take very seriously, that actually you'd seem far worse than that in Johnson through that whole period,

but you felt that wasn't worth resigning over. Everybody you will talk to about Boris will say the same thing, that he does have a sort of hypnotising effect on people. He has a magnetic personality. and use humour in the darkest of moments in an incredibly effective way. So he never worked on me, I must say. I mean, well, I think it did work on me because during COVID, actually, I think when it was pretty bleak out there for everybody.

And I think in leadership positions, I think trying to maintain that sort of careful balance between public realism and optimism at the same time. You know, Boris was pretty well equipped for that, come back to the reasons for his demise in a moment. I think in the end, there wasn't a single point. It was accumulation of things, which led to the sort of resignations that there were, including mine. And I remember, I think I did about six media rounds in the last few weeks of Boris's regime. And at every single one, I didn't mention government policy at all. I was literally defending one party gate allegation after another. And it just got to a station and he's going to, this can't go on.

And by then, I think it was pretty obvious that Boris was going to get done over. He was either going to get done over by the 1922 committee and the no confidence thing, or he was going to get done over by the standards committee. So one way, not that he was going to get done over. And I think by that stage, we were saying, come on, Boris, you know, the writing really is on the wall now. So it's kind of drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. It was a bit. For me, it was a cumulative. There was a tipping point, and I reached it. Yeah. So I mean, one of the strange things that we both went through, so we came in in 2010, David Cameron

through 2016. And it seemed as though the Conservative Party, on the surface at least, was being run in a slightly more center-right direction. Almost all the ministers were remainers. Most the MPs were remainers. The party was committed to international development,

0.7%. It was committed to doing stuff on climate. Fast forward. And once you come through 2019, The wheels start coming off in the most unbelievable way. Boris Johnson's elected as Prime Minister, this amazing figure, Dominic Cummings, emerges and sort of starts spewing out extraordinary stuff and then blows himself up.

Liz Truss comes in and then she's in for whatever it is, 44 days, blows up the British economy. Rory always gets Brian Clough and Liz Truss mixed up. I know it's an easy thing to do. 49, I think it was it. I'm the one who normally gets confused with Brian Clough, by the way. Brod up on Liz Truss. They're very simple figures. And then we have Lee Anderson, this figure that may be fading from people's memories going off to reform and Sullabram and all the rest of it.

And this amazing story that you're telling us that even after all of that, they were trying to topple Rishi Sunak, which would have been completely unimaginable. I mean, just to remind people, Boris Johnson had been elected. Liz Truss wasn't elected. Rish Sunat wasn't elected by the general public. The idea of getting rid of him as well was kind of complete madness. So looking back this, what on earth was going on the party? Because presumably you guys thought that you were bringing sanity back. It only goes to show in a way that politics goes in cycles.

And I think that when I look back, there was no single moment. I think, you know, we'd slip to about seven or eight or nine points behind the opinion polls towards the end of Boris. And then by the end of Liz, it'd gone to 20. And then the next two years, it never budged. It didn't matter what we did, what we said, good or bad, it never budge. And I think that just showed that we'd reached the limited public patience. You sort of don't know you're there until you reach it. And anybody who was involved in the 2024 election will tell you that actually it wasn't the choice of date or the speech in the rain or anything like that.

It was just, do you know, what, is somebody else's turn now? You know, sort of you've been there a long time. You know, I know you individually, they were saying nice things to us as candidates saying, look, you know, I know you've done the best, but actually we think it's somebody else's turn on the carousel. So it wasn't a particularly complicated thing. And I think because a lot of colleagues realized, you know, we'd been in office for 15 years nearly, they knew that this was the last chance to learn for a lot of them. Their parliamentary careers were coming to an end. You know, they might have missed out on a ministerial role or whatever it was.

So people were sort of going their own way a bit and plotting their course for the future. Some of that they thought might be more advantageous to them if they were with a different leader. It was becoming a bit of a free-for-all. I don't blame anybody necessarily that. I think that's what happens when you get to the end of a long term in government. I wish it didn't happen. I wish it was a better way of concluding your time in office, but it did get ragged. Roy and I bumped into your nephew, George, in Damascus, where he's a war artist.

But your son, Adam, he's on record as sort of say that he could never admit to people that his dad was a Tory MP. How does that make you feel? You're referring to a piece he wrote in The Times a while ago, and it called a huge reaction from all sorts of different political colours. And I didn't know what he was going to write, all I knew he was going to write it. And he was quite sort of shy about it and said, I just feel a few things need saying. And so when I read that piece,

and I realized that actually throughout his sort of university time and less so it's cool, but university time, that, you know, being the son of a conservative minister because it wasn't a badge of honor anymore. It was a badge of shame. Maybe it's always been like that, but I do think that's, we should all be sad by that.

You know, we all want to do jobs that make our families proud of us. And the idea that a particular career choice could be so shameful that our children can't tell their friends what we do. And judging by the number of people,

a lot of Labor MP said the same thing to me at the time. I think we need to reflect on that. And my kids all got grief for me being when they were at school. And I think, you know, some people, deal with that better than others, but I don't think people should have to deal with that. I think, you know, if we talked earlier on about the appeal of politics as a career choice that you can be,

you can be really proud of and really aspire to, that's the sort of thing which will put people off. And then all you're left with is IG logs and, you know, PPE students, whatever is, you know, and people who just think that politics is a game. Politics isn't a game. It's something which affects everything we all do and we should have the best possible people for it. So, yeah, he sort of stepped out of the shadows, and I don't know whether I was more embarrassed than what he was. How did he handle that, though? That's quite a big thing for you.

For him, I mean, it was... No, but how did you handle that together? You know, we're close. You know, our family's close, which is great. So, you know, we do laugh about it. But one of the things he said, which is quite, I thought, quite telling after that was that the people he shared a house with the university in Cardiff had sort of universally got in touch with him and said,

oh, Christ, I'm really sorry. we didn't realise, we didn't think. I thought I was quite telling that, you know, because he was worried that they might be frustrated. Actually, they were quite apologetic. They just said, we didn't think. It never crossed our mind that there was anything wrong with, you know, slagging off the toys.

Yeah, no, and he was doing the journalism course in Cardiff at the time. And, of course, I was in the State for Wales at times. So, you know, the big telly in the common room, whenever they looked up, I was on it. And he was thinking, oh, God, you know, can we flip over? to S4C or something. You call your book

Ungovernable, and it strikes me that one of the ways in which Britain sometimes feels ungovernable is it feels like it's very, very difficult to get stuff done. And many of the things that Labor's talking about is stuff that we talked about for 14 years.

Surprise, surprise, Kirstehm was talking about growth. It's not as if we didn't think we were doing growth. He's talking about trying to sort out AI. He's talking about trying to make the government more efficient etc, et cetera, et cetera, trying to build houses. We spent a lot of time talking about how can we build more houses, or enough houses.

So why did we fail? And do you think Kirstama's going to be more successful than we were? It depends on what your measurement of failure is. I think the trouble is we were committing to doing stuff, which in anybody's estimation was going to take years. And I thought actually Michael Gove caught on to this quite early on by doing the leveling up program, which was, you know, much smaller infrastructure projects

of five to ten million quid in many, many more places so people could actually see that if the government said on the 1st of January 2019 was going to do something and the ribbon was cut two years later, that was progress, it was tangible progress. Whereas things like HS2, or you could argue the third runway at Heathrow, nobody gets any electoral benefit from that

until the first plane takes off or the first train gets. For the first 20 years, all you're talking about is running over budget and demolishing sites of special scientific interest. So it's negative for years, followed by a fleeting moment of success in 20 years' time. So I think relying on the big infrastructure project was a mistake. Sorry, Robbie, but the point is that we were, I think, partly guilty of setting unrealistic expectations ourselves and partly the victims of the media saying, right, okay, you need to resolve in a hospital waiting list in six months, otherwise you're as bad as the last guys,

we'll go for another one. those oil tanks are impossible to turn around in that time. And yet it's right at the heart, isn't it, of Trump and of populist politics all over the world, is people just feel governments too slow, too inefficient, too many reasons why things can't be done. And the reason for the enthusiasm for the kind of Elon Musk's is this idea that's going to be vigor, that's going to be action, people are going to get on with things. I have a needless to say, a bit of a theory on this, which is that almost everything, I think, government is down to political will. If you really want to do it, or you really have to do it,

you can do it. I mean, look at Nightingale hospitals. Who would have thought you could build a hospital in three weeks at Excel or wherever it was? When there's a desperate need or desperate urgency, these things can be done. And it goes back to what we were saying, I think, about plunging people into departments, taking relatively junior MP, sticking a label on them and saying, you know, Minister of State for such and such, and then expecting them to deliver on major change in a very short space of time, often went up against a, you know, slightly resistant treasury. And actually, by having ministers who are better trained and better supported, who have got the ability to say, no, this is how it's going to be, you know, as Churchill

wanted, you know, action this day or whatever it is, then we will improve that. And for a very fleeting moment, I was minister for implementation, which when Boris and I both worked out what that meant. It was meant to be something which was designed to help deliver government projects with greater ease and speed. But it was given to me as a equivalent of a parliamentary under-secretary, the lowest of the, you know, lowest in the food chain. I know it's a least qualified person to deliver on that, as you could possibly imagine. My last question relates to the title that your book almost had, as I understand it,

which was about my knighthood. Now, I can see why in the end you didn't call it about my knighthood. But what is it about Tory MPs that they're so desperate for this bloody noahood? What is it? I blame my fantastic special advisor for coming up

with that story. Again, I don't think that it's unique to Tories, by the way. So before you completely... No, there are some there are some of the Labour. It's true. It's true. But I think in general. And explain the joke, Simon. The joke was that in the chief hopes office, you always got a steady tree of people coming in to tell you stuff, normally how you could do better, which is all, you know, part of the course. But we had a bit of a running gag that,

nine times it turns an exaggeration, but as they left the office, just closing the door behind them, they'd lean back and say, oh, by the way, my knighthood. And sometimes they were very legitimate, you know, bidders. But sometimes I used to think it was a bit cheek. because, you know, Richard's view about those things were, as a right, they were those kind of honours should always be for people who'd gone over and above that which, they were being paid anyway. And so they had to have a sort of very special achievement and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so we nearly called the book that, but then we sort of resisted.

I think that would have been a very bad title. But I don't think our people were any more guilty than anybody else, people, to be honest with you. Speaking to somebody who'd rather die than be called Sir Alistair. They all say that till they were off at, Alison. Well, I've often said no false issues. I just don't understand what it's about. What does it speak to in them that they think that's so important? Is it being part of something bigger?

Do they see it as a... Do you know, I've never really asked myself that question. I think for a lot of people, there was a degree of sort of family, people often used to say to me, are not being facetious or something. They used to say to me that this is about my mum, it's about my dad. It's about my family. It's about something which they can be proud of other than having shepherded the digital inclusion bill through Parliament,

something like that. It was a bit of... Maybe that was all just flannel for something else. But I think overall, the idea that the honour system brings, you know, joy and pleasure and pride to people who have gone, you know, without being asked to over and above what life normally expects of them, I think... Johnson's hairdresser.

thoroughly deserved, thoroughly deserved his honour. I think... You don't need to answer that. Well, I think from somebody who used to work for Tony Blair, I think you're in a very... Why? You didn't do any resignation on us. You're in a very delicate position.

He didn't do any resignation honours, and if you're talking about cash for honour, it was bullshit from start to finish. Rory, have the last question. And as part of the problem is that all these honours are only exciting for people until the current CD values. Which it has.

Exactly. So the reason people want to be called Sir is that Sir Winston Churchill was called Sir. So put Sir in front of your name, someone might think you're Winston Churchill. And the reason people want to be Lords is someone might think you're the Duke of Devonshire, right? But the problem is if you get rid of it... We don't want to be the Duke of Devonshire. Well, exactly. You don't want to be any of these things.

But you asked us why people want them. The reason they used to want them is that it used to be a mark of being kind of posh, but they still do. Even though it has been devalued. It's all been devalued now because who wants to be. a night when literally almost every single member of parliament, I think, who'd been in before 2010 got a night with exception of one by the time that parliament came to know in the Tory side, yeah. Who missed out?

I read that. Was it poor Crisp and Blunt? Could it have been Crispin Blunt? I don't know. Anyway, Roy, have the last question, Rory. Let's finish them with thinking back on your 14 years as a member of parliament. and what made you sad about it? And I think we've got a sense of what made you proud about it.

But what made you sad and what do you think should be improved? And what do you think the public doesn't really understand about what's going wrong, about why Parliament is ungovernable or becoming ungovernable? I don't think it's beyond recovery, by the way. This was not a speech at a funeral. I still think Parliament is made up largely by very good people who've got the very best of intentions, but who occasionally get it wrong.

My fundamental starting point is that. What makes me sad is, I think sometimes we probably didn't give the level of support to people that we should have done in order to maximize their chances of success in whatever role they were put in in government, or whatever the role they chose as backbenchers. I'm very saddened by the fact

and Alastair touched on it just now talking about my son's observations. I'm very sad about the fact that politics is not deemed to be as honourable profession as it could be and maybe people will say it was not help much by what you've said and I would hold my hands up to that charge. But on the other hand, I do think we have to look at the mirror. We do have to.

We can't just say pretend this isn't a problem. It is a problem. But I think there are ways to get around it or improving. It would probably take 10 years. Like we're saying, it's not something to be cured overnight. You know, I often ask myself, you know, if I live my life again, would you do it in? Yeah, in a flash, I think it's a fantastically rewarding, occasionally deeply frustrating way of life. And it's a way of life. It's not a profession or anything like that. You know, did I love every minute of it? No. I mean, sometimes as the diary will impart, sometimes I just, you know, chewed away at you. You know, I don't think I made the right calls on numerous occasions and I wish I could, you know, relive those bits a bit. There is hope, and I think, you know, sometimes there are people emerging.

You think, actually, do you know what? They are really, really good. And just let's hope we don't sort of suck the life out of them before they've managed to maximize their potential. But it's the system we have. And politics is meant to be passionate. It's meant to be argumentative. We're meant to have these, you know, very, very sort of hotly held opinions. we've meant to, you know, that the rough and tumble of politics, the way in which Parliament

is constructed is by and large all good stuff. I just think there's bits around the edges where we could do better. Well, thank you for your time. And as a fellow diarist, thank you for your diary. Well, thank you. And good luck with the rest of your life. Thanks a lot, I'll see you. Thank you. Thank you, Simon. Very much. Cheers, sorry. Thank you. See you soon. Bye-bye. Okay, Roy, so there's Simon Hart. Our first Chief Whip on the podcast? What do you make of that? Well, I think the first thing that really struck me, and I don't know whether it struck you, is he's very, very courteous and polite, much more so than, in fact, he is in the diaries. The

diaries are pretty brutal, sort of brutal about people. But when you actually pin him on the spot, the old sort of emollient Chief Whip comes through, and he becomes very sort of charming. I suspect his views on Kemi Badenok and Swell of Braveman are much more unprintable. In fact, they are pretty unprintable in the diaries. What was your sense of him? Yeah, I think he was trying to be very, very nice. I think he was trying to fit him with the tone of the podcast and disagree agreeably. He was trying to be a little less tribal than he probably is, trying to be quite thoughtful and reflective about his past. I had not realized until I actually looked a bit, read the diary and also looked into a bit deeper into him. I'd completely forgotten that he was this big figure during the countryside alliance. I mean, he made our life a bit of a misery to be absolutely frank. People talk about the Iraq war march. The country, the country. The countryside alliance marches were right up there. And he was the chief executive, wasn't? He was leading that march against you, yeah.

His barber jacket and his flat cap became a, you know, regularly on our television, saying how sort of, you know, we were this terrible out-of-touch metropolitan elite who didn't understand the countryside. So he didn't want to revisit that. I told him he was interesting on politics generally. I think he is somebody who seems to have a genuine belief that politics is a force for good and that it's going through this very, very bad phase. I think you're right. There was a difference in tone between what he's written and the way he was projecting himself to us.

I think the final thing to say is that Ken Clark once said to me that the big change in government between when he came into the House in the 1970s and when I came in 2010, was that when he came in the 1970s, there were lots of kind of solid Shire Tories who were very, very happy to spend their whole career on the backbenchers. And there were many Labour members who were the same, very proud to be in the House of Commons, didn't want to be ministers. and that was maybe 70, 80% of the House. And that provided a much more stable environment so that you had people who wanted to be ministers and then you have many people who were very proud of what they did in their constituency, who they were,

and honestly slightly looked down on ministers. The problem by 2010, Ken Clark pointed out, is that because everybody wanted to be a minister, it was a completely horrible sort of maelstrom of everybody stabbing each other in the back, trying to prove their loyalty. And it gave much more control to the whips. Anyway, I wondered whether Simon Hart, who very patiently spent nine years on the back benches when the party was in government not getting a job, being patient and charming and good humor, wasn't a kind of glimpse of an older world and whether Parliament wouldn't be a slightly more stable place if there were more people like Simon and maybe fewer people like me and Liz Truss.

Well, were you just sort of graspingly ambitious and feeling very, very frustrated and angry that Cameron and Osborne couldn't see your talents as clearly as you saw them in the mirror? me. I remember a friend of mine saying to me, I reckon 10% of our colleagues think they should be Prime Minister. And he said to me, no, no, no, Roy, 95% to your colleagues think they should be Prime Minister. Yeah, I think more people think they should be Prime Minister than think they should be Chancellor. I think they, you have to say you want to be Chancellor, but I think most people are quite scared of being Chancellor, whereas Prime Minister, you've got a bit more, freedom to sort of, you know, to skim over the surface a little bit. Anyway, I thought he's very likable. His book is a pretty rollicking.

read. It obviously doesn't compare with the great diaries of politics, Alastair Campbell and Alistair Campbell and those sorts of people. But no, it's definitely worth a reading. And of course, the other thing that's really interesting is to see so many of these people that were such a part of our life, including this podcast when we first started, who have just sort of now vanished and evaporated. You know, Jonathan Gulles, where are you now? These figures who people thought would be Prime Minister, Penny Morden, Grant Shaps, all of whom lost their seats. Yeah, yeah.

So there we are. Okay, well, listen, we'll see you soon for the next one. See you soon. Thank you, Alison. Bye-bye. Bye.