The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 146. The Rise and Fall of The Conservative Party: Jeremy Hunt (Part 1)

Episode Date: August 3, 2025

How did Jeremy Hunt lose the Conservative leadership race to Boris Johnson? What does the longest serving Health Minister think will fix the NHS? What does Jeremy Hunt really think of Kemi Badenoch���s leadership?  Alastair and Rory are joined by former Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to answer all this and more.  Visit HP.com/politics to find out more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. 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] Social Producer: Celine Charles  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.com. Welcome to the restis politics leading with me, Alice Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And today, a real treat for us, at least as far as I'm concerned, we've got Jeremy Hunt. Now, Jeremy Hunt is very, very unusual in being probably the most senior remains. conservative member of parliament. He was the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was the Foreign Secretary. He was the Health Secretary. He was the Cultural Media and Sports Secretary under David Cameron, Theresa May, Liss Trust and Rishi Sunak. So he served under four different prime ministers in government. He ran for the leadership. I declare an interest here. I supported Jeremy when he ran for leadership against Boris Johnson. Before he entered politics, which is now 20 years ago, he was a businessman. Serial entrepreneur makes jokes about himself failing to sell marmalade in Japan, I think. Maybe actually, you can tell us a little bit about that. But ultimately,

built and sold a very successful company and has remained when almost all the rest of us have dropped away, which is another thing to investigate when it comes to Jeremy. So many things to talk about. Thank you for joining us today. We tend to start, Jeremy, with the very start. So you came from a military background. Your dad was very high up in the Navy. And I just wonder whether that was ever a route that tempted you. I think if there'd been a war, I would have definitely joined the Royal Navy because I would have taken the view. That's where the action is.

And by the way, thank you for saying it's a treat, Rory. I'm a bit worried there may not be a treat for Alistair because of what I'm about to say, what I'm about to say, which is that when I was at university in the 1980s, Margaret Thurray Thatcher was at her heyday, and I was a card-carrying Thatcherate. And I thought the action is in Westminster. So that was a moment I resolved to go into politics. You didn't fancy the Falklands. I didn't fancy the Falklands.

My dad was very nearly sent to the Falklands, but didn't in the end get sent. But my politics have probably slightly changed over the years. It has to be said. Have you gone from right to left? I think I have gone from being a class. classic small state, libertarian, kind of Elon Musk-type conservative. No, you are upsetting. I know, I know.

But I have moved to being someone who says, at the core of my being, we have to have decent, high-quality public services as part of whatever it is that we are planning to do for the country. So that makes me a different type of conservative. Can we stick on this for a moment? Because oddly, at the time you were at university, I guess you're roughly the same age as. people like David Cameron. Identical to David Cameron. Identical.

He's about a month older than me. And famously, people like David Cameron, George Elsporn, were not actually very involved in politics when they were at university. Unlike you, they got into politics straight after university when you went out to teach in Japan and do other more exotic things. Tell me a little bit about this sort of these odd choices that people make at 18 and 22. You know, why were you more involved in politics in university but then somehow didn't like then become a special advisor immediately after university. What was going on in your head at the time?

First of all, they were just much too cool to get involved in university politics. Cameron and Oswald. By my standards, by my standards, I was a, you know, I was a humble Carthusian. This was St. Paul's and Eason. So they were in a different category and they knew that university politics was deeply uncool. I was interested in politics because I was genuinely interested in politics. And I have to say that the university battles were pretty helpful training ground for what happens later on in Westminster. And I always remember, because I wanted to become president of the Oxford University Conservative Association. Which you did. Which I did.

And I remember asking someone called Nick Levy, who was himself president, who didn't then pursue a career in politics, how do you become president? And he said to me, do you know, it only depends on one thing. it depends on whether you really, really want it. And I look at people like, for example, Robert Jenrick today, and, you know, I know that he's being loyal to Kemi, but you can tell... He's what. You can tell that he wants it.

And you can tell he wants it. And I think the thing is that we laugh at that, but actually it's an important quality. I remember Tony Blair once saying to me, when I, in Kirstarmer's early days, what do you think of Kier? and I felt the jury was out at that stage, but he said to me,

I have to say the one thing about Kier, he really wants it. And this is something that is one of the really important determinants of success. Can I just sort of come in on that? Have there been times in your life where you felt that you haven't quite wanted it enough that other interests, other parts of your life, meant that at certain key moments,

you missed the killer instinct, which, for example, when you were up against Boris Johnson, that maybe in some sense he wanted it more than you. Yes. And interestingly, although I've been very focused on a political career, if I was going to examine my career from a professional standpoint, by the way, I'm someone who tried three times to become party leader. And the fact that I failed miserably on all three occasions, I think there's a message in there. But I think you could quite legitimately say that one of the reasons is I wasn't hungry enough. I pride myself on having a wonderful family that is a priority for me and there are red lines that I won't cross

and yes, that may have been a fact I think also in the case of Boris there was a much simpler thing which was that I was a remaner, he was a Brexiteer and the Conservative Party were never going to vote for a remaner in that particular leadership election but yes, it's an absolutely fair comment about me

Did you come across Johnson, Cameron, Osborne at university at all? No. The only one I heard of at university was Boris because he stood to be union president or union librarian or some post in the Oxford Union. And so he was kind of known for that, but not on a personal level. No, not at all. You were never tempted into the Bullingdon? Never, no, I wasn't invited.

Not alone, no, no, I wasn't tempted. Because I've only going to a minor public school. I wasn't on the list, you know. Thank you for being so honest also, because I think often that I just interviewed a friend of mine who's, a wonderful American politician. But of course, he, because he still wants to be American president, if you ask him these sort of questions, talks immediately about public service and you don't get much of the humor or the comedy of actually what it's like being an 18, 19-year-old trying to form your way towards politics. But the next stage you did is that you then went off to Japan,

is that right? And that's quite an interesting dimension to you. I mean, you speak some Japanese. your wife is Chinese originally, is that right? I mean, tell us a little bit about that part of your life. Well, this is like one of the great ironies of my life. So there I was at Oxford. Can I just add an addendum to that last comment you said? I talked about not being hungry enough. And this is something I think Alistair will understand.

But I think one of the reasons that my hunger declined over the years is because seeing the job of Prime Minister up close, it is a miserable shit job. And it's really hard to persuade yourself that it will be good for your mental health in any way at all. And I think the thing that really causes your ambition to wilt is the simple knowledge that I cannot name a Prime Minister in my lifetime for whom it has not ended in tears one way or another. And that is really depressing. Thatcher literally. Yeah.

Blair, I'd say that Blair, Major and Brown, in their own ways, it ended unhappy. But they have all rehabilitated themselves, but it took them at least a decade to do so. And then the others are all more recent. But I think it does make you look at this. And I do ask myself, I remember something you said last week, Rory, about the problems in the democratic system that we tend to underrate. And I do ask myself if there is a problem with our system that they don't have in America, for example, where it's perfectly possible for a president to do two years. terms and then step down gracefully and be considered an enormous success. British prime ministers, sooner or later, the press get you, the public tire of you, and things seem to go wrong. So that was

a factor. Now, your question about the ugly truth about why did I go into business, there I was, I was inspired by Margaret Thatcher. I had a dad who worried about money for his whole life. I thought I'm going to solve this by going into business, earning some money quickly. Was your dad just like a salaried? Because you came from quite a... He or you were related to the Queen or something. What was that about? I only found out that when I was in politics and someone dragged it up from...

In Wikipedia, I thought that must be bollocks. And then I looked it up and to my astonishment there is this very, very distant link. But my dad was just a salaried naval officer. We were an upper middle class family, but no money other than his naval salary, which had a generous subsidy. has a generous subsidy for private school fees, but that was basically the only... Which presumably you wanted to turn down, but he insisted you went to this minor private school. Actually, I've got a scholarship, so we didn't have to have that discussion. But anyway, so I thought

I want to start a business. And my first girlfriend, when I was Oxford, was Japanese. I wished I'd studied classics, actually. I ended up very boringly doing PPE, like the ambitious little squit I was, and PPE was the thing to do. So there I am thinking, I really should have studied languages. I love languages. I'm going to learn a hard language. So off I go to Japan. And then in my 20s, I set up a business exporting to Japan. My friends are Japanese. I come back to London. I have to Tommy Matts in my flat. And, you know, if there is a god, he obviously has a sense of humor because I end up marrying someone who's Chinese and there could not be a more different culture. You know, Chinese and Japanese are like Germans and Italian. They are.

You know, German, there's something very interesting going on here. See, I knew. I was aware of the time when You made that terrible faux part when you said that your wife was Japanese. Right. And people just thought you're a bit confused. Was that the first girlfriend staying on in your head? No. It was something different. And I'm going to do my first,

and I promise you my only shameless plug for my book. Oh, you're both in a book, Jeremy. I have. It's called Can We Be Great Again? I know it is. In that book, I actually explain, by the way, it's an optimistic book, and I hope Kirstarmer reads it too. But in it, I do explain how on earth I made this terrible faux power.

So I've been Foreign Secretary a month, and I arrive in Beijing for this very important trip, first trip to China. I am nervous and I over-prepared. And I over-prepared to the extent that I think not only are the things I want to raise with the Chinese Foreign Minister, but here are two or three points of small-talk to break the ice. And I had two points of small-talk. The first was that we both happened to speak Japanese. I lived in Japan. He was ambassador to Japan.

My second bit of small-talk was that my wife was Chinese. And in the heat of the moment, I said, I'm so delighted to be here in Beijing because my wife is Japanese. And I thought, my God, the press must have left by now. I turned around and there was this wall of cameras. And the foreign office mind are very optimistically said, I don't think that's going to be the main story, Foreign Secretary, how wrong he was. So at some point you decide, though, to go into politics. And it's quite, I mean, you've gone through quite an interesting moment because when you're going to Japan, I guess it's a moment. where Japan is still not very far off the moment where it was the great growing economy of the world,

where it'd become 50% of the size of the US economy, it was taking over Manhattan. And suddenly, the world changed, changed in a very, very odd and sudden way. Japan ground were halt. China shot off. We're into the world of the single market, the WTO. What's your memory of what was going on? were you thinking about it in terms of geopolitics and big politics, or were you still mostly thinking,

I'm working hard to try to get some businesses off the ground in Britain? So I went to Japan because I was interested in the country and I wanted to learn Japanese. As a byproduct, I was quite interested in the fact that that was a period when everyone was talking about Japan, overtaking America because no one could ever compete with the brilliance of Toyota car factories and their extraordinary way that they managed to get thousands of workers to cooperate and continuous importance.

As it happened while I was there and ahead of setting up my own business, I did actually fall in love with the Japanese model of capitalism, which I think is a lot more ethical than some of the sort of get-rich-quick side of traditional Western capital. And just explain how you would define the Japanese model of capitalism. So the thing I liked about Japanese capitalism is the focus on the product rather than profit. They always say if you get the product right, the profits will look after themselves. and their definition of success is building up market share, in other words, getting more customers to choose your product. And they are very happy when a Japanese person sets up a business. I mean, this is a bit of a cliche, and in fact their model has merged with ours

a lot more over the decades that have followed. But, you know, they're very happy if they don't make a profit for five or ten years. Now, at the time, that was a very different approach to Western capitalism. But where it was replicated, interestingly, was the West Coast tech sector, where you also had, for the first time in our capitalism, a group of businesses that said, actually, we really don't care about making money, we're here to change the world. And, you know, the original Google had a very, very strong set of ideals.

What I think is fascinating is that, you know, there was Japan doing incredibly well, and America invents the internet. Now we've got China doing unbelievably well. Question, is America going to continue to reinvent himself? despite all the challenges of Trump and the universities, this is fundamentally a free society in the way that China isn't. And I don't think it's as clear as it was then with Japan that America is going to win.

OK, we'll come back to that. Can I just ask you about that time of your sort of entry into politics? You became an MP 20 years ago, kind of seeing the end of Tony Blair, and then the beginning and end of Gordon Brown, and then David Cameron, and you straight into the cabinet with David Cameron. Just give us your take.

on having, you'd obviously watch them all in opposite from before going to Parliament as well. Just give you your take on what you see as the sort of strengths and weaknesses of all three of those. So I think that when I arrived in 2005, I had absolutely no idea of these internal wars going on in Downing Street between Brown and Blair, apart from, you know, speculation in the press. But to me, Tony was triumphant. Remember, as a new MP, you are very influenced by what you see in Parliament. And I have never since then seen a Prime Minister so confident and so dominant at PMQs, which is the moment of the week. And he was, I think, a truly impressive parliamentarian. And for me, it was always utterly fascinating that when he left, he said that he hated PMQs. But he got a standing ovation from all of us because he was such a formidable parliamentarian.

And I think that, you know, that was impressive, irrespective of, what you think about his policies. Gordon Brown is probably the person that I've changed my mind on the most because when Gordon Brown took over politically, he felt as an opposition, Conservative MP, pretty hopeless. You felt the government was unraveling.

He was trying political tricks that were constantly getting exposed like cutting the basic rate of tax when he wasn't a tax cutter, things like that, gimmicks. Of course, there was this conservative narrative of not fixing the roof while the sun was shining and trying to pin the whole financial crisis

onto Labour, which, but this is exactly, of course, what Labour is trying to do with the 22 billion story. Not quite as successfully yet. But the interesting thing is that having become Chancellor and it was only when I became Chancellor that I actually saw what Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling did in the financial crisis and it was truly impressive.

I mean, the fact that he'd been Chancellor was able to get on the phone to his contacts and get the G20 together and I realize now that sometimes you get this complete mismatch between what people think inside Downing Street and what people think outside. And inside Downing Street, I think Labor thought, Gordon's been absolutely brilliant.

He's done an amazing job in the financial crisis. Surely people are going to recognise that. Outside, people felt miserable and scared. And also, I think there was a failure to be honest with people about what it meant in terms of austerity. and David Cameron was the man with a solution. So I think that was where my view changed.

Can I just develop that? Because we've got a little bit of an analogy, maybe with that at the moment. So Kirstama's now just over a year into his time as Prime Minister. And at this stage, Tony Blair had a net popularity rating, I think, about plus 34. David Cameron is about minus 3 and Kirstarmer's on about minus 54 at the moment.

And yet you get the sense that inside Downing Street, they're pretty confident. And they find it very difficult to reconcile if you're Morgan McSweeney or the inner circle. They think, you know, we're doing the right thing. We're on the right track. And yet somehow the public feels Britain's broken. This really isn't working at all.

I mean, can you reflect on that a little bit of it? Is that the same thing again? Is it an analogy? It is a bit because you are in a bit of a bunker in Downing Street. And remember, you're seeing all these difficult decisions that you're taking every day and you're feeling good about them. You're thinking I did something really smart. And there are some.

You know, getting three trade deals, being someone as Kirstama is, who is essentially decent and low ego, has meant that he's been able to navigate both the Trump White House and Brussels with both liking him. And that is an impressive diplomatic feat. But why is it that George Osborne's narrative about the Labour government that ran out of money has worked and the $22 billion hasn't worked so far? anyway. It's because alongside his narrative about Labour, George Osborne was doing some really big things. I mean, he cut public spending by 19%. I mean, that was

massively more than Thatcher ever did. So he had a political narrative alongside real policy substance. But a year on, I think people still find it very difficult to discern what Kirstam actually wants to do. So if all he does is say, because

of the terrible inheritance, X, Y, Z, it just sounds like a politician's lagging off his adversary, and that's why it doesn't hold water. Now, I actually want Kirstama to succeed. I'm a conservative. So the last drop of my DNA, and I always will be, and I happy to explain to you why, but we have labour now for three years, maybe four years, and we really need labour to take some big decisions.

And the thing that has worried me the most has been the climb down over welfare reform, all sorts of reasons why they approached it in the wrong way. But the fact of the matter is that this is something where left or right, we have got a massive crisis on and it's not sustainable to be signing off 3,000 people onto welfare every single day. And we all really need Rachel Reeves to come back at this. So that's where I think the biggest substance opportunity has been missed. Can I answer just a small side point on that?

Why did Kemi Bader not say, I completely support what you're doing on welfare and therefore put Kiyosah on an awkward position that he could have got his vote through with Tory support? Well, I don't want to be disloyal to Kemi Bay, not because I'm a conservative backbencher, and I fundamentally know how difficult that job is. But I would have made a different judgment on that. I think we should have supported it. I think that they had some individual concerns about some of the details, which made them uneasy about supporting a straight cut in disability benefits that was being proposed.

But in opposition, you have to be broad brush. And the fact of the matter is the welfare bill is totally unsustainable. It's bad for the economy. But most importantly, it's terrible for the individuals involved. Alistair, you know far more about mental illness than I do. But when I was Health Secretary, every doctor that I met said that if you have anxiety or depression, you need social contact. And what we should be doing for a fraction of the price of the increase in welfare spending is getting people better access to mental health. and that would have been the progressive way to win the argument over welfare reform.

Just on that, though, so, you know, when you were Health Secretary, we talked a bit about mental health, but there was something you said in it, you did an interview recently with the Telegraph, I think it was, and you said that you felt that establishing this sense of parity between mental and physical health had been, quotes, a disaster for the benefit system. He said, by drawing attention to mental illness, we create an incentive, not just for people to use mental illness to qualify for benefits, for people not to get better. Now where I agree with you is social contact is incredibly important.

But I sort of felt that was sort of, I think we have to keep the sense of parity between physical and mental health. And I feel that we're worried about that because I think we're losing that battle at the moment. Well, as far as the NHS is concerned, we absolutely should have total parity of esteem. So we should treat mental illness

every bit as seriously as physical illness. I agree. But I don't think parity of esteem means giving exactly the same treatment to each type of illness. And I think where it's gone wrong is that where this has been applied to the benefit system is we've just said, you know, you get three points for back pain, three points for anxiety, three points for something else. And we're trying to jumble them all together. And I just think if you look at the way the benefit system work, for someone who does have moderate anxiety or depression, and that is a barrier to work, if you

then put them on a welfare package, which then makes them worry that if their anxiety improves, they may no longer qualify for the benefits that they've become dependent on. You are creating a trap for people. And that's why I think, look, the most interesting statistic here, sorry to, this is a number here, so I promise you this is the last one I'll give you. The increase in benefits, working age benefits, since before the pandemic, 49 billion a year in real terms. The most successful part of the NHS's mental health program is talking therapies.

Recognised all over the world. People come from Sweden to see how the NHS talking therapies program works. It costs less than a billion a year. So you could double... This is where we need more of it. Exactly. You could double the number of people getting treatment for anxiety or depression for a tiny fraction of the increase in... So what you weren't, just going to get there, so you weren't saying there that you worry that people are using mental health as an excuse to get benefits?

Or are you saying that? That may be happening. But my biggest concern is actually that this is doing immense damage to people who do have mental illness. Look, let's call a spade a spade. I think there is an element of fraud, but that is caused mainly by something different, which is a court ruling giving everyone the right to apply for benefits by phone. And I think that that happened in 2021. one, that needs to be sorted out. But that's a different issue.

But what you are saying is that part of the welfare to work is actually we need more and better mental health services. What I think Rachel Reeve should have done, and look, it's easy to be a back-send driver and all that. But what she should have said is we are doubling, tripling, funding for people with anxiety or depression to help them get back to work. Here's the amazing package we're going to do. But we're not going to make it a de facto part of the benefit system.

Jeremy, Alastair, let's take a quick break and back in a moment. Hi everybody, it's Dominic Zavrick 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 Alistair 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 described. 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 Alistair 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.

Jeremy, there's so many directions we could go in with you, partly because you had all these huge jobs, and I hope we can touch on a lot of them. Chance who you can talk about the economy, foreign secretary, talk about foreign affairs. But I want to stick on health for a moment because you and Alice are set off down that path. You were the longest serving health secretary,

I think we've ever had in Britain. And it's very unusual. I mean, people like me were sort of rotated in that, ministerial jobs sort of every year. I think I went through more ministerial jobs than you did, and you've been in politics twice the next time, right? So there you were as a Secretary of State for Health, and you really got your feet under the table, really thought about it a lot. And it's enormous. I mean, it's something like 40% of the day-to-day spending of the government. And we've got a health secretary now talking about moving from treatment prevention and from hospitals,

the frontline and all this sort of stuff. And someone in the story is this cliche that we should be doing much more in public health, much more in prevention, that that's really where you get the bang for the buck. That's where you get the return. That's how you're going to increase life expectancy. Instead of which, we end up spending more and more and more money on hospitals. What's going on there on the basis of your seven years at the helm to explain why we perpetually seem to be trapped in this world that doesn't at least make sense to academics on the outside?

Well, the first thing is that we all need West Streeting to succeed. And I think he is one of the most impressive Labor Ministers. I want him to succeed. And I think it is often easier for Labor to reform the NHS than the Conservatives because any changes we do, there is suspicion that this is a secret plot to privatise it or whatever. I don't think that said that this talk about moving to prevention, moving care upstream, treating more people in primary care than in hospital, is anything new. In fact, the 2019 10-year plan that Simon Stevens launched had exactly the same principle.

So the question is, can Wes deliver it? And he has said some encouraging things. So on the positive side of the ledger, he is bold and ballsy, and that's necessary. And he is avoiding falling into the very first trap that he could fall into, which is to use up all the money he's got on pay rises. and I am someone who thinks that this BMA strike is outrageous. But the real reason why it would stop Wes improving the NHS is that if he gave an over-generous pay rise to doctors,

he would have to do the same thing to nurses and all the agenda for change workforce. And then there would just be no money left for any of these reforms. So he's getting that bit right. There's a bit that I'm worried he may not be getting right, which is that in the end the reason the NHS is not succeeding. and let's be clear, the austerity narrative is justified when it comes to problems in the court service. Prisons.

Prisons and local government. But since 2015, we've had a 34% increase in the number of nurses, a 37% increase in the number of doctors. If extra bodies and extra money, actually, because the budget has also gone up by a lot, were the answer, then we would have a transformed NHS. Instead, we have an NHS still on its knees after the pandemic. So the thing that I'm worried about is the reason the NHS is not working is because we infantilise all the managers throughout the system by turning into the most micromanaged healthcare system in the world. Stalin would be proud of all the targets the NHS has. Nowhere else in the world does this.

A French hospital, a German hospital. You might have one or two targets, but not the 30, 40, 50, that hospital managers. and doctors have. And my worry is that by closing NHS England down and centralising it in the Department of Health, we're going to have more micromanagement from the centre, whereas if you look at public sector reform that's worked, particularly raising standards in state schools,

which are now brilliant by international standards, that has been done by empowering heads, giving heads maximum freedom over their budgets, encouraging innovation in the ground. And that's what we really will need. to see if we're going to have a transformation in the NHS. Do you think that as a country, so I'll, I will plug your book for you, you know, can we be great again?

Do you not think that we're slightly delusional about the extent to which we can deliver the sort of country with the sort of public services that we want and think we're entitled to without making some very, very big choices on tax, which at the moment nobody really seems to want to make? It's a really central question. So I'm going to just give a very short summary of how I think we deal with that. I am worried that if we take that decision, which many people on the left think, let's just bite the bullet and raise taxes to pay for all these decent public services,

we will basically kill off economic growth. That's what I'm worried about. And then we will end up with less money, not more money for public services. But then you have to have a solution. And that has to be reform. Yeah, it has to be reform. And so obviously the five to ten year solution is to get, economic growth back up to 2 to 3% with things like planning reform, which Rachel Reeves is rightly

talking about the pension reforms that she's going to be announcing, I think, very soon. Those things are great, but they take time. So what are you going to do if you need more money for not just the NHS, but defence is the really big one, and you need it now? The only area where there is potential is welfare reform, which we've talked about, and public sector productivity and that means encouraging innovation

with all the potential of things like AI. Now, the reason everyone rolls their eyes when you talk about this because government ministers love to talk about efficiency savings.

I did, Rachel did. But the Treasury always gets this wrong. So if you want... Including when you were there? Including when I was there but I did try and change it. If you want the police

to solve more crimes but fewer police officers to do it, what the private sector would say is, well, then invest in a fantastic new computer system that removes all the admin. Police officers do about eight hours of admin a week. Cut that out and then you can have more time solving crimes and you'd have to increase police numbers so quickly. The Treasury never wants to invest up front in those big new IT systems that make more productivity on the front line possible. And so we always end up with inefficiently run public services.

So unless you take a strategic view as to how to make our public services more efficient over a three, four, five year period and put the money up front, it's never going to happen. And just on health, and you said, you know, Labor might be more trusted to reform the National Health Service. But do you not think that at a point we're going to have to reach some pretty big, bold, difficult, radical decisions about the fundamental of the health service? Or do you, when you say you absolutely agree with the principle of the National Health Service, does everybody in the Conservative Party by that? Are we wrong to start thinking, well, maybe? Okay. I can't speak for everyone in the Conservative Party,

but I personally don't think we should change the model of funding. But you have to be honest that there are social insurance systems in the Netherlands, in Germany, in Israel, that actually get better outcomes, sometimes for less money than we spend on the NHS. But if you were going to move to those systems, you would have to persuade British people that the state should run a system where richer people can opt for the gold service

and get better care. And I don't believe we would ever win that argument. So I think a much more productive argument is to say is how can we get the same standards that they have in Denmark or Australia or Israel with the structures that we have? Now, you know, we don't have a free market in state education, but we've got the highest standards of reading in the Western world. We worked out a system through transparency, through Ofsted, going back 25, 30 years, there's been a cross-party consensus which actually Bridget Philipson has been the first person I'm afraid to challenge.

But there's been a cross-party consensus that has made our state schools some of the best in the world because we worked out within the structures that we want to preserve, how how much? to raise standards. So I think that's what we should do in health. And that I think means if we were going to choose a country to copy I would copy Sweden. What they have done is they have an NHS but it's decentralized. It's done on

a regional basis. There's much more nimbleness, much more flexibility and much higher standards. I must point out Bridget Philipson's not here to defend herself. That was a very BBC moment. Rory, come in. Exactly, that's right. Now I've come even more BBC is pointing me like John Humphreys. Jeremy, one of the things I think, I suspect, if you were a teacher listening

to this, is you would say, okay, maybe we're doing well by international standards, but we are absolutely exhausted, run off our feet, unbelievably stressed, underpaid, and that this drive for productivity is killing us. And I guess you'd get people in the NHS saying the same thing, while at the same time, and this is what I'd love you to try to help us understand after years running the NHS. We're in a situation where the number of consultants since 2019 has gone up by 18%, the number of resident doctors by 32.7%, number of nurses, by 22.9%. Meanwhile, the number of emergency emissions, gone up by 2.9%, elective by 9.1, outpatients by 12%. In other words, there is this incredible discrepancy since 2019 between the massive increase

in the number of staff and the actual outcomes, which are going up much, much more slowly. It's not that productivity is flatlined. Presumably on those figures, productivity is getting worse and worse and worse. It has. Something's gone wrong in productivity since the pandemic, and it's really hard to put your finger on exactly what it is. Are you suspicious is WFH? I don't think so. I don't think so.

And by the way, a lot of those increases were driven by decisions I took as Health Secretary because I was dealing with scandals like midstaffes. And people were saying they just aren't enough nurses on the wards. And we need, you know, more doctors, more clinicians. I think clinicians in my time went up by about 40,000. Rory, I think your point is a brilliant one, though, Because the truth is, if we really want to have more productive public services, we have to carry the workforces in health and education with us.

And without being boring about technology, I think the big opportunity here is AI. For example, in terms of marking work for teachers, one of the biggest burdens they have is outside teaching hours, all the homework they have to mark. There's a lot of evidence that computer, programs can do that work for them. There's evidence that doctors could save about a third of their time by these computer programs that automatically update patients' notes and they can just give instructions on a microphone as they're walking between beds on a ward. So I think those are the

kind of things that we need. And I do think it has to be done in partnership. But it's a journey we absolutely have to go on. Normally Roy and I like to take people chronologically through their life. Can I jump back a little bit to your first big job in cabinet, which is DCMS? Again, I'm happy to plug your book, can we be great again? I sort of feel in myself, and I've said there's a lot on the podcast, I feel the last time

that the country really felt like umph, power, at ease with itself, modern, it was 2012. The Olympics. For the Olympics,

yeah, which you were obviously, you know, Cabinet Minister in charge of that at the time. And it sort of had been a cross-party thing, and it was a, there was a legacy attached to it and all that stuff.

I just wondered whether you think I'm being unfair if I say that the decade of austerity in the decade that we had the choice in power that we somehow did lose our mojo. Now I would argue, and you might agree, they might not say it as loudly as I do, that Brexit was a big part of that. But I think it was the only part of it.

It feels like the country felt a lot worse at the end of that decade than it did in 2012. First thing to say about just about the Olympics, is that I was building on the foundations left by the late Tasajal. And it's an interesting example of how much progress is possible in British politics when there is some kind of consensus between the parties. And I think the other outstanding example of that,

which I've got a chapter on in the book, is climate change, where consensus between the parties has meant that we've decarbonized by more than any other G7 country. What's happened since? my view is that in the sort of 15, 16 years since the financial crisis, something has happened to the country, which is actually not Brexit, that has never happened in our lifetime before, which is we've had three massive global economic shocks. The global financial crisis, which, you know, meant that in 2010, one in 10 pounds being spent by the government was being borrowed, completely unsustainable. We then had COVID once in a century pandemic, and then we had a 1970s energy shock following the invasion of Ukraine,

which led to... And we had Brexit, which was a shock. And we had Brexit, which was a shot, but it was a self-imposed shock. The other three were not self-imposed. And the result of that was that the government's in place at the time had to take horrible, difficult decisions to get the economy back on its feet.

And I think by and large, whether it was what Alastair Darling did or what George Osborne did or what Rishie soon acted or what I did actually. By and large, they took the difficult decisions that had to be taken in an emergency, but they left people feeling incredibly bruised. And the point I want to make in the book is that living standards, GDP per head, which is the closest link to living standards, only went up by, I think, 14% over the last 14 years, which is something, but it's historically much, much lower than happened previously. And so we've got a national view of ourselves

that our economy is absolute rubbish. And what we forget is that actually other people have been through similar trauma. And we're the sixth largest economy in the world. And one of the most interesting statistics that I uncovered in researching this book is that in 15 years' time, the independent experts,

the Centre for Economics and Business Research, say in 15 years' time, projecting all global economies, where will the UK be? We will still be the sixth largest economy. In fact, we'll have closed the gap slightly with Japan and Germany who are ahead of us. The real story, by the way, is that India, China and America pull further away from everyone else.

But my point is not that everything is hunky-dory. It is just that, you know, we have got the foundations there and we need to get our mojo back. And, you know, my biggest worry, I'm a believer in open societies, freedom, democracy, all the stuff that we all believe in. But that is really now under very, very big challenge, partly from Russia, but mainly from China. You know, Xi Jinping is a rational person. He's not a dictator of the style of Gaddafi or some sort of crackpot dictator

who just wants to enrich himself and his family. If he was sitting in this studio, he would say, Alistair, I really do believe that autocracy is a better system than democracy because democracies elect politicians who just want to get themselves re-elected and they're incapable of long-term decisions. To win this argument...

And there's a point. And he's sometimes right. Absolutely. To win this argument, we have to reform ourselves and we have to get our confidence back. And that is the UK, but actually particularly the United States.

But the reason why I think the Olympics is so important is because that was the time at which... I'm not everybody. None of us can speak for everyone, but the public felt like they were in... engaged in that sense of something good and positive. Whereas now what we've got is a sense of the public pretty much looking at all politicians and thinking, you're all terrible when, you know, I know they're not.

So how do you think we, how do we get that mojo back when the gene pool of politics is narrowing, when the pressures on politicians are greater, when the media landscape is more complicated, when the international order that we took for granted feels like it's eroding? How do we get the mojo back? Two things. A boring one and an interesting one. The boring one is we need governments that actually do deliver. And I think, if I can put this politely, this is a work in progress for Kirstama's government. But, you know, if they don't sort out the small boat's problem, people will be very angry because they didn't come into office saying this is a really difficult problem to sort out and we're going to do our best.

They came into office saying we're going to smash the gangs and we're going to do this. So they have to be better at delivery. and I think you know and I know this is easier said than done in government. The interesting thing is that if we believe in centrist, rational government, then we have to learn to communicate like the populists. And I want to just share one story about Trump, which I think is the most interesting. It's not a negative story about Trump, by the way,

but I just think it's really interesting. I sat next to his chief of staff when he came for a state visit when I was Foreign Secretary, General John Kelly. didn't survive very long as most of his chief of staff a wonderful true patriot and I had a fascinating conversation I said what time does the president get to work he said 1130 or midday

and I thought this just confirms all my prejudices leader of the free world and he doesn't even bloody bother to show up until midday I said what's he doing he said he's sitting in his private quarters in the White House he's watching TV CNN and Fox and he's on social media. And then I thought you could look at this a different way.

For the first time in history, you have an American president who, before he sets foot in his office, he knows what America's thinking. And America knows what he's thinking. Well, I'm sorry, Alisabeth. I have to tell you that the party you support and the party I support, we are losing elections against people who do.

You know, Trump is spending three hours a day talking to his customers. And I would say that... I get the talking to customers a bit. That's the communication point. But I think a president spending so much time, and let's be frank, Jeremy, he's watching television. He's mainly watching Fox so that he can see who's saying nice things about him

because that's how he likes to feel. And he's watching CNN so as he can see, hope that he's right, that he's hating the right people. Do you really want our politicians to be watching TV all day? Not really. And by the way, I wasn't. But let me just put it another way. Okay.

So how did I treat it? the media when I was Chancellor. This won't surprise you. I did a media around maybe once a week or once a fortnight, intensely prepared by our civil servants, go through all the difficult questions. If I got through it without screwing up, sigh of relief, then I don't have to bother with the media for another week. And I think it was the same for Rishi Sunak. And by the way, I think it's the same for Rachel Reeves and Kirstama today. Compare that to Trump. Yeah, that's interesting. He doesn't care if he makes a big mistake because he's going to be back on TV the next day. And I support him. And that, I'm a problem.

But anyway, we're not disagree about the outcome. Yeah, well, let's look, I, I just want to develop this a little bit more, Jeremy. So I briefly ran against you for that leadership race against Boris, and I was wumbling around with a smartphone. You thrashed me, Rory, let's be honest. You did a brilliant job. Were you on the stage when he started taking his clothes off? Were you in that one? I think I was actually, yes.

Anyway, I was just, but I was, I was interested in this because I've been looking at this again with Zoranam Dhani, who's the, been running in to be Merrim, which has been an enormous amount about him getting out on the streets, filming himself, interacting with citizens. And I do sense that there's maybe something there which you could do against the populace, that there's a sort of energy that the centre could take back by, as you say, taking control of social media in a different way. Look, I don't think, by the way, I think he is a left-wing populist, actually, so I'm not sure.

But what I think is interesting is, look, if it's about communication, you know, Kirstarmer and Rachel Reeves have got some difficult messages that they want to get across. And by the way, this isn't just about, you know, what they think of their opponents. It's got to be what they want to change in the country. You know, why aren't they spending three hours a day explaining to everyone what they're trying to do? I think that actually we should learn from this because I want, you know, centrist, rational politicians to start winning elections. At the moment, we're getting thrashed. So we've discussed a lot of your early life and political career.

and we've got into some very interesting questions around things like health policy, but we're yet to get into your experience in the two great offices of state as foreign secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer. So let's finish today's episode here. Come back for a second and final episode of our conversation with Jeremy Hunt, which will be out next Monday. And if you can't wait until then, then very good news if you are or if you want to be a member of Trip Plus because you can get it straight away. And all you're going to do is sign up at the rest ispoties.com. As a triplast member, you'll get ad-free listening, access to our exclusive miniseries and many more benefits.

And if you're not a member, we'll see you next week. Bye for now.