The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 150. Nicola Sturgeon: What Really Happened In The Scottish Referendum (Part 2)

Episode Date: August 24, 2025

How did the media and Westminster impact the Scottish Referendum? Why are spin rooms "utterly pointless" in Nicola's view? Is misogyny in politics as bad as it used to be, or getting worse due to social media? Rory and Alastair are joined by Nicola Sturgeon for part 2 of their interview to answer all these questions and more. Visit HP.com/politics to find out more. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus: Start your FREE TRIAL at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, an exclusive members’ newsletter, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Josh Smith Assistant Producer: Alice Horrell Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen 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 therestispoletics.com. This episode is sponsored by HP. Now, Rory, I hear that Windows 10 is finally being put out to pasture this year. It is, and something pretty relevant for you, Alistair, given what I've seen as some of your technology. It's going on October the 14th, to be exact. And after that, Microsoft is going to be able to, stop supporting some of those old laptops of yours. No updates, no security patches. So if you were still using it or a business was still using Windows 10, it would be really exposed to cyber threats, for example.

It would be like locking the door, but leaving the key in the lock. So it's time to move on, and HP are making that refreshingly straightforward. Yes, they are. HP's latest business PCs comes with Windows 11 Pro as standard. They're faster, more secure built for the AI tools, which are already reshaping the way we work. And you don't have to figure out all in your own. HP's business advisors help you pick the right kit, so no baffling jargon, just practical advice. And here's the bonus. Restis Politics listeners get 10% off business PCs at HP.com using the code Trip10 Terms Apply. So unlock efficiency and innovation, upgrade to Windows 11 Pro PCs with HP and get 10% discount.

Visit HP.com slash politics to find out more. Welcome back to Restless Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. me, Alastair Campbell, this is for part two of our interview with the former First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon. Nicola, we left part one talking about Alex Salmon. And just before we go back into that, maybe just take us a step back to the independence referendum. You were telling Rory about where you felt Salmon was good tactically.

My big worry, as somebody who was on the other side of the argument to you, was actually I got the sense that Salmon ran rings around Cameron in terms of framing the whole thing, 16 and 17 year old votes, the question, the timing of the question. That was an example to me of these pretty effective tactical operations. And can I do a very, very quick explainer for international listeners? So we're now coming into 2014. The SMP has been pushing hard for independence, obviously from the creation of the party, but particularly since the creation of Scottish government. And David Cameron takes what, for many of us, I was then in the Parliament in Westminster, that seemed like an enormous risk, which was to agree that there would be a referendum. And this time,

referendum would have allowed Scotland to go independence if it got a majority in that vote, whereas the votes in the 1970s had required a higher bar to cross for independence. And it felt like a very, very close thing. And it felt, as Alice says, as though Alex Hamer was very clever in setting the terms of this referendum, which felt as though it was continually disadvantaging the unionist side, right? That's my little explainer, which Nicol, you'll probably disagree with my explainer anyway. Over to you for an answer. I don't disagree with that. I don't think it's the whole story of the referendum. If we go back to David Cameron's decision to say yes to a referendum, which would take away

any legal wrangling over whether the Scottish Parliament did or did not have power to do it unilaterally, in that moment, and that was the moment David Cameron took us a little bit by surprise, we hadn't expected him to do that when he did it. So we briefly were on the back foot and suddenly thought, because at that point we didn't know whether he was going to say you can have a referendum, but you have to have it in three months' time. And so suddenly we thought, oh my

goodness, we're not ready for this and yet we might be about to be rushed towards the point of decision. But we quickly regrouped and Alec was always really good in these moments and through different devices we kind of rested

the initiative back, got into a process of negotiation which from sort of late 2012 I was in charge of with Michael Moore on the other side of the debate that led to the Edinburgh Agreement. And in the Edinburgh Agreement, we effectively, in terms of the process of the referendum,

we kind of got everything we wanted. You know, we got to set the date, subject to electoral commission approval, we got to set the question, we were allowed, or we won the argument over votes for 16 and 17-year-old. So in terms of how that was then shaping up and processed terms,

we were delighted with how, that was. I think to move on from process to substance, we were always at a disadvantage. There was a sort of institutional and I guess it might always be this when you've got a battle between the status

quo and an argument for big change, that the status quo has always got a bit of an advantage because it's the devil people know whether or not they like it or not, they know it whereas people who are arguing for change as we were are always kind of

having to get people to sort of accept the unknown and the unprovable in things. There was definitely a sense, and this was through UK government, I would say through the BBC and a lot of the British media, that anything David Cameron or the president of the European Commission or the President of the United States said was taken as gospel, anything we said was assertion and couldn't be trusted. So there was an institutional imbalance there, in light of which the fact that we came as close is probably actually a bit of a triumph.

You do admit, though, in the book, Nicola, that you feel that you were weak on the issues of currency, what would happen to the pound, weak on defence, weak on nuclear weapons. And it struck me as odd. Yes, I get it. Cameron threw down the gauntlet, took you by surprise. But I was genuinely surprised, both at the time and now reading your book, that you hadn't done more work on those questions. And are they not the questions that are going to haunt you again if another referendum comes? Can I just quickly come on the back of this?

Because I don't know whether you remember, Nicola, but you very kindly came in front of my parliamentary committee in 2014, where I was grilling you on foreign affairs, defence, security. And I remember this quite long, I think it was in the Assembly rooms in Edinburgh, but a very, very long session where you were having to try to answer questions on exactly how many embassies Scotland was going to have abroad, how much funding you'd put into your intelligence services, etc. Let me try and as candidly as possible answer this.

I think at the outset, when the referendum debate went from being kind of almost hypothetical, big picture into, well, there's definitely going to be a referendum. So the level of scrutiny and the granularity of scrutiny went up several gears. We were playing catch-up, I think, in the sort of preparation on some of these big questions. I think we got ourselves into a much stronger place. but that stronger place was always going to be a difficult place to argue what were essentially in advance unprovable things. Scotland will keep the pound.

Now, I will argue to my dying day that had there been a yes vote in the referendum, there would have been an accommodation around a currency union. Now, what the price of that might have been for an independent Scotland is up for debate, but I believe there would have been. I also believe an independent Scotland would have been able to negotiate independent membership of the European Union. But convincing people of that in advance was always going to be really difficult.

Add into that the sense of, you know, the referendum was effectively a choice between, you know, what will happen on take EU membership. It should have been a debate about what will happen to EU membership if we stay in the UK versus what will happen if we vote for independence. Instead, it was all of, you know, what would happen if we stayed in the UK

was treated as neutral and benjamin. and all the risk goes on the independence side. Now, in retrospect, you can see how unfair that was because on EU membership, it was actually rejecting independence that ended up with his out of the EU, not the opposite. So there was just a structural imbalance in the debate. Now, maybe inevitably, maybe it can't be any other way. And I think given that, although the outcome was devastating for people like me,

in some ways, when you think about it in those terms, that we got so close to a different outcome is actually remarkable and a tribute to the strength, not just not of the political leadership necessarily, but of that grassroots democratic awakening in Scotland that blossomed over that summer into referendum day. I was passionately on the union side and remained very much on the union side, but I felt another challenge that you had is that, that nationalism was beginning to develop a bad name, because this is the beginning of the rise of populism, this is the beginning of the rise of right-wing nationalist parties and parts of Europe. And so an independence referendum, which was about dividing people, making a country smaller, saying, us and them, could always be characterized by people like me in terms of what people don't like about nationalism. And of course, you had a very different vision of nationalism, didn't you, had a vision of civic nationalism, which wasn't really like that. But were you

conscious of that problem that nationalism was beginning to develop in a broader global context, a more difficult name, even if your type of nationalism wasn't like that? So I think that's something we, and certainly I have always been conscious of. I don't think that became a bigger issue in the referendum campaign. I think had the referendum been a year later, that would have been different, but I think at that point it wasn't really. But that was something that had always, been a worry because the Scottish independence movement, the SNP, is not a nationalist party in the sense that you have described and that we see in many parts of the world today. And of course, in many of these countries, these nationalist parties are not, you know,

they're not fighting independence campaigns. It's about a vision of the country that is. Evers is a civic movement. It's about self-government. You know, it's in the context of this debate, ironic that the SMP is probably the most pro-immigration party in the UK. I say that without fear of contradiction. We wanted Scotland to remain in the European Union. So the nationalist movement in Scotland is not just civic in the sense of it doesn't matter where you come from. If you live in Scotland, you have a stake in our country.

But it is deeply internationalist in terms of independence is, yes, about making Scotland a better place domestically, but it's also about Scotland playing a bigger role in the world. So that's always been something that we fought to define and to avoid some of the more negative connotations of nationalism globally. I've said before, and I'd say again, if I could go back to the founding of the SNP, I wouldn't call it the Scottish National Party, because I think that name conjures up some of that stuff that is not justified, but can't do that, obviously. But I don't think that was a huge issue in the referendum campaign. I think what, and I'll just speak personally here, I think what I didn't take enough account of

was the kind of emotional impact on the part of people who opposed independence of this sense that it was part of their identity that they were at risk of losing. And I look back and feel a bit ashamed that I didn't pay enough attention to that, not in the sense of changing my mind, but being more sensitive to that. And it wasn't until Brexit, ironically, when I felt a part of my identity, European identity, was being taken away that I really understood that. And that was my deficiency, I think, looking back. That's really interesting you say that about the name. I can give you the exact date, March the 14th, 2014. The reason I know that's the date is the day that Tony Bend died. And I was in Aberdeen with Alex Salmon doing an interview for GQ,

where if you remember, he said some silly things about Vladimir Putin. I remember this interview well. What did he say? Tell us what he said. He basically talked about how we admired Putin and whatever you said about Putin is a strong leader. And it was massive in Scottish politics for days and days and days and days. We had this very long interview and then we had dinner. And he said to me, if we get independence, by the way,

I'd like to get some of you kind of Anglo-Scott's involved in the sort of process of transition, blah, blah, blah. And I said, well, I think to get independence, you know, the first thing you should do should change the Labour of your party. I think you should get rid of national and make it about internationalism as well as independence. But anyway, that never happened. The other thing that came through in your account of the referendum campaign, you became what became known as the yes minister. Your job essentially became winning the argument for independence and also for doing the kind of the big draft white paper.

And there's a very interesting account of Alex phoning you from Hong Kong. Sounds like he's a bit the worse for where. and you are reduced to tears by the fact that you seem to be carrying all the way of the work that you're doing. And you have what feels to me like a pretty bad panic attack. Is that right? Yeah. The first time in my life, I remember having what I would describe as a genuine panic attack. It was, you know, just a matter of weeks before the white paper had to go to print the white paper.

And I think, and I would say this, I think we did a really good job in the white paper. Whatever people think about, you know, the content of it, I think we put out. out there, something that was a pretty weighty prospectus for how independence could be achieved and what it would deliver. It was bloody long, remember that. It was very long. But it was trying to do so many things in the same document. It was a really, really tough task to get it from conception through to publication.

I had a big team working with me in the Civil Service, but I was personally, very personally invested in it. I was reading every draft myself, kind of rewriting bits of it myself. and by the end of this process, it took hours and hours and hours just to read it from start to finish. And I reached this point where I just, I had this sense of impossibility. I can't get it from where it is just now to where it needs to be

and it goes to print in a few weeks. And I remember, you know, sort of ended up on the floor of the room I'm in right now, actually, crying and struggling to breathe. And it was just this way of responsibility of having to get this document that I felt, and I think to some extent this proved to be the case, would be really pivotal in how the rest of the campaign would unfold. And Alec at that point, he was first minister, so maybe that this was justified, he was, you know, running the country, but he wasn't taking much to do with the white papery. Allick didn't really properly engage

in the referendum campaign until probably after the Commonwealth Games that summer, so quite late summer. I knew I had to get him to he was the person who had to effectively sign it off before it went to print. He hadn't read it. I knew I had to get him to read it and just at the point of knowing that I was going to have to force this, he told me it was often a trade

mission to China. And I'm like, how am I? How in earth am I meant to get him to read this thing when he's pissing off to China? And he said, I'll read it on the plane, Nicola. And I'm like, yeah, until you have the first glass of in-flight champagne and then about, you know, we were faxing.

copies of this to China. I'm like, you know, he's probably under covert surveillance. That was sensible. I know what, but we had no choice. So the Chinese, you before we did, what was going on? They probably did. But it was, you know, looking back, but anyway, the sort of the low point of this was, because as well as having to do, I was having to stand in for a McPherson's questions. On this particular day, the MOD had done a big announcement around shipbuilding, which was actually about reducing shipbuilding in Scotland, but it turned out to be. be more of a problem for the yes campaign than the no campaign. You know, my constituency

interests meant, you know, I knew a lot about shipbuilding. There had been a shipyard in my constituency for much of my time in Parliament. So I'm getting ready to go down to the chamber to do First Minister's questions for Alec and the phone rings and it's Alec. He'd spent the afternoon at horse racing in Hong Kong. He was not sober and he just phoned helpfully to give me a few tips for First Minister's questions. I think I told him to F off and put the phone down. And yet, you see, the other thing that's interesting. You admitted that, you know, because I remember at the time seeing you and some of your people and you said, oh, we've got this button down, we've got that button down. Oh, we did. I mean, we did. But it was, what was going on behind the scenes was

much, much tougher. I'm glad you admitted in the book that, and I'm really pleased about this, because I was involved on the other side in this one, that Alistair Darling wiped the floor, that's your phrase, wiped the floor with him in the first debate. And you were then, and you describe yourself in the spin room saying how well Alex did while crying inside. Haven't you there by expose the utter pointlessness of these spin rooms? They're utterly pointless. I'm not an advocate of spin rooms. I've not because more of my experience has been doing the debates rather than being in the spin room of the debates. But, you know, I've been in a spin room at debates probably less than a handful of times.

This was the most miserable experience I had ever had in one. And it was that sense of, I thought in that moment we had blown the whole thing. Because at that point, it was still an uphill struggle, but there was a sense of, a growing sense of possibility that maybe, just maybe we could pull this off. And in that moment, it felt we'd blown the whole thing. It didn't turn out to be the case. The polls didn't, you know, show a hemorrhaging of yes support. But, you know, that was just a, it's a moment in the referendum campaign appeared. I will never, and I don't have the opportunity now to work out what was going on.

but I wasn't allowed to take part in any of his debate preparation. I'd been doing most of the debates by this point. And I thought, well, you know, I've got a good sense of what's coming at is, what works best in our, but I was frozen out for reasons that I didn't understand at the time and don't understand to this day. But there you go. That is all history. It's so refreshing to be able to talk honestly about these things now that everybody's left politics.

But I just wondered sort of going behind the scenes, what it felt like to be on the other side. So if I think back to, as I say, you may not remember it very well, but we had you in Edinburgh in front of our committee. And I was asking grumpy questions about the intelligence service. And Frank Roy, who for listeners, was a longstanding member of parliament in Motherwell, who'd been a steel worker and a Scottish plant. And Ming Campbell, who was on the committee with me, who'd been a sort of Scottish national legend as an athlete. And then later you get much bigger guns like Gordon Brown making these kind of big speeches. What was your sort of sense of this? Did you feel that people were being unfair?

Did you feel that these were biased unionists? Did you feel these were men patronising you? What was your emotional experience of these kinds of encounters? So we felt, I felt, you know, it was a David and Goliath situation. And we were the underdogs. We were, you know, the kind of upstarts against the whole weight of the British establishment. and of course there were other voices from outside Britain weighed in, President of the Commission, Obama, you know, Pines at some point. So we felt absolutely that we had this, you know, massive weight, establishment weight against us.

There was also a sense that they were, you know, every fear and smears. It wasn't on the no side that debate, you know, the issues were being debated in a proper, realistic sense. It was a fear campaign. And, you know, the no campaign referred to itself as project fear. So, you know, and you talk about Gordon Brown's big speeches, and he made some very influential speeches in the course of that. I'm not knocking Gordon here. But he was one of the voices that decided to argue the case that people in Scotland

would not be able to watch Doctor Who if we voted for independence. So there was a sense of just trying to scare people. I think it was EastEnders. Well, that makes it okay then, Alison. I take it all back. It was EastEnders instead of Doctor Who. I'm not sure that is the germane point at the heart of this debate. But anyway, so there was, and you know, you won't get to use the pound.

You'll get chucked out of the European. And actually that started to play in our favour because people started to feel insulted that intelligence and sense of self was being insulted. And there started to be a sense of, well, if in the UK we are so, we have no rights to shared assets, we have no right to determine our own future then actually, what good is this union doing us? So it played in our favour. And that's, we reached a point, I think,

where once people decided to vote yes, there was no shifting them. So Alex, the first debate performance where in the moment, I thought this is going to be disastrous, people are going to, you know, hemorrhage away from yes. That didn't happen. People were solid once they made that decision. I think what we didn't do effectively enough,

obviously because we lost and things like the debate performance just not being able to be convincing enough because we were trying to prove the unprovable on the big issues. We didn't get enough or a fast enough momentum from the soft no to yeses. We got some of the way but we didn't get quite there and that was partly our own feeling but partly it was because of that weight of you know that the sky will fall in if Scotland votes to be independent. So the fight a week of the campaign, you know, the banks all, I think, probably under significant pressure from the Treasury were all pressed to come out and say, we'll leave Scotland if there's a yes vote. So that weight of everything being against us was definitely felt emotionally and practically.

But in some way, you know, as an underdog often will, it allowed us to really rally and rally our troops as well. Yeah, and also then Project Fear in the Brexit campaign, quite far badly. so they didn't really, Cameron and Osborne read the lessons of winning rather than the lessons of what went well and what didn't. In the hours after the result in 2014, Cameron's pronouncements on the doorstep of number 10 about English boats for English laws,

that was, I mean, from our perspective, brilliant and it helped fuel that post-referendum sense of Scotland's not being put back in its box, but from Cameron's point of view, the most tone-ref speech in a crowded field, the most tone deaf speech I've ever heard. It sounded as if he was punishing Scotland for daring to dream as opposed to saying,

OK, we've heard that you might not think the union is working great for you. How do we make it better? You said in the book that you had an inflated sense of optimism ahead of polling day. And as the campaign he finished, you said, this is in the book. When I got home to Glasgow, I had a glass of wine and cried.

It's quite a lot of tears in this book, Nicola. I'm one of life's criers, which is one of the things people probably don't think about. Right. Okay, Nicola, Alistair, quick break. and then back for more. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers, The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

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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. any resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain

feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise. People are arguing about Europe. The government has got a few issues with the trade unions. And we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues and people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. And we'll be talking about the very

first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alice. we'll 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. Hello, I'm Gordon Carrera, National Security Journalist, and I'm David McCloskey, former CIA analyst or novelist. And together, we're the co-hosts of another Goalhanger show. The Rest is Classified, where we bring you the best stories from the world of spies and secrets. We have just released an absolutely cracking new series on the infamous Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, how the U.S. spent decades fighting a war on drugs to bring his cocaine empire to justice. By 1989, Escobar was the seventh richest man in the world, wealthier than the entire state of

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If this sounds good, we'll have to clip for you at the end of this episode. Following on from first referendum, The time I was most scared, to be honest, is when Boris Johnson became prime minister. And we came into 2020. And I and many of my conservative colleagues in Scotland felt this is it. We're in real trouble because we've got a Tory government. We've got Boris Johnson as prime minister who was horrendously unpopular in Scotland. We'd had Brexit that Scotland had voted against.

We had a massive, large, motivated SMP base. You as First Minister were riding higher than any. first minister in history. It seemed at that point that there was no way of avoiding a referendum and that you were very probably going to win. And then it didn't happen. Why didn't it happen? Why didn't you get it across the line the second time? If we had secured a referendum, we would have won that referendum. And that, you know, that can't be disproved because it didn't happen. But I believe with every fibre of my being, that would have been the case. And therein lies the answer to the question, why did we not secure a referendum? Because Westminster just

decided it wasn't going to let it happen. Just to interrupt, because again, to bring people back to that, certainly the view of Scottish Tories was that Westminster wouldn't be able to prevent it. And our advice to Boris Johnson, which turned out to be wrong from the unionist point of view, was you're going to have to grant a referendum. You can't have a situation where Westminster refuses to grant. I think ultimately that will prove to be the case. I don't think in any democracy, people can be prevented forever from making a choice

that enough people want to make. But in that moment, and this was a question that had never been definitively answered, you know, could the Scottish Parliament have done it unilaterally, or did it legally need, you know, Westminster to exercise the power or transfer the power that has now been, you know, answered through the Supreme Court, which actually in some ways is better for the independence movement because we've got a sense of reality rather than delusion about what is possible. And we know that we have to build the case and strengthen the pressure for a referendum.

and for that to happen. But in that moment, I think it was easy for the Tories just to say no. What was the price of that? There wasn't much of a price to be paid. We were, they could play into the sense that they had created of, well, there's chaos around Brexit. So we don't want to, you know, we don't want to add to that at the moment. And then, of course, COVID comes along and there's a sense that, you know, for that reason, it's not the time to do this.

So they found that politically, they were able just to say. say no. Now, I don't think that will sustain forever. The task for my party and those on my side of the argument is to sooner rather than later get to a point where that position for any Westminster government is politically unsustainable. And looking back, do you think there might have been a couple of things you could have done differently, that you could have gambled more, used that incredible momentum and position you had in a slightly different way to get it across the line? In short, yes, there must have been things I could have done differently because I I gambled more. The thing is I don't know what that means and I've searched my soul over what that means.

Gambling more would have been to say, right, I don't care what you say Theresa May or Boris Johnson. I'm going to start the process of legislating for an independent referendum. I think I would have struggled to get that past my law officers at the time because of the legal position. But say I had managed to do it. It would have ended up in court because it would have been challenged. and we would have got to where we got to with the Supreme Court anyway. So gambling more, yeah, it might have made people feel better in the moment. Would it have actually delivered a different outcome?

I think that is a much more open question. You know, we have a fundamental issue that we have to reckon with, which is the Scotland Act reserves the constitution and with it, the determination of whether or not there's going to be a referendum to Westminster governments. Now, my party had got into the point of believing is, well, actually, if I was just braver,

if I was just, you know, more able to sort of give two fingers to Westminster, that would change. Well, we couldn't just magic that away. We can't just magic that away. What we've got to do is shift the political balance of advantage and disadvantage. We have to not just get to the point where a majority of people in Scotland clearly want independence, but they want it badly and urgently enough that there is a sense that Westminster can't stand in the way of that. And that sounds like, you know, long, hard work.

And it is hard work and how long it is depends on how well we do it. But there's no magicing it away. And I wish there was. I wish there was some other way I could have found to get round the legal reality. But I'm not sure there is a way to get around. In fact, I'm pretty certain there's not. You were there almost a decade. You dealt with five British conservative prime ministers.

You dispense with Liz Truss in about a third of a sentence. So we don't need to waste too much time on that. I get the feeling. Just tell me if this is right. You quite like Cameron. You had a lot of respect for Theresa May, but you couldn't really build a rapport. You thought Rishi Sunat was a little bit out of touch.

And you thought Boris Johnson was a complete and total charlatan. Does that about sum it up? I think it's a reasonable summary. Cameron was the one I got on easiest with and I think that was partly the kind of eating charms of and yeah I quite liked him we had our moments of

we disagreed in a lot but we had some moments of shouting at each other and such like but I always got on well with him Teresa was undoubtedly of the five prime minutes as I interacted with the one that seemed to me to take the job most seriously you know was always on top of our brief new what she was about

and she would say the same about me maybe so it's not all one way it was just impossible to build a report and that frustrated me at times because I instinctively thought her and I should have been able to build a better rapport and undoubtedly my failing as much as hers but it wasn't possible

Rishi I didn't really have much to do with Rishi because I stood down not long after he became Prime Minister Liss Trust well we know what happened to Liss Trust Boris, you know, a message, something emerged during the COVID inquiry where I had in a message to one of my advisors called him an effing clown. I mean, it wasn't the most polite way of describing somebody,

but he's a clown, a charlatan, somebody who should never in a month of Sundays been anywhere near Downing Street. And there was nothing about how Boris approached the job that said he took it remotely seriously. Everything for him was reduced. just to an opportunity for a gag. And that basically was my experience of them. And yeah, I don't know.

Maybe some people have got different experiences, but that was mine. Given all that, and that's a pretty strong statement, how on earth did he manage to become Prime Minister? I mean, what does it tell us about British politics? I mean, because everything you've described would suggest that British public, who basically, and we believe in democracy and have a certain amount of common sense, would never vote for someone like that.

So what does it tell you about the world that someone like that can... become prime minister? In Scotland, of course, we didn't vote. I mean, obviously some people did, but in Scotland we didn't vote for them. I think, you know, why is Trump president? I think, and I think for progressives, people on the left of politics, I think there's some really big questions that we have to ask ourselves that there are, and arguably I was able to do this from a very different political perspective than these guys of kind of just tune in to the kind of sense of a population and make them feel, and in my case I hope it was genuine, that you're kind of one of them and on their side and there's a sort of authentic connection. But people

that Boris and Trump are doing that and how are they doing that? We have to ask ourselves that because they are in many ways, you know, both Boris and Donald Trump are the polar opposite of being, you know, of the people that are voting for them in many ways of the examples of. The examples of the problems of the financial and economic elites that have done so much damage. But I think there is a straight, and I always tried as a leader to speak straightforwardly. It's what I tried to do during COVID. People could agree or disagree with me, but I try to communicate clearly and directly. And I think they do that as well. And I think there is something, if you listen to the likes of, and I'm not, I don't want to single out here, Starmar and have a go at him gratuitously here, but you listen to people like Kier Starmor.

And you get to the end of his sentence and think, what was he saying? What was he trying to say? Because it's all buzzwords and political jargon and it's all mangled up a bit. And so I think there is, and obviously the problems of the world right now are much more than communication. But I think politicians on the left, they're trying to ape the Trumps and the Johnsons of this world rather than offer an alternative. And then even when they're trying to offer an alternative,

They're not able to communicate it in a way that people are able to relate to and connect with. Your publisher must have been delighted, though, that Trump had a little whack at you as he left Turnberry golf club last, the last time he was there. Well, I was quite delighted. I suspect he'll be on the paperback cover. Back to your point about you, you love Alan Johnson. I'm with you on that one. I'm with you on that too, and I agree with you on Boris as well.

Well, we both, most of our listeners. In fact, I'm very shocked that both of you've called him Boris. you must never call him Boris. Jim Murphy, you can't stand. You like Mark Dreyf and Carwin-Jones, very fond of Martin McGuinness. I think we've got to give you a little shout-out for your analysis of Nigel Farage.

While I found him every bit as odious in person as he appears on TV, it also seemed to me that underneath the bombast is a brittle, fragile ego. He seems very insecure, especially around women. And then you've got lots of interesting observations about sexism and misogyny throughout the book. And maybe this is a way back into Alex Salmon

before we kind of get towards the end of this. I mean, it's so ingrained and embedded that women, or maybe everybody, but certainly speaking for myself, you don't always recognise it as sexism and misogyry because you kind of internalise it as just how the world is. And, you know, I'd tell a story in the book about a kind of episode of that I suffered from an MSP of another party in the early days of the Scottish Parliament of effectively sexual bullying. but it took me until 2017 in the wake of Me Too

when the Scottish Parliament was doing a survey of staff and members it took me till then to actually recognise what that had been back at the time I just thought well that's what you have to put up with in politics because that's rough and tumble that's how it is Are we allowed to tell the story or would you rather we didn't? I don't mind you can tell it though I still feel mortified by it So basically this is a guy who spread the rumour

that Nicola had injured a boyfriend whilst performing oral sex and gave her the nickname Nasha. I don't know whether he started the rumour or gave me the nickname. Well, he certainly spread it. I don't know whether he was the source of it, but he took great delight in spreading it.

Yeah. And then you also had this situation with a very good friend of mine who I've known since way back when I was doing my job with Tony and she was doing the same job with Shirak, and that's Catherine Collina, who then became ambassador.

to the UK and this rumours spread. And you seem to indicate you think this may have been the Russians that you and she were involved in this lesbian relationship. I don't know. I just have often wondered, because it was an episode I won't go into just now in the 2015 election of a story that came out of a discussion between me and a French ambassador, a different French ambassador.

And I just often wondered, is this some kind of bot factory that's taking all these little ingredients and throwing up the story that had no basis, in fact, at all, that Catherine and I were having this relationship involved at one point the suggestion we'd bought a house from Judy Murray and we were living in there

and people, you know, if that had just been a social media rumour, I probably would never have heard it, but my family were being asked about it. My neighbours were, you know, asking about it. But going back to misogyny and sexism, I mean, that's undoubtedly an aspect of that. Women in politics

are treated differently to men in almost every respect. You know, we, the focus on what we wear, how we look, the tone of our voice, things in men that are seen as attributes of leadership and in women, their character flaws. And that different treatment was true when I was growing up in politics.

It is still true today. And then you add in the factor of social media and the toxicity of social media. And I think while there are more women in politics today, I think the sense of public life being a bit of hostile environment for women is actually greater today than it was in my earlier days in politics. I bring together your point about the age of Trump and your points about women and sexism. You were a real champion of some of the big progressive causes of the 2000s.

You really defined yourself around issues like climate justice, immigration, and you were a big campaigner for trans rights. and these are things which now in the age of Trump feel a bit sort of abandoned. I mean, you'll get even Friends of Alistair on the left saying the Democratic Party could have won if it hadn't lent so hard into those issues. And that actually what they need to do is move away from those issues become more relevant to everyday voters, right? And that often means the progressive left basically not talking very much about climate, not talking about immigration, not talking about trans issues. It's a reflection on that. And do you sometimes fear that your form of... Progressivism, a bit like, I guess, my anxieties about my form of centristism, is being a bit

kind of sidelined and left behind by bigger historical trends. I absolutely fear that. I think that's, you boil everything down. And my biggest worry about the state of democracy, the state of humanity right now, is that these issues that I think are so vital, you know, the planet is, is burning. I'm sitting here in Glasgow in early August, and we've got an Amber War 940. for wind and rain. You know, the planet, climate change is happening right now.

There are parts of the world that are becoming uninhabitable because of climate change. And yet we seem to have slipped into this belief or large parts of the populations of the world have slipped into this belief that it's the action to tackle climate change that is impoverishing people, not climate change itself. And similarly on equality issues, you know, we've slipped into the sense that, you know, the problems that a working class man is facing economically are, you know, is all down to women's rights or gay rights or trans rights. And that is fine in terms of there are people in this world who want to argue these things

because that's what they want to believe. My real despair, and at times right now it is despair, is that people on the progressive left or centre left of politics are just abandoning that territory. So for me, it's not that the government. Democrats in America or Labor or the S&P in a UK sense should be abandoning these issues to focus on issues more relevant to people. The challenge is to show people why these issues are so relevant to their living standards and to the health of the community that they happen to be living in.

And instead, you take immigration. You know, I deplore the way in which Starmar is effectively abandoning this argument to Farage. I think it's electorally stupid because if you'd say to people, well, Farage is actually right, then I suspect they're going to vote for the real thing rather than the person that is seen to be playing catch-up. In Scotland right now, one of the biggest economic challenges we face is a population that is not big enough for all the things we need to do.

We need immigration. So I just want to see progressive politicians have the guts to stand up and argue the case on some of these things. It might be electorally uncomfortable for a period because these things tend to go in historical cycles. But if you abandon the ground and cede the argument to your opponents, as I think is happening too much just now, then frankly, I think we're all in a pretty sticky wicket on some of this stuff.

Yeah, you're right there about you, so you feel despair at the timidity of politicians on the left in the face of charlatans stoking fear or destroying democracy. I think I've got a very strong sense of who you were pointing that one towards. Just my final, final point in Alex Salmond, and this relates to the discussion we just had on women in politics. When the scandal around the allegation, sexual misconduct allegations around him, was that the first time that you knew or sensed that he had, that there were real problems in this area concerning Salmon? Yeah, and I've searched. I've really searched my soul in this over the year since of, you know, should I have known?

was I willfully blind to this but I didn't know that there was any sense of inappropriate sexual behaviour I've spoken openly about what would be described as sometimes bullying behaviour I'd heard rumours over the years about consensual affairs

and always took the view rightly or wrongly that that was none of my business what consenting adults get up to is is up to them but no until all of this came to light, I did not think or I certainly did not know and I didn't think he was somebody

that acted inappropriately around women. And again, going back to the whole issue of women being treated differently, there were times, and I don't want to put, I don't want to overstate this, but there were times around that whole period where I thought I was getting more grief and being, you know,

sort of scrutinised more for what I knew when than he was for, what he was actually alleged to have done. Yeah. And there's another observation I want to make about Sam which relates to your husband, Peter, because Rory made the point, I think we both made the point at different times as that whole story was unfolding, that was it a bit odd that the chief executive was married to the leader?

And you actually record that Salmon said to you at the time, you should maybe think about getting rid of Peter as chief executive. I mean, looking back, whatever his motivations, which may have been related to something completely different, looking back, do you not think that would have been a wise thing to do? I think I say in the book, and, you know, I'm being careful in what I say, and I'm going to be careful here for obvious reasons, because getting anywhere into the rights and wrong substantively on this issue would take all of us into legal waters that we're not able to get into. So if I even put a toe into the substance of this, then, you know, that's a problem. I can see why people think that is what I've said in the book. And I think that's probably as far as it's safe for me to go at the moment. Nicola, one thing that we see consistently through your career and through this interview

is that you're passionate about women and the interests of women. Again, for internationalists, as one of the challenges that you faced was a challenge from some women over the transgender issue. There was this moment where you said that some of the people opposed. the SMP's gender reform bill, cloak themselves and women's rights to make it acceptable, but just as they're transphobic, you'll also find they're deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well. What's going on there? I mean, that seems quite extreme.

I find it astonishing that anybody would take issue with that statement. Now, what people, because literally everything I say on this issue is misrepresented and twisted in some way, I am not saying, and I've never said that everybody who opposes these trans rights or the gender recognition legislation that I took through Parliament falls into that category, not by any stretch of the imagination. But I'm sorry, I think whatever side of this debate you're on, it's a simple statement of fact that there are many people who have attached themselves to this debate, you know, people who would support Trump or in America or Farage here.

Being opposed to trans rights is at the moment the acceptable form of bigotry. and if you scratch the surface of that, you'll find that these people are also homophobic and sexist and misogynist and maybe racist as well. Even people who fundamentally disagree with me in this issue, I genuinely can't believe that they don't recognise that. And how is it? I mean, it's been one of the biggest bits of culture, we're almost more in Britain actually than in the US, strangely, because in the US, the progressive left doesn't have a group of feminists as opposed to trans rights. It's not really a political phenomenon. What do you think it says about Scotland in particular that almost uniquely in the developed world, people who traditionally would have been on the feminist progressive left have taken such a strong position on this? Well, some of them have.

I've got many friends and colleagues on the feminist progressive left who are of that view. I'm not going to deny that, but I've got many, many who are not of that view. So I think they're in fair play to any campaign that manages to make people believe they are the overwhelmed, majority representation of an issue. I think with the help of media along the way, I think they've managed to do that. It's an interesting thing. When we first, or the issue of gender recognition reform

was first mooted in Scotland. It was back in the 2016 Scottish election. And at that point, every party was committed to it. So it was myself for the SNP, Ruth Davidson for the Tories, Kess Dogdale for Labour, Willie Rennie for the Liberals. We were all at a hustings in that election campaign.

The question was asked, we all committed to it. And all of us, in one form or another, had a commitment to reform in our manifestos at that election. And also, we were not doing something groundbreaking or not proposing something groundbreaking. Many other countries had already done this. The Republic of Ireland has had this on the statute book for a long time. And that sense of consensus,

no great controversy around this, continued right up until, I don't know, 2021, 2022, at which point it became mired in the culture war. Now, part of that was that many people had concerns that they genuinely hold, and I do not take away from that. But there was also a sense that it was being whipped up from certain quarters as part of that bigger culture war. I believe that trans people should be respected and protected.

there have always been trans people that always will be. We should try to take away the discrimination and the stigmatisation, afford greater dignity and respect. I'm a feminist to my core and always have been and always will be. The risk to women comes from abusive men.

In any group, and I'm talking to the trans group here, you'll find bad faith people, bad people. You know, there are some biologically born women who abuse children. In no other group do we say the bad people should define the rights of the whole group, which seems to me what we started to do with trans people. So I believe the rights of trans people and the rights of women

are not in conflict and shouldn't be in conflict. If I have an overarching regret about this, is not that I believe something I shouldn't have believed or should have changed my mind. I'll fight for the rights of minorities for as long as I've got breath in my body. It's when this became so toxic. And I don't know that this would have made a difference, incidentally,

but if I could have my time again, I think I would have pressed the pause button and said, okay, let's all take a breath, take a step back, and see if we can find a way of moving forward on this issue that avoids or reduces that polarization and sense of division. It might not have worked, but I wish I had done that. My last question, Nicola, and thanks for all your time. You write a lot in the book about COVID

and how heavily that weighed on you, and then you say that, that after you gave evidence to the COVID inquiry, you came close to a breakdown. You cried on and off for days. You couldn't get out of bed. You were blaming yourself for people dying. And I think is that the only time

you've actually gone and sought professional help? Yeah. You know, without ending on too much of a down, just tell us about that. I can see it now as almost the straw that came close to breaking the camels back in that period. I think if all the other stuff that I had faced since standing down as First Minister

hadn't happened, then that COVID inquiry experience might not have had that impact on me. It was accumulation of things and it brought me to that point. And it was a friend who said to me, you should talk to somebody. And I've always, maybe Western Scotland kind of mentality about these things that, and wrongly, I should say, I'm utterly wrong about this. But I suppose I've always had that sense of going to seek professional help is a sign of weakness.

But the friend taught me into it. I went to see a counsellor. and it helped me hugely. And it didn't take long a few sessions of actually talking to somebody with a bit of distance and obviously training for me to bring myself back out of the kind of hole I'd fallen into. And I suppose that that's maybe the sort of, I don't know, sharpest illustration of what I've kind of learned over the past couple of years. Because the past couple of years for me have been the most testing. of my life

and a lot of it's played out across the media so I don't need to go into it all and I'm often struck by a sense that if you had you know a few years ago put in front of me this scenario that would unfold I would have said I won't survive that

I just won't be able to get through that and yet I have and it's been I've had really low dark moments along the way but through inner resilience through recognizing a needy professional help at one stage through friends who have been much better friends to me

than I've ever been to anybody else in the past, something I hope to put right in the future. I've come through a really difficult time and can say hand on heart that I'm probably happier than I've ever been before. And so there's something in, I'm not a different person, I'm the same person, but I've got a different perspective and outlook on life today.

And while I wish that certain things hadn't happened, that's probably a healthy place to be. The final one from me, looking forward, you've had this extraordinary role as First Minister. I mean, it's something very, very few people get, a chance to play a central role in the government of a whole nation. And now you're young. Thank you.

I am. Your mid-50s, I mean, you've been in politics almost all your life. I mean, you've known almost nothing else. You've got another at least 20 years of working life ahead of you. And I guess maybe this is therapy for me and Alistair as well. but how do you think about what you do next, which will genuinely give you that level of fulfillment and depth. It's remotely comparable to what you did in the first half of your life.

Please do say podcasting. I'm coming for you. I'm going to basically launch a rival podcast. I'm not. So I think because the last couple of years have been so tumultuous and, you know, unexpected and unusual, I kind of need a bit of time to rebalance myself and just, I guess just enjoy being out of some of that.

I think so a couple of random thoughts on this and I think a fair bit about it. I think being First Minister or being Prime Minister of a country, it's so unique. You can't replicate that in anything else you do. And looking, I think, at some leaders name and no names, I think the ones who possibly struggle most are the ones who try to replicate that. And so I'm not sure that's the right thing to do. For me, it's about finding or discovering or rediscovering what else in life gives me fulfillment and happiness.

And I use that second word very deliberately. I don't regret anything about the career path I took. It's been a huge privilege. And, you know, I don't regret a second of it. And this has been my choice. You know, I sacrifice certain things along the way. I didn't do a lot of the things people of my age and stage in life would have done. and I sometimes think I'm going to have a period of maybe living life a bit back to front

and just taking the luxury of enjoying certain things of finding fulfillment and happiness in other ways and just enjoying the kind of luxury of being able to pick and choose of where I happen to be in the world at any given time, what I want to do and find, not by trying to force it, but through a process, just finding where I can make a difference what I want to use the voice I've got such as it is to try to influence and what things make me a happy person. Very good. Well, listen, you two have been getting on far too well, but we'll have to come back another time to discuss your observations. I don't know if you spotted this one, Rory,

having had the opportunity to preserve the royal family up close, I have little doubt that history, however long the sweep of it may be in this respect, will look back on the Queen's death as the beginning of its end. Rory will not agree with you, that one, Nicola, but we're going to have to leave it there. That's an episode in and of itself. I think it is, yeah. Thank you so much for your time.

Have a great day. And I'm in Scotland too facing some very extreme weather, so I hope you have a safe afternoon. And you. So, Rory, your former leader. Yeah. Listen, I mean, just to come back to my complete obsession with the idea that when people become ex-politicians,

they become much more interesting. I mean, that was a Nicholas Sturgeon. I barely recognise. Really? Yeah, I was talking yesterday to Ruth Davidson, who I admire Mensity, and she was complaining that, and she really knew her well, 10 years against her in Scottish Parliament, that Nicholas Surchin used to have this stock in trade where she'd say, of course, I've made a few mistakes, but she'd never give you a single example.

It was total sort of stainless steel. And suddenly today, having gone in thinking, my goodness, we're going to have to work hard to get her to open up, she was natural, open, self-revelling. reflective, self-critical. I mean, people, real nerds can watch some of my previous encounters with her. You know, I was on question time with her. I was taking testimony from the thing. At the select media, as I say, very, very stiff, brittle, defensive. And suddenly there was this incredibly attractive human person that I warmed to immensely. I mean, I said right at the start that she says in the book that she felt it was a form of therapy. And I think it has been,

If you think about, you know, what the last couple of years have been like for a fairly obvious reasons to do with an ongoing criminal case, you didn't want to get into it. And just sorry, just to interrupt, because we didn't quite explain this to people. I mean, you mentioned briefly at the beginning, but for people to understand, her husband was arrested, charged with embezzlement, re-arrested. The police were photographed going into her house, going through her drawers, digging up the gun. She was arrested. She was arrested and now being clear. I mean, and this was somebody who when she stepped down was at the absolute pinnacle. I mean, it's like a Shakespearean tragedy and then was crashed down in an instant to being portrayed as a criminal, a villain, corrupt, etc.

So, I mean, unbelievable. I've said you before that I, look, I'm not a nationalist. I'm very proud to be British. I'm very proud to be Scottish. In fact, one of the things that I liked in the book very early on, she talked about one of the of her grandparents who was quotes English by birth but Scottish by choice, which is exactly what I am because of my family background and so forth. But I've always found in her, I think I've always spotted this very strange mix of the shy and the quite sort of inward looking and somebody who nonetheless

has a sense of how you operate in the limelight. I mean, we were joking about it afterwards. finished her recording when the very, very first time I met her. And she was a real rising star at the time. She'd been made Health Minister. Everybody was saying she's the one who's going to take over as First Minister. And I was doing this charity bite ride up in Scotland for leukemia research, as it was then known, now called Blood Cancer UK. And she and I were the kind of the star attractions at this thing. So I thought really looking forward to having a good chat with Nicola. We could toddler along on the bike for a few hours. Anyway, needless to say, it was pelting with rain. And she was very, very cold. I mean, really quite cold. And I remember saying to friends,

I was, God, she had Nicholas Surgeon. She was really, really cold. Then I got to know a bit better subsequently. And I went to her, why were you so cold first time I ever met you? Well, frankly, because it was partly because it was a horrible day, but also because I was absolutely terrified of you. Because at the time, you had this image of the sort of, you know, the big fat controller who was in charge of everything. There's also something in this anecdote which you're not quite getting across, which we've got from Nicola, which is you describe yourself as going on happy toddling bike ride.

Her memory of it is the maladaptively overly competitive, Alistair speeding into the thing. There's no chance for conversation at all. No, no, Roy, that's because my intention was to have a nice little leisurely bike ride and then win. But because she'd been so sort of chilly, I thought, so did it, I'll just, you know, I'll just win the race. But then, and then, of course, I think the only reference to me in the book,

which she was joking about after we finished the interview, is where she says that I was relentless in persuading her to come out for the people's vote campaign and the second referendum on Brexit. We didn't really get into Brexit, but that was when I kind of, I guess, had most to do with her. And I agree with you, by the way, I felt at that point, I felt that with Johnson in power in the UK, Britain out of Europe and labour struggling in Scotland,

I thought if they don't get it over the line now, I'm not sure they ever will. And of course, there are people in the SMP, I think, who have a sort of feeling, which she would say is unfair, that maybe if Alex Salman had been leading them, he would have been able to bring off that magic, that he would have taken that risk,

that he would have found a way of forcing the Westminster government. Certainly, I mean, certainly that's what we as Scottish Tories felt. I mean, very much the advice we were sending to Westminster, and we were wrong, was, no, no, no, Boris can't oppose the signal will of the Scottish Parliament if they really wanted to. I mean, we were desperately saying, listen, this was a once-and-a-lifetime decision. That's what the SMP said. It's got to be 20 years for the next referendum. But we were really, really worried. We didn't have enough time because it's amazing. I mean, it's a brilliant two hours. And I really loved the way that we went naturally from conversation to conversation. But the question I had up my sleeve that I would have

like to ask is about education. And it is actually about what she actually achieved as First Minister. So she said 10 years ago that closing Scotland's education attainment gap was her political priority. She said, let me be clear. I want to be judged on this. She didn't succeed there. And in fact, Education Scotland's getting even worse under her successes. The figures from February show the number of kids leaving schools with no qualifications in Scotland is at its highest for 15 years. And that I guess is something that Anna Sawa and others, and indeed my former colleagues in the Conservative Party in Scott, will keep pointing out, which is, despite all the rasmatars, despite all the popularity, the performance on things like education, some people

might even say health, was not what it should have been. And that's maybe something if we have a third go at her. When we talk about the end of the monarchy? Well, presumably if I'd asked that, I would have got quite a defensive response. I was in two minds about that as well, because when I put to her, that quote from where she talked about her own school, not really meeting kids' aspirations. I mean, I do hear from quite a lot of parents in Scotland say, well, you know, it hasn't much, you know, it's still the same. Well, actually, the figures suggest it's, figures suggest it's worse, unfortunately. Yeah.

I mean, Scotland's gone from being one of the best educational records in Europe. Yeah, I think one of the reasons why you enjoyed it much more as an interview is neither we nor she allowed it to become a kind of, you know, we were better than you, Labor's better than the SMP or whatever. So, no, I'm glad you enjoyed it, because I know you've, I've heard your many, many doubts. I will get so much grief from my friends. I'll tell them now, Adas, yes, yes, yes, you can say what you like. And I saw what, Douglas Alexander, he always gives me a hard time for being nice than Nicola.

Catherine McLeod always tells me, you know, tells me off. But you cannot deny. And the other thing I've got to say, I was, as I often do, I was imagining, my family listening to the podcast. And I, you know, that stuff she was saying at the end about, you know, stuff that you believe in, you have to, you have to fight for it. You don't lean into the people who completely disagree with you. Yeah.

So, you know, on issues like climate and trans and economic inequality and all the rest of it. And immigration indeed. Yeah. Well, thank you. And of course, my own apology to Ruth Davidson, who would have felt that I wasn't as tough as I should have been. But no, I really was taken with it. And I do think actually she revealed in that interview why in the end she is a little bit different from Theresa May.

She was right to say that they both in some ways are quite introverted figures. But she's got a capacity now for informality, humor, self-criticism, which I think is really charming. I really was taking a minute. Good. See you soon. Thank you. Bye-bye, Alistair. Hi again.

It's David from The Rest is Classified. Here's that clip we mentioned earlier. Victory over drugs is our cause. a just cause. And with your help, we are going to win. Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medelline drug cartel.

The world's 14th, richest man. He was, in many ways, a terrorist. This is an economic power concentrated in a few hands and in criminal minds. What they cannot obtain by blackmail,

they get by murder. And I don't think he expressed any regret at all. He tries to portray himself as a man of the people, this kind of like leftist revolutionary outlaw. Nearly everyone in Medellin supports the traffickers. Those who don't are either dead or targets.

If you declare war, you've got to expect the state to respond. This is the moment where he goes too far. 13 bombs have gone off to Medellin since the weekend. By the end of 87, Bogota is essentially a war zone. US spending for international anti-drug efforts is going to grow from less than $300 million in 1980. to more than 700 million by 1991. It is the certain knowledge that no one is really safe in Colombia from drug cartel assassins.

It's a conflict where the goal wasn't even to stop, the flow of cocaine. It was to bring down this narco-terrorist. Everything has turned against him after this point. The whole thing he was building is collapsing. To hear the full episode, listen to the rest is classified wherever you get your podcasts.