The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 147. I Thought It Was a Prank - Then I Was Chancellor: Jeremy Hunt (Part 2)

Episode Date: August 10, 2025

What was it like to be handed the reins to the economy following the Liz Truss mini-budget collapse? How did Jeremy Hunt feel fighting an election that he knew the Conservatives would lose? How would Thatcher have dealt with Trump?  Alastair and Rory are joined by former Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to answer all this and 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 therestispolities.com. That's the restis politics.com. Hello and welcome to the second episode of The Restis Politics Leading, where Alistair and I are talking to Jeremy Hunt. And if you listen to episode one, you'll know that we talked a bit about Jeremy Hunt's early life and he's rise into politics and what he thought of some of the big figures in politics. and in particular his time with Cameron and Osborne, London 2012 Olympics, and his time as Health Secretary. But now we're going moving into maybe more controversial times,

foreign secretary and then Chancellor under Liz Truss, after he picked up the pieces of her mini-budget. Jeremy, before we get into what sort of conservatory, let's actually go straight to the Chancellor thing, because that was an unbelievable period in British politics where Listruss beats Rishi Sunak for the leadership

of the Tory party I don't need to ask who you voted for and it's just mayhem and we have this she brings in quasi-quating as

Chancellor we've talked to him on the podcast before and even he seemed to think it was all a bit sort of weird and wacky and then he falls

he becomes the sort of full guy for the market's going completely crazy on the back of the many budget that she was so proud of. And then you're by now on the back benches and you get a phone call. So just sort of talk us through it. I mean, I still can't really believe what happened, but I was actually on an away weekend with my long-suffering wife, Lucia. So there I am a weekend away with Lucia in Brussels, of all places. And I get a message on a Friday morning saying, Liz Truss here, please call. it's from an unrecognised number.

And I think it's a hoax. I think it's just probably a radio show presenter. There was lots of talk about a cabinet reshuffle happening. And I thought someone is going to imitate Liz Truss and make me make a fool of myself. So I said to Lucia, I'm not going to be fooled by this. I can't believe that they think I would fall for it. So I ignored it. Then I got an unrecognised number calling me,

which is actually the Downey Street switchball, which I zapped, because I thought this would be the same thing. And eventually a friend of mine called. me and said, actually, I think number 10 really are trying to get in touch with you. So, gingerly, I call the number 10 switchboard. I think this is probably a hoax, but I had a message saying that the Prime Minister wanted to speak to me. Oh, yes, she did.

She does. And anyway, they put me through. And so I became Chancellor. And then there was a sort of period. Did she acknowledge that there was a bit of a problem that had to be resolved? I mean, what she said was, this situation is not sustainable. And I said, how do you want me to help? And she said, Chancellor.

And I said, knowing this is a huge decision. And also, if I'm honest, not expecting it to be for very long, I thought probably I'm going to be the shortest serving Chancellor in history. I said, can I have half an hour to think about it? And I thought half an hour was the longest I can reasonably ask for. And then I had time to talk to Lucia and my brother. And actually, after 20 minutes, I called her back and said, Absolutely, I'll do it.

Did you make conditions? I thought about that too, because as you will know, that is the one moment when you have leverage. But it didn't seem very necessary because the crisis was so obvious that I think it was clear to all of us that I was going to have to do some very big things. And then this is the weird way that British politics works. You know, I've never run an economics ministry. I have a business background, so I had some instincts, but I had never been business sector. or worked in the Treasury. And at 5 o'clock I'd become Chancellor.

I worked through the evening with Treasury officials. And then on Saturday morning, I have to do a media round to reassure the markets, including an interview with Laura Coonsberg that we did as pre-record. And you can imagine how I was feeling at that moment with my general lack of knowledge of how financial markets work. I never worked in the city or anything like that. But I look back on that week. And the first thing was that there was total unity of purpose with civil servants.

I could see that the Treasury civil servants were incredibly nervous. And I thought, how do I reassure them? And I said to them, look, you need to understand that we're going to do the right thing for the country. And if that means I'm a Ken Clark Chancellor who hands on an economy in great shape to his political opponents, so be it. we're going to do the right thing. Whether I succeeded in being that Ken Clark, Chancellor, historians will debate, but it created a sense of unity amongst us.

But actually the biggest thing that I did in that week in a way is something that is much less known, which is that when five days later, Liz Truss told me that she was planning to resign, I realised it would be an absolute catastrophe if the Conservative Party went into another three-month leadership contest, which was what was going to happen. Was it five days?

It was five days. So she pointed me on a Friday, and then the Thursday morning after that, was it fine? Wow. She told me that she was possibly going to announce that she would step down in six months or have a leadership contest.

And I said to her, if you're going to do what is in the national interest, you say absolutely nothing until the Conservative Party has agreed. They will do the whole contest done and dusted in a week. And I said, and just for the record, I won't stand. Because otherwise that message wouldn't have had any credibility. And to her great credit, actually, she agreed to that. I mean, you know, you can disagree with lots of things she did,

but that was actually a brave thing to do. And that's what happened. Jeremy, can I just come to that? because it must have been unbelievably brutal for her. I mean, as you say, becoming prime minister is absolutely the pinnacle of someone's ambition. It's something that she would have been working for for much of her adult life. And she would have felt this kind of miraculous thing of winning the leadership contest, getting into that position, finally having the chance to do these things that she'd always dreamt of doing.

all these big radical changes. And then the whole thing blows up and she's gone in whatever it was, 40, 48 days or something. I mean, there's not been nothing like it in almost in British political history. It must be the most unbelievable psychological journey. Yes, and I think you sometimes reinvent history and say, you know, it was inevitable that she was going to go really quickly after the mini budget. I don't think that's actually true. And we've tended to say that now looking back.

But when she appointed me as Chancellor, her intention was that I would reverse the measures that she took in the mini-budget, and she would start again. And that was how she saw it. And it was actually only losing a parliamentary vote on the Wednesday night, so four days after I become Chancellor, which is nothing to do with the mini-budget at all, but caused her Chief Whip to... resign, that finally damaged her confidence so much that she decided that she had to go. What I was hearing when you were describing those meetings with the Treasury officials was almost like now, we're going to have to run economic policy without much reference to over the road because they've been a bit of a problem up to now. Well, let me tell you what I think the biggest problem was, was that the Treasury officials

were petrified by the summary dismissal of Tom Scholar. which he was the permanent secretary at the Treasury, the most senior civil servant, highly respected figure throughout Whitehall. Liz Trusson, he had clearly not gone on when she was Chief Secretary to the Treasury. And she decided to make this statement by requiring Quasi Quarteting to fire him.

Which you would think was a mistake? A huge mistake. And the reason it was a huge mistake, but not just because he's a very talented person, but because I then ask myself, and I've never really had Treasury officials confirm this to my face, but I ask myself whether, when the most senior civil servants just been fired on the spot,

if the Chancellor then presents a mini-budget that is full of catastrophic ideas, how likely is it that civil servants will speak up? And I think as a cabinet minister, I'm sure you think this as well, Rory. You know, we are here by day, gone by night, generalists who arrive, not experts in our brief, but they're to challenge. And what you need more than anyone else is civil servants who are prepared to say, that is a crazy idea, Secretary of State, don't do it for these six reasons. And, you know, if you don't have civil servants doing that, you're going to end up coming a cropper pretty quickly. What did you think of a before you, you know,

when she became Prime Minister and you were going off to Brussels with your wife? What was your sort of sense of Liz trust. I remember I wrote a piece when she became leader. I said Kirstama might as well go home now. If she's Prime Minister, Labor at home. I just couldn't see anything other than a disaster for your party. So I was perfectly happy about that, but

I just wonder what your sense of her was. I didn't have that sense. I supported Rishi Sunak, and I respected her for being ballsy, and I understood what she was trying to do in the sense that, funny enough, as we're still talking about today with Kirstama and Rachel Reeves,

that the economy was in a state which needed radical surgery to get us back on our feet after COVID and the energy shock. So that I understood. But what I thought was a terrible mistake was the unfunded tax cuts in the mini budget, which caused interest rates to rise. Because I knew then, and I think this is probably what made you think that Kirstan was home and dry, that ordinary families would then forever blame us for their mortgage. is going up and I think that is what happened. Yeah. What did it tell us about the Conservative Party

that they voted for Lestruss-Truss-over Rishishishanek? I mean, I was supporting Rishishanak then, so again I was surprised. I wouldn't naturally have voted for Lestruss-Trust, but she actually won quite comfortably. What did that sense, about the sense of the spirit of the party? What was it that they saw in her that that made them prefer Lestruss-Trust to Rishi-Sunak?

I think what it's said is that still all these years on, you know, a decade after her death, we are still under the shadow of Margaret Thatcher because the current generation of people at the top of the Conservative Party grew up when Margaret Thatcher was at the height of her powers. And can you imagine if you are, you know, a right-wing, idealistic person at university to have a leader who is so...

so forthright about the ideals you believe in, so unapologetic. In practice, as we know, she was a lot more pragmatic than she let on, but her rhetoric was totally uncompromising. And it made everyone high. You know, it was an incredible thing. I think actually Jeremy Corbyn did the same thing to elements inside the Labour Party. But the difference was that Margaret Thatcher was a very successful Prime Minister, love her or loathe her. And, you know, one, three elections and did extremely well. So I think people saw in Liz Truss some of that Thatcher boldness.

What they didn't understand was that when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, she was actually incredibly cautious in her policy decisions and very conscious of the vulnerability of her position, which Liz Truss wasn't. She wouldn't have sat the Treasury Department Secretary of Day 1. Can I develop that once more, Jeremy? Because the other leadership contests that I got, I get many leadership contests wrong, but another one which I got dramatically wrong and felt

most painfully was you against Boris Johnson. And I hope most people listening to this will understand why I passionately wanted you to be Prime Minister and not Boris Johnson. And I actually found it very, very difficult to understand that the country would vote for Boris Johnson. I thought, look, on the base of my constituency, Cumbria, most people seem to say to me, yeah, okay, he's jolly, a bit of a buffoon, but he's. not really serious enough or suitable enough to be prime minister. And I really thought Britain's never going to vote for this guy to be prime minister. And yet they did.

I mean, was that not very painful for you to be not just beaten, but beaten by somebody like that? Did that not lead to a moment of sort of self-questioning? It was very painful. And I was very upset that he didn't keep me on as foreign secretary because I felt that I was doing an okay job there. He asked you to be defence. He asked me to be defence secretary, but, you know, in Whitehall terms, that was a demotion. And even though it's actually a very, very important job,

I felt that it was not the right start to our relationship that he was saying the very first thing I'm going to do to my runner-up. And who did he make Foreign Secretary? Dominic Robb. Oh, yeah. And so I was, you know, I was disappointed at that too. But in a way, Rory, I didn't really think in my hard of heart. that I had a good chance of winning, because I could see going round the hustings,

I could see the fact that I had voted Remain and the fact that we just had a Remainer Prime Minister, Theresa May, who had come a cropper and been unable to get her Brexit deal through Parliament, meant that I was very unlikely to win. So I suppose I was kind of resigned to that happening. It's interesting, though, because, I mean, Rory, I think, ruled out, said he just would never serve under Johnson government, but you would have stayed. if you asked you to be stolen as Foreign Secretary? Yes, I mean, I remembered Boris.

I worked very closely with him when he was Mayor of London and I was responsible for the Olympics. And look, this is going to sound a rather conceited thing to say, but he had this guy called Simon Milton around him who was quiet, gentle, smart and a fixer.

And he made the Boris machine work. And I suppose I thought, well, maybe I'll be that kind of person what I had not understood at all was that far from going for someone sensible and quiet and calm he went for Dominic Cummings in that same role so this was going to be a very different Johnson administration

I just wanted to develop this because that also revealed something about Johnson which is that a bit like there's a difference between Trump one and Trump two there's a huge difference between Boris Johnson's mayor and Boris Johnson as Prime Minister I mean, Boris Johnson's mayor was quite a kind of liberal, centrist, progressive. Boris Johnson's prime minister was going full out.

I mean, you know, to start with, he booted out people like me and Ken Clark and Nicholas Soames and David Gork out of the party pretty quickly, brought in Dominic Cummings. But then went all in on a very, very radical style of, you know, challenging parliament, challenging Supreme Court, trying to rewrite the ministerial code. He couldn't be prosecuted. I mean, and you were trying to also watch him handling COVID, which again, it seemed to me that he was sort of unusually poorly suited to because his style of politics isn't really about careful attention to detail,

looking at international data or any of this stuff. Was that when you were chairman of the Select Committee? Yeah. I think it was COVID more than Brexit that did for his premiership. And in the case of Brexit, we were in an appalling constitutional crisis. and I think you could make the case that it needed someone who was prepared to duck and weave to get us out of it

but there couldn't be someone less suited to being Prime Minister in a pandemic than Boris because this is a time for explaining to people calmly, some very difficult changes calmly, truthfully some very difficult changes in our daily lives and I think that he wasn't the right,

person in that role. In a way, for me personally, that was probably a slightly more difficult moment because with my background as health secretary, I really did think, you know, the pandemic would have been a moment which I would have felt more natural do. There is something I see as a link between the comments you made in our first episode with you when you were talking about the new politics of communication, the sort of slightly horrifying vision of Trump spending three hours every morning watching the news and tweeting. The sense that politics is all about communication, the game, which Boris Johnson was very good at. And the other side of politics, which is running things well, administering things quietly and professionally. And my anxiety is

that those things are connected. Oddly, the personality type that does the big, brash, good social media, celebrity stuff is very rarely suited towards the business of scrupulous, cautious, thoughtful, truthful administration. It's such an important point, but I am ultimately optimistic. We have had plenty of leaders in history who've managed to combine sensible, rational governing with brilliant communication. I mean, I would point to Reagan, Thatcher, Clinton, Blair, these are all people. Actually, David Cameron at his better moments, perhaps not quite so consistently as those other ones, but they did combine the two. Now, you need to. You need to, need both. And I think my argument to people who want, you know, rational government,

what is rational government, by the way? It's such a trite phrase. It's government that actually persuades people to endure short-term pain for long-term gain. Persuades a country, the value of deferred gratification and taking difficult decisions now because it'll be worth it in five or 10 years' time. That's what you need if you want a country to prosper. Now, pure populists, all they care about is getting votes. And there's an absolute disaster. So, The question we have to ask ourselves is how do we learn to marry those two elements of government, strong communication and strong government? And I think that Labour and Conservatives, both in their own way, have been failing to do that.

How do you think that would have dealt with Trump? She didn't like showmen, really. She didn't really like liars. she was although she was a woman she didn't necessarily believe in bringing on women but she didn't like misogynists

well I think the interesting thing about her is that I think she would have found a way to make it work and it would have been slightly different to the way Kirstama is finding to make it work but Trump respects strength and in the end

she never hesitated with Reagan to tell him where she disagreed with him in private, whilst giving him the strongest possible support in public. So I think it would have been a version of that. But I think she would have found it very difficult to support things like the big beautiful bill with the huge unfunded tax cuts because she was a housewife who believed that the bills had to add up. So there would have been some difficulties there, but I think she'd have had his respect

because of her basic strength. Jeremy, Alastair, let's take a quick break and back in a moment. Hi, everybody, it's Dominic Samarach 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'll live.

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 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. On just your time as Chancellor, so when Liz Trust did go, Rishi Sunnet came in, and you carried on,

and that was one of his first decisions. But by then, did you sort of feel that the Tory days were running out? And I just wonder what the, I'm fascinated by the psychology of that, because you could have thought it then, right, I've done my bit, I've helped them through,

and actually I'm now going to go off and do other things. But you decided to stay on be chancellor, And I just wonder what it's like to do that if you deep down and feel you're going to lose. So the first thing is that it's an incredible privilege to do that job because it is, you know, people say, which is the job that you enjoy the most? Without a shadow of a doubt, Foreign Secretary. You travel around the world, red carpets, private jets, a wonderful dinners, fascinating people, including Trump, by the way. It was a pretty fascinating guy to meet on a number of occasions.

nothing comes close in terms of enjoyment but in terms of power which is the other thing that people care about in politics apart from Prime Minister, Chancellor is where the power is and I felt it was an incredible privilege over two years to do all sorts of things that I had been wanting to do for years for example the NHS has never trained enough doctors and nurses

and I put in place a long-term workforce plan I was very worried about defense spending and, you know, I increased that to two and a half percent of GDP, you know, saying that we would honor the recommendations for the infected blood inquiry. In the grand scheme of things, these are relatively small things, but they actually really matter for individuals involved. And so it was a great privilege to do that. So I never worried what am I doing here. Right. But I did have a sense that the conservatives were going to lose. And I thought the best thing we can do in terms of winning again in the future

is to govern the country well in the time that we've got left for us and to take wise and sensible decisions. And maybe this is the moment to say why I think it is actually in everyone's interest, even listeners to this podcast who have never voted conservative, that the Conservative Party gets back on its feet. because I think it's really important if the country is going to succeed that we have a pro-business centre-right party and not a populist right-wing party.

And for all the sense that people like you, Alist, think of the Tories as the old enemies, actually it matters for the British body politic to have a party that is rooted in the business community. And many people in the Conservative Party have come from business like myself. And I think it's really important if we're going to have a successful economy that those instincts are represented in Parliament. I really worry that that voice is lost in America now.

And that lots of people who understand how business works are not seeing their voices heard in Congress when these crazy tariffs are being introduced. And so just as I think, It's a very good thing for Parliament to have a Labour Party with its roots in the public sector, people who've been in education, the NHS, poverty campaigners. That's very important. I think it's also true. And so why am I committed to the Conservative Party?

Why did I stand again? Why will I stand again if the party will have me? It's because as long as Parliament will have me, as long as my voters will have me, I will stand again. It's because I do think it's really important to have a centre-right party that, thinks and cares about wealth creation. Do you not worry at the moment that they're sort of swimming around rather naively in the same waters as Nigel Farage and thereby helping him? It is bloody tough.

I mean, when you've had the biggest defeat in your history and people have thrown you out, they're not going to suddenly have buyers remorse six months later and say we got that wrong. And so I don't think anyone would have done much better than Kemi Badernock. but what we haven't done yet and we now need to do is to be an opposition party that's offering solutions and that's when I think

the British political system works is when you have a government that's being challenged and an opposition that is championing actual solutions. Isn't part of the problem, of course, that Boris Johnson and Listras damaged the brand

in a very fundamental way? When we were in Parliament, together. The basic story, I think, was all the Tories would suggest, that labor was sort of well-intentioned, but not very pragmatic. And the Tories were, you know, could be accused of being nasty, but at least they were competent and they kind of managed the money well and they kind of made the tough decisions. And they were sort of, they would portray themselves as kind of, sort of serious, practical people. And the problem really with the Boris Johnson-Lis Trust's interlude is it kind of took that whole narrative away. The narrative which you sort of had with

Thatcher and Major and Cameron and even to some extent, May, was really, really damaged. And that's very difficult to rebuild. It's difficult, but it's not impossible. And I think that in some ways our brand was in a very bad way after the back-to-basics scandals of the 1990s that Alistair will remember very well. And Labor's brand was in a terrible place in the Corbyn years as well. And I think that what we have to remember is that in a general election, people are looking forward. And the question is, you know, are you offering solutions to the big problems the country faces? But that isn't enough. You've also got to have mastered communications in a social media age. And I will say that I don't think we're there yet in any of the mainstream parties.

honest Bob's really trying Roy and I did an event the other day with several hundred business people and we asked them they were all sort of grumbling quite a lot about the government and grumbling a lot about your party and not really that keen on Farage and what have you

but we asked them who they thought would win the next election and there was I'd say the winner was probably a Labour-led coalition was their thought but there was zero who thought the choice would win the next election Do you think that's realistic?

Well, I think, you know, we've, we had to have a year of penance, a year of silence, you know, it's pretty difficult to get out there in the media and win your argument when every good idea you have people say, well, you were in power for 14 years, why didn't you do it? And that is the standard stock response that I and my colleagues all get. But things move on really quickly in politics. And I think we shouldn't underestimate the capacity of things to change. And you've mentioned populism a couple of times. What do you think is the best way for, A, labor and B, the Conservatives under Kemi Badernock, to deal with the rise of reform? Well, first of all, you've got to be truthful to yourself and your values.

So if you try and be something you're not, it's never going to work. But secondly, I'm sorry to be challenging, and I'm sorry, by the way, to say this, or I'm embarrassed to say this to a comms expert like you, but I would say that if Kirstama was watching TV and on social media for a couple of hours a day, talking to people, doing stuff on, you know, with the regularity that Trump does, I think Nigel Farage would say, my God, he's changed. I want to give you one example, actually, from a few weeks back. Jumped out at me, there was a clip of Trump who had his head around the door of Air Force One.

I think it was a clip about Iran. And he was saying something like, you know, I think the time for negotiations is over. I'm fed up with them. And then he got on the plane. And I suddenly thought, I've never seen this before. The choreography of Air Force One has always been so tightly managed. You know, the president shakes hands with a few dignitaries, walks to the top of the steps, waves at the cameras, and then gracefully flies off. And here was a president with his head around the door that was open.

just giving the media a clip, inserting himself into every single news package that evening. And, you know, I think that's what Starmer should be doing. I think it's what Kemi Badox should be doing. I think we've got to get out there and be talking to people. But with substance, I mean, let's be clear. This is not about substituting a media strategy for substance. You've got to have both. No, because the thing we, Roy and I constantly say about Trump,

it's almost like watching a reality TV show. and it's compelling on one level, but it feels like bad governance. Listen, I'm not disagreeing. We talked about this in the first episode. I do think that all politicians can learn from the way Trump communicates, not about the lying. I don't want them to go down that road, but just it's fresh. It's interesting.

He says interesting things. He does it in an interesting way. And a lot of our politicians just come over as just a bit dull and a bit last generation. One thing that is interesting is you described yourself as a, young man as being maybe more on the Elon Musk vision of the world, the sort of doge vision of the world. And love and more hate him, his view of the world is shared by quite a lot of people. And I'd express it like this. Basically, the view is government is paralyzed. It's all stuck up. It can't get anything done for whatever reasons. Sort of yes minister, civil service, laws, processes.

is you just can't get anything done. And of course, that's fundamentally, I think, what Liz Trust felt about the world. I felt like she was my sexual estate when I was the junior minister, that there was this kind of blob. Now, you don't really, or you're not really expressing that view.

Am I right that you're not really expressing? Why not? Do you agree that a lot of the public basically feel that government is the problem and that you need to be much more radical and blow the whole thing up to get anything done? They do, and that's a big worry. The reason I said I was perhaps closer to Elon Musk

is just because I was a small state libertarian. It was in that sense, rather than in the sense of blowing up the establishment. My experience of civil servants is that they try incredibly hard to do what their elected masters ask them to do. I very rarely had a sense

that they were trying to thwart me or frustrate me in what I wanted to do. But you do need to keep at it and there is a risk aversion in the system. And the risk aversion normally comes from the politicians in number 10 who don't want too much noise. They don't want a secretary of state to have too many big battles. They want to keep things nice and calm. And that means that you can end up being overcautious in policymaking.

We absolutely do need to show people that our system of government works. And I think that we've got to answer in the last episode we talked about the challenge from someone like Xi Jinping. He would say, I don't think democratic. politics works because you're incapable of taking decisions for the long term. We've got to show that we can do that. And I think we do need some really big reforms to the plumbing and wiring of our democracies. But most of all, we need politicians who are prepared to make the argument for long-term changes and for the fact that we're not going to be able to solve problems overnight. Jeremy, let me just try this one more time and then back to Alasso. I did feel, and I guess we're

different personalities, I did often feel. in government, incredible frustration at how slow everything was, how something I'd asked to be done. You know, I'd say, please do this. And then weeks later, people come back in an options paper saying, here are four options. And I'm thinking, wait a sec, I already told you what I'd like you to do. I didn't ask for four options about this, right? But I suppose that's them trying to deal with the problem, the fact they disagree with me. But Theresa Mays at the moment often says in speeches that she thinks the fundamental challenge to democracy and to the Sanderground, is delivery. But none of us really look enough at whether our actual systems of

government are fit for purpose, whether there isn't a sense in which actually the whole thing doesn't quite work anymore. There are too many regulations, too many laws, too many processes, too much civil service structure, and it's just stopping practical things getting done. Well, we should absolutely do that. I think one of the reasons I really enjoyed reading your book, And I was trying to think, as I read it, Rory, why is it that my experience of government was so different to yours? And I think the main thing is that life is miserable for junior ministers. Because the whole of government departments revolve around the Secretary of State. And basically, junior ministers are an annoyance to officials.

And what I found was that most of the time, when I was health secretary, the biggest constraint on doing big, bold things. example, I wish I got rid of all the national targets, which we have in the NHS, which make it such a Stalinist system. But number 10 would never have had it. They would have said this is going to cause too much uproar. And so that was a constraint. But on the whole, if a politician who's a Secretary of State wanted to do things, if you had stayed longer in DIFID, for example, I think you would have absolutely been able to get Diffid operating in exactly the way that you wanted to do it. And then two successive governments would come along with cut all your funding. But I have to say, you are right. We have got to get our system and government working better.

Now, you know, a really good example is why on earth, if we want to build a nuclear power station, does it take five years before you can get final approval to build it? And then another 10 to 12 years after that, if there are no delays before it actually starts generating electricity. Why does it take so long to build HS2? I think if Parliament decides through an act of parliament with Royal Assent that we're going to do this project, then we've got to find a way of making it happen more quickly. And that would give people confidence that governments are actually able to do what we're electing them to do. I suspect Xi Jinping has been briefed by the Chinese embassy here about HS2

and he'll be using it everywhere as saying, you know, see what I see, democracy just doesn't work. This is maybe my final point. you end your book with a sort of letter to Keir Stahmer about long-termism. You said earlier you wanted him to succeed. And where I completely agree with you, I think there is a real danger that the governments that are in the sort of modern media democracies where the pressures are so great, social media has made it worse, it's really, really tough. I worry about the Gigi Jinping message.

I think it's not to be trifled with. And I think I worry about Trump in the same way. I think Trump doesn't really believe in democracy and the workers of democracy. So I guess my question is whether you think that overstates it, that the idea of dictatorship, autocracy, becoming a real threat to democracy, is something that we don't talk about and worry about enough. We should absolutely think about this very, very hard. In fact, you know, I think alongside climate change,

this is the biggest thing that future generations will judge us on. There is a global argument between autocracy and democracy. I have no doubt whatsoever that in the end, freedom and democracy will win. I mean, you know, we talk about a global migration crisis, but where are all these migrants trying to get to? They're trying to get to Europe and North America because they know in their bones this is a civilized way of running your societies for all our many faults.

my worry, Alistair, is that in the last century, freedom won, but it took us two world wars, a cold war and a holocaust to get there. In other words, we had to go through hell and back in order to get to the point where the Berlin Wall fell and people recognized the power of open societies. I think this time round, the question is whether we're going to be able to avoid tragedies on the way there. And how worried are you about Trump? Well, I think Trump is never going to champion democratic values. That's not his style. And because I believe in them and because fundamentally I think that Britain has pretty good economic fundamentals, I want us to form the strongest possible alliances with countries that share those values,

whether it's European countries or whether it's Japan or Australia or Canada. So that we are championing those values. And I think in the end, they have a lot going for them, not least that innovation tends to flourish where there's freedom of thought. Final one from me, Jeremy. When you came into the House of Commons in 2005, there were figles like Peter Tapsal in the House of Commons who'd been first elected in the 1950s. That's an incredible time range. People spent a long time in the House of Commons. But when I look at the first government you were in, the first David Cameron ministry and go down through the lists of Secretary's estate who are around that cabinet table with you, you're basically the last one standing.

It's David Cameron, gone, William Hay gone, George Osborne, Ken Clark, Theresa May, Philip Hammond, and on and on, Andrew Lansy, Michael Gove, Justin Green, and Caroline's film and etc. maybe not all gone, there may be a couple still left, but the core big celebrity figures of the Cameron governments, May governments, and actually quite a loss of the Boris Johnson governments have gone. What's happening? Why, in a sense, are you increasingly feeling that last man standing? And what's different about the way that you think about politics? Why do you seem to be a more becoming more of a sort of permanent parliamentarian when so many other people who were part of your intake have moved on. I'd like to be able to give you a wonderful piece of spin

and say it's my deep-rooted commitment to public service that has kept me there while others have fallen by the wayside. But in fact, there's a lot more chance to it than that. I mean, you know, I unexpectedly became Chancellor. And obviously, as Rishi-Syanax Chancellor, I had to fight the next election because otherwise it would look like I was a rat deserting a sinking ship. So I did that out of a sense of duty.

And then having decided I was going to stand, I had to fight bloody hard to win because everyone wants to win the races that they're in. But having been elected, I am actually enjoying doing something that you both do, which is writing. And I discovered that, you know, you think you know it all, as I said to Alistair earlier,

you think you know it all when you've been chancellor. You answer questions night and day about the economy. When you sit down and start to write a book, you realise you didn't know the half of it. And I find that a very, very rewarding process. And you know, the thing about Parliament is it has this very weird thing, which is actually what Kirstama and Rachel Reeves discovered when they had the welfare rebellion, that however big the government's majority, somehow it always attracts attention to itself and puts itself right at the centre of national life.

I don't know quite how it manages to do that, but I genuinely find it a totally fascinating place to be. So you are going to fight the election again? Yes, I will. Whether I'll win or not, I have no idea. And let me ask you this then, because at the moment, honest Bob is going around the place being sort of Littrazon, steroids and Instagram, and with those little films. But might you stand for the leadership again, ever? No. I think my wife would have something to say about that.

And look, I try three times. I think that's enough. Yeah. encourage you to think again because you're the one person would make me rejoin the Conservative Party and come in behind you. The thing is I'm the... That's the endorsement you don't want. I am the non-conservatives' favourite Conservative and that's why I never get chosen by

Conservative Party members. Well, listen, thanks for being so generous with your time. Pleasure. Thank you both. Thank you, Jeremy, very much. Have a great day. Bye-bye. So, Rory, there we are.

I mean, as with, what is it about former chancellors that we get them in and you didn't really want quasi. And I was thinking, oh, Jeremy Hunt's been flogging his book. Is he going to say anything really that interesting? So I was a bit reluctant about him. We ended up with both of them making them into two parties. I found that very, very interesting. I know he's still a politician, but he kind of, he really illustrates your point about when they're out of the front line. They can be much more reflective, much more thoughtful, much more interesting, I thought. Yeah, it's interesting. Quite a problem, isn't it? I wonder whether there's a way of making politicians more like that when they're actually still on the front line jobs.

Because, of course, part of what works about it is that he's not too party political. He's pretty good at saying, you know, I'm wishing West Streeting the best. I hope Kiyosama's going to succeed. I like what Rachel Reeves try to do there before he gets onto his disagreement, which you don't hear much of in frontline politics, presumably because they're worried in a very boring way that if they say something complimentary, it'll be thrown back at them across the floor of the House of Commons. Well, you said, you know, you thought, right?

You see, I think where he was right is that, you know, we talked about the Olympics, we talked about climate. I think the public do quite like it when politicians aren't just, you know, he would not be anything but a Tory. And he kept saying, I'm a Tory, I'll always be a Tory and all that. But he didn't feel the need that maybe I think you'd do in active permanent combat politics constantly to denigrate the other side. I was also struck by the fact that some of others, I think, will be very thrown off balance. I imagine, particularly those who are more on the left, by him beginning with that sort of unashamed, jolly conversation about being a great sort of Thatcherite undergraduate in love with Mrs Thatcher, president of the Oxford University Conservative Association, all that sort of thing. But it's also interesting the journey that he's been on, because at university, Liz Trust, was the head of the Lib Dem,

associated president of the Lib Dems at Oxford. And she went on a journey. The other direction has become more and more right-wing. She's now full over on the Maga Trump. He's gone from the Thatcher, right, right, back, as he said at the very end of it, towards being somebody closer to me, in other words, the conservative,

who non-conservatives like. Yeah, and so, you know, One Nation and all that. I just thought he was very reflective and interesting and fair about some of these things. And, you know, I came in armed with all sorts of, all sorts of stats about his dreadful record at the health department, the rest of it. I just found it interesting just to hear him being much more reflective about being a politician and about about being him.

Because the point you made at the end there about how long serving is and what have you is that he's not just that he's seen so many people go. He's seen so many different stages and different colors, if you like, of conservatism. They just sort of, you know, keeps going. Yeah. the thing that I would have pushed him on if I'd been being tougher, and maybe I should be self-reflective, that having been overly tough with Gabrielle Atal, I was too soft probably on Jeremy, partly because he's a friend and partly because I'm desperate to have some sort

of vision of a conservative party I can get behind. I guess if I was being grumpier and more combative, I would want to know why he didn't achieve more radical reform when he was in those different jobs. And he pointed to that. Fair enough. He said, you know, I regret the fact I didn't manage to get rid of all these targets when I was the health secretary. But he did run that department for seven years. He was the chancellor for two years. He was the foreign secretary of years. Why is it having been right at the very top of government for so long? He wasn't able to achieve the sort of stuff that he thinks needs to be done. And I wonder, and this is unfair of me to raise it at the end of it, whether he in government isn't maybe a little bit, and maybe this is what I was getting

up with my Musk questions, maybe he is at some level a little bit too reasonable. And maybe there's a gap between what he thinks needs to be done and his real willingness to drive through. I noticed that the big success he kept trumpeting was education, which of course was Michael Gove, who's a more kind of radical figure. And also that was, again, I could have come back loads about the story's record and education, but I just didn't want to get into a kind of, you know, slangy match about that and record against record. But I think it also relates to the point you made right at the start about leadership, whether you want it enough. I've only ever had a couple of sort of little minor spats with him, but I've, I think he is

reasonable, I think he's genuinely a reasonable person who now comes over as being much more reasonable because he doesn't feel he has to sort of tow the party line. And even though he is perfectly obviously, he doesn't really think that Kevin Ostrategies working and he, I'd suspect he doesn't really get too excited the idea of Bob Jenric being leader of the Conservative party. But even on that, he's sort of fundamentally loyal. You know what he's thinking and saying, but he's not going to give you headlines. Just a final thing for me, because I keep inflicting Tory colleagues and friends on you. I've inflicted on you, uh, Sajit Javid and Adam Sahawi quasi-quoting.

No, I inflicted quasi-quarteng on you, Rory. You invited quasi-on-me. I got him on the tube and you said no. What do you think looking at all those people that you've seen coming in and out, is there a gap between how you as a good kind of tribal labour person perceived all these horrible Tory cabinet ministers from a distance and how they actually come across in front of a microphone? Or what's your sense of them as a kind of group? Well, I guess a bit like him, because I'm sort of really interested in politics and what politics is about.

I like it. I like talking to people who've been through a lot and who talk about it in a genuinely reflective way. And actually, in his own way, Kwazi Quatteng was very, very reflective about, you know, talking very, very differently to the way that Jeremy Hunt just did. I still find it difficult that anybody, particularly a young man who could sort of be in love with Margherty. Thatcher, I find that quite a hard sort of leap across. But, you know, he comes from a very different sort of background. He's got very different sorts of views.

But I think they've all been interesting. I don't mind talking to people of different politics. And I think that what I was surprised about with him, I think, was, in front of somebody that I see socially said that they'd heard Jeremy Hunt on something else, I don't know what, and said, God, if only he'd talk like he talks today, I think, you know, he might have become Prime Minister. And this relates to the point he's making about Trump, you know, in the way that Trump communicates. And he's got, there's something in there.

I think we were slightly talking across purposes. I thought he was saying, you know, we should sit down and watch television all day. He was basically saying that Kirstarman should think much more about public opinion and then get himself on the television all day. Well, Alist, thank you so much for that. And that was fun. Thank you. Bye. Bye-bye.