The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 159. Michael Gove: My Journey From Left to Right (Part 1)

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

How did Michael Gove go from campaigning for Labour leader Michael Foot in 1983 to becoming a Conservative MP? What is the impact that Rupert Murdoch has had on public life? What do Michael and Rory disagree about when it comes to Israel?  Alastair and Rory are joined by former Cabinet Minister Michael Gove to answer all this and more.    Get more from The Rest Is Politics with TRIP+. Enjoy bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access, live show ticket priority, our members’ newsletter, and private Discord community – plus exclusive mini-series like The Rise and Fall of Rupert Murdoch. Start your 7-day free trial today at therestispolitics.com For Leading listeners, there’s free access to the Wordsmith Academy - plus their report on the future of legal skills. Visit ⁠https://www.wordsmith.ai/politics⁠ To save your company time and money, open a Revolut Business account today via https://get.revolut.com/z4lF/leading, and add money to your account by 31st of December 2025 to get a £200 welcome bonus or equivalent in your local currency. Feature availability varies by plan. This offer’s available for New Business customers in the UK, US, Australia and Ireland. Fees and Terms & Conditions apply. For US customers, Revolut is not a bank. Banking services and card issuance are provided by Lead Bank, Member FDIC. Visa® and Mastercard® cards issued under license. Funds are FDIC insured up to $250,000 through Lead Bank, in the event Lead Bank fails. Fees may apply. See full terms in description. For Irish customers, Revolut Bank UAB is authorised and regulated by the Bank of Lithuania in the Republic of Lithuania and by the European Central Bank and is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland for conduct of business rules. For AU customers, consider PDS & TMD at revolut.com/en-AU. Revolut Payments Australia Pty Ltd (AFSL 517589). Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith Producer: Alice Horrell Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Head of Politics: 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 restispoletics.com. This episode is brought to you by Wordsmith. A.I. And increasingly, of course, in all the organizations we work in, we can get massively slowed up by the paperwork, the processes, the forms, the legal advice. And that's why, in business today, it's all of us, legal teams, companies are facing a choice, lead the AI shift or risk being left behind. And companies like TrustPilot, Deliveroo, SkyScanor are already leading the way,

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in Scotland, now benefiting companies worldwide. Shifts already happening. Wordsmith is helping legal teams around the world with clarity and confidence. There's free access to the Wordsmith Academy, plus their report on the future of legal skills. visit wordsmith.a.ai slash politics. Welcome to the rest of politics leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alice Campbell. And today we have, as our guest, Michael Gove,

who had the most remarkable career in British politics. In fact, I think very, very few people held so many different ministerial positions under so many prime ministers. He began as an education secretary under David Cameron. He served in the Ministry of Justice. He served in the environment. He served for Boris Johnson as a leveling up secretary. He was a leadership contender on a number of very well-known occasions, probably one of the very

best-known conservative politicians of his generation. Before that, he was a journalist. He was a columnist for The Times, and he is now the editor of The Spectator, a magazine owned by the extraordinary new media magnet, Paul Marshall, who also owns G.B. News and unheard and various other things. So Michael is an amazing route in to British politics, conservative politics, somebody who was very kind to me when I was a member of parliament, very actually kind to me when I became a minister, and also has, like many of our guests, a very remarkable backstory. Welcome, Michael.

So Michael, let's start with that backstory, your childhood. Yes. More interesting than most? Well, I think that four people of my particular generation, we were almost the last generation before some of the laws changed around abortion and determination of children. And therefore, I was one of the last of a generation, I think, where mothers had no option, effective option, but to carry a child to determine and then give them up for adoption. And so I was born in Aberdeen to a woman who was studying Kukri demonstration in Aberdeen at the time.

She was originally from Edinburgh. I was in care for the first four months of my life and then adopted by my mum and dad, Christmas of 1967, and then brought up by them. And my dad passed away two years ago. My mother is still alive and in Aberdeen. And they also adopted my sister, who's five years younger than me, from a different birth family and who is profoundly deaf and happily married and lives just outside Aberdeen. And the two birth parents, what do you know about them? A limited amount. I don't know anything about my birth father.

When you say you don't know anything. Anything. Name. Not a thing. The only things that I know are that I was born Graham, Andrew Logan, and I know that my birth mother was originally brought up in Edinburgh, then moved to Aberdeen to study, as I say, to be a cookery demonstrator. I don't know anything else about my background. In fact, I believed that I had been born in Edinburgh because that's where my parents collected me from. That's where the adoption agency was operating.

And so on my passport, it says born in Edinburgh. But actually, the truth was that I was born in Aberdeen. That's where my birth mother was studying. I know nothing else about them. Right. Gosh. Do you get a bit fed up with people asking you about this? I mean, it's such an extraordinary story and presumably it's the centre of so many interviews. And the next question, I suppose, it occurs, but might be irritating, is why haven't you pushed to learn more about your mother and your birth father?

I think that there are a group of people of broadly my age and maybe a wee bit older. Nikki Campbell, for example, the BBC host, Roger Mosey, who was my boss at the Today program, Jim Nocti, who was my mentor on the Today program. I'm sure he would disavow me now. they were all adopted. And so the nature of adoption has changed. It was an issue that I took a very close interest in as a minister. People do ask, and I'm not at all bored about talking about it, because I think that inevitably you don't need to be a Freudian

to recognize that birth and family at the very early stage has an impact on you and influence on you, and if you're not always aware what that influence is. Why haven't I taken things further? Well, as you both know, I'm a naturally a nosy person. I've talked about it extensively with my mom. Your birth mother. No, no, no, with my adoptive mother,

whom I think of as my mom. And that's the reason why I haven't done it, because I have felt that to try to find out more about my birth mother and my family might suggest to my mom who's still alive that somehow the love that she gave me wasn't complete, that there was something missing. And she's never tried to steer me away from it.

She's never suggested that I shouldn't do this, but it's just something that I know and feel. But others who have made the search for and established a relationship with their birth parents, with their birth mother, like Nikki Campbell, have encouraged me to do so. But so far I've held back. So when you say mum and dad, that's how you see them. Just tell us a bit about them. My mum and dad come from probably an unconventional background for someone who went on to become a Tory politician. So my dad was a small businessman. He ran a fish processing business in Aberdeen, which was established by my grandfather.

He left school at 15 to go into the family business. It was never a big concern. Maximum number of people employed about 20. He met my mum, ice skating in Aberdeen. My mum was the daughter of a labourer. She again left school at 15, went on to work as a shop assistant in a jeweller shop in Aberdeen, Jameson and Carrie. and then subsequently worked as a lab assistant at Aberdeen University.

Class terms, of course, are, you know, they're very difficult and they're pernicious, but my mum would have come from what you would have thought of as a working class background, and my dad probably from a lower middle class or, you know, bourgeois, petty bourgeois background, but it was a, in the best sense of the word, and I don't mean this in a demeaning way, an ordinary loving home. So it was never the case that we wanted for anything. There's no four-yorkshire-style auction of poverty. It was completely comfortable.

Indeed, they made sacrifices, not going without, but they made sacrifices in order to ensure that they could pay for me to go to an independent school when I was 11. I subsequently got a scholarship after I was there, but they were paying the full fees for the first few years. Again, the school concerned Robert Gordon's College for people who would know it or know something about Scotland. They'd recognise that it's not an ultra-posh establishment, but it was an independent school. It cost hundreds of pounds at the time for me to go there. there. And they were, and my mum is, a lovely, unpretentious, unpolitical family. He's your dad political? He took an interest in politics, because he wasn't very strongly political. Most of his instincts were right-wing, but he voted conservative. He also voted

SNP. He voted different parties at different times. My mum was always Labor. The only time that she ever voted to give my fondest regards to your mum. I will. She's only, She voted conservative during the time that I was an MP. But now that I'm no longer an MP, she has gone back to voting labor. Good for her. She's a good for her. And Michael, you were obviously this sort of very, very, I don't know, not quite a child prodigy, but you were a very sort of smart, hyperliterate child.

Your parents have stories of you sort of reading the incitechapid in the evenings. It's a sort of narrative about you not want to go to. Swat. Yes. And your parents were less bookish. Your father was less bookish. Yes, I think that's completely fair to say. So there weren't many books in the home.

So my dad would subscribe to Reader's Digest and would read the Rejust Digest, condensed book thrillers and sometimes history. My mum is a classic Catherine Cookson, you know, historical romance reading woman. And, you know, in that sense, neither of them were hyperliterate, but nor was it the case that this was a home utterly devoid

of books or any culture of reading. But it was the case that in comparison, I was inevitably a bit of a cuckoo in the nest and that, you know, they discovered as I was growing up this appetite on my part just to read and absorb information and so on. And my dad was also very athletic. He'd boxed for the army in his youth. He was a very good football player. He nearly played semi-professionally. And I, while I love watching sport, was an unathletic lump. So in that sense, it was clear that there was no sort of biological link between my very athletic dad and my very pretty mother and me.

And Michael, one thing that sometimes happens, I guess, is that your parents might begin to believe, as you went on in life, that the world that you went to was quite alien to. Oh, yes. Quite difficult for your father to give you advice in the way that a father would like to. Yes. Because you'd got beyond the sort of things that he had experience of. Completely. And I think that it's an experience which is perhaps less marked now, but has obviously been fairly extensively written about in the sort of post-war era. So during the post-war era, you know, you had social mobility. And, you know, you've got people like Alan Bennett who've written very movingly about this. So Alan Bennett is the bookish child of working class parents in Yorkshire. He goes off to Oxbridge. That is his natural destiny. But at the same time, he's almost educated out of his background. So he learns at Oxford, not out of stombish initial social climbing, but just a desire not to be awkward and not to stand out. He learns inevitably middle class habits.

And so by definition, you find yourself, not so much at school, but more when I went to a university in England, leading a life which is increasingly alien from your parents. But you embrace that life. Yes. And I think one of the things that I hope I'm conscious of is the difference and the distance without it being estrangement. So when earlier this year I was made a lord, which would have been unthinkable when I was a child. I was really pleased that my mum, my sister, my mom's best friend, Brenda, were all there. Similarly, it's still the case with very old friends in Scotland in Aberdeen that I can slip back. sometimes too much so, into the person I was when I was younger, but there's a difference, yes.

So your first political activism was for Labour? Completely. Did you join the Party? I joined the Labour Party. When Michael Foote was leader? When Michael Foote was leader. Against Margaret Thatcher? Yes.

Who went on to become one of your heroines? Correct. I joined the Labour Party in 1983. I was 16. I joined the Aberdeen North Labour Party. Bob Hughes was the MP at the time. Wonderful man. He was a wonderful man.

He was a wonderful man. He was a very... He was the one MP that... Nelson Mandela always used to pick out as a great campaign on apartheid. He was, A, a fantastic anti-apartheid campaigner, B, a very well-liked local MP, and C, he was the only Scottish Labour MP who didn't back John Smith for the leadership

and backed Brian Gould instead. But you put that to one side. I campaigned for Labour in the 1983 general election as a schoolboy. My mum was a regular attender of the Churchill, and I was a regular attendant at the Church of Scotland. I believed in a world where if we abolished money and moved towards a greater level of equality, then we'd get rid of wickedness and evil.

And I also remember that Aberdeen was twinned with the town of Clermont-Ferrant in France, and the daughter of the socialist mayor of Clermont was visiting Aberdeen, and I was deputed to take her out on a sort of twin town-style date. She was lovely. I'm sure she won't remember me. So a French socialist? Yes. France socialism.

We'll get on to Brexit later. Yes. And the disaster that that has reeked upon the country, Michael. Of course. But what made you think you were labour and when did you realise that maybe you weren't? So I would have described myself with all the pomposity that a 15 or 16-year-old can muster as an ethical socialist. So I loved George Orwell. I believe that there were fundamental problems and injustices in our society that only the left or the Labour Party could deal with.

There was something about Michael Foote in particular that I liked. I mean, remember, I'm a kid, but still, I like the sort of dogged, unfashionable, the literary style that he brought to his oratory. And again, I was an unusual kid, not, I hope, too unusual, but certainly unusual at the time. being the sort of kid who would watch the news avidly and who would read the papers and take an interest in those things. What did you think of Thatcher at the time? At the time, I thought that, you know, what we fundamentally needed. I remember I was just a teenager, was a radical shift to the left in the country.

But I realized later, really in my final year at school and as I arrived in university, I realized then that actually, even though I hadn't been aware beforehand that I was conservative. And then at university, I'm very sympathetic, obviously, to the Michael Foote whole thing. The thing I can't quite work out, I can completely understand, you know, admiring Michael Foote. But am I right that at Oxford, you ran the campaign for Boris Johnson to be president of the union, who is like the polar opposite of Michael Foote? I mean, instead of being like a sort of shabby, high-minded, highly serious, thoughtful, ethical, intellectual,

a complete sort of larger than life flashy dressing Charlotton Rogue, right? What was the transition? How did you go from foot to Johnson? I did not run Boris's campaign, but I was an enthusiastic supporter of it. Very good. So I was at the time in the Oxford Union, there were this cast of characters called

Stooges. And to be a stooge was to be the lowly representative in your college who would persuade other people who were members of the Oxford Union to vote for whoever the big guy or big woman on campus was. So you'd stand in the Porter's Lodge. More of less. And when people walked out and say, would you vote for Boris Johnson? Completely. The person who was actually running his campaign, though, was Simon Stevens,

who went on to become chief executive of the NHS and who was an advisor to Ellen Melbourne. God. So the real guilty man is Simon not me. He sat along with Simon in Downes for years. Can I have a set of thing? Can I keep sort of developing this? So what was it that you saw in this guy? Why are you not horrified by it?

Well, the very first time I met Boris. I was just after I joined the Oxford Union. And one of the things I really enjoyed at school was debating. There was a particular tradition associated with. Scottish schools at that time. And he was literally one of the first people I met. He was there like a basking shark at the bar of the Oxford Union. And I was introduced to him. And he said, are you conservative? And I said, yes. And I said, and what about you? And at the time, there was a left, right, wet, dry division, both in the country and at Oxford. And I said, well, then what sort

of conservative are you? And he sort of looked me up and down and there was the sort of the brush of the hair. I say, yeah, I'm a, I'm a green conservative. And I wasn't sure at the time whether this was a typical attempt to avoid answering the question, because he didn't know whether I was on the wet or the dry side of the divide. And once he found out which side of the divide I was on, he could say, well, I'm pretty much a wet green. I'm pretty much a dry green. But there was is, as is so much with Boris, an element or more than an element of truth of that, He had been influenced by his father, noted environmentalist amongst many other things.

And he did have, you know, way before he got into Parliament an interest in these issues. But he was at that point the person who had already amassed around him a sort of group of friends and supporters. And the elections for the Oxford Union were essentially between, you know, one man or woman and their mates. And so the people who were in my college and the other people whom I knew in light were also borrous supporters. I don't want to overdevelop this psychological theme, but you're now the editor of the spectator. And I remember once having a lovely meal with you in Parliament when you were a very distinguished cabinet minister. And you said in a reflective moment, I sometimes wonder whether actually I wouldn't rather have been editor of the spectator than the cabinet. And of course, Boris became editor of the spectator.

And then, of course, you were involved in his governments. You were involved in leadership stuff. So he became quite a sort of major figure in your life, occupying positions vying against you. He's been a major figure in all our lives. But yes, so there's a coincidence there. And the obvious thing is, and a number of people have sort of delved deep into this, like the FT writer Simon Cooper, who's written a whole book about the Oxford generation of which I was part. And yes, you've got a group of people who were at Oxford in the 80s,

some of whom went into journalism, Boris and I. And of those people who went to journalism and conservative politics, there are parallels between Boris and myself. And that's inescapable. there were other people who were also at Oxford. Who were the other? Remind us who else is in that Simon Cooper book. Ed Balls was at Oxford as an exact contemporary. And he went to Jones and the FT and then obviously subsequently into politics.

Cameron's your age? David Cameron was another exact contemporary. He's a wee bit older than me. But he was at Brazeno's College, 85 to 88. I never met David Cameron when I was at Oxford. So I did know one or two people who were his friends and who I subsequently got to know better. Miller bands, are they roughly? Yes, they were.

So David Miller Band was the way. president of the Junior Common Room, the student representative organization in his college Corpus Christi. Ed Miliband went to the same college later and had the same post. Ruth Kelly was an exact contemporary. She was at Queens College. Evette Cooper was a wee bit younger. She was at Balliol and she went on to, again, she went on to journalism and politics as well. Stephen Twig was probably the most prominent student labor politician at the time. He went on to become president of the Oxford University Students Union, which was the sort of genuinely university-wide student representative body.

Presumably, Johnson and Cameron never suggested you of membership of the Bullington Club. No. And I did a talk at the Oxford Union a couple of years ago, and I was looking around the walls. There's a picture of you sitting there looking rather nervous wearing a kilt. Yes. Did you often wear a kilt? Yes. Just talk to me a bit about your Scottishness, how important that is.

So the first thing is that the president or the officer of the Oxfordshire, Union, still when debates occur, wear white tie. And I thought, rather than going for the full rig, it would be appropriate. I had a kill to get the dress accoutrement that marked the equivalent of that. The second thing is, one of the reasons I think I was nervous in that picture, is that we had a debate with Malcolm Rifkin, Donald Dewar, George Galloway and Eric Fourth. And there'd been a bit of two-in-thro beforehand between Donald Dior being very uncomfortable about being on the same platform as George Galloway. Donald Gere did not like George Galloway.

No, he did not. I remember that vividly. He did not. And so I think I was a little bit nervous about whether I'd upset the guest because of that sort of juxtaposition. I mean, they all spoke very well. Funn enough, it was a debate on devolution. But, you know, the extent to which your birth and background determine your views and tastes, you can never, you know, put down in precise percentage terms.

But I'm conscious of and reminded every day of the, fact that as someone who was born and brought up in Scotland and they went back to work in Scotland for a brief period after university, that gives me a slightly different, maybe warped, but still a slightly different perspective from friends, even those with similar backgrounds and outlooks, who are English, particularly people who grew up in London and who are, you can either argue that bit more in their swim or that bit more instinctively comfortable with the, you know, the institutions that are at the centre of British life. You mentioned both you and Boris Johnson went into journalism. Do you think journalists make good politicians in general? I think it's

impossible to generalise. I think there are certain skills that you should pick up in journalism that help in politics. So I think it helps enormously to be able, to cut through verbiage and evasion to get to the heart of the matter. I think it helps to be able to know that you have to communicate complexity to an intelligent individual, but someone who doesn't know anything about that subject if you're going to command their attention in a story, a feature or a column. And that similarly, if you're a minister or a politician, if you're confused, if things are opaque or obscure, then you're not the master or mistress.

of that detail, and you need to be. So the journalistic desire to get at the heart of things and the ability to sum up the essentials is a very valuable diagnostic or analytical tool if you're a politician. But you can get that if you're a doctor or if you're a lawyer or if you've been working as an engineer. So there's nothing particularly there. There is a tendency, I think, to dismiss some journalists, I can understand why, because people think, oh well, journalism is inevitably a superficial profession for butterfly mines, and in particular, there's a premium on people dashing off provocative opinion that gets talked about or lots of clicks. And one of the disastrous things are people who want to win applause and want to create a bit of a crackle around

the policy that they're implementing or embracing. And then they walk away because journalists are used to their columns being tomorrow's fish and chip paper, and they don't see things through. In other words, an 1100-word column is a lot easier than a white paper. Yes. But the skills are the 1100 word column can help you construct a white paper. Absolutely. For example, I remember when I was at the Department for Education, one of the things that I thought is that, of course, you've got to try and convey, you know,

some sense of authority to the little servants. They wonder who in earth is this guy. But at the same time, you sometimes just have to ask stupid questions because things seem unbelievable. And being a journalist, you almost have a license all the time to either be the ignoramus or to pose as the dathed laddie and say, excuse me, I'm sorry, I just don't understand, you know, Columbo style. And similarly, so when I was trying to investigate, not investigate, ask about how a PFI operated.

I sort of knew, but I said to the civil servant, so you're telling me that we pay every year, we pay this private body to allow the school to operate and run. And then we pay them every time we replace a light bulb. And then at the end of it, presumably it's like a mortgage at the end of 25 years, the local authority or the government owns the school. What? The private company owns the school. So we pay them rent and then they own it at the end. Well, well, you know, who thought of this thing? This is crazy. Now, all the civil servants were thinking, this guy's an idiot. Anyone who's a minister should know how PFI operates. But what I was doing was, A, being a bit like a journalist or interviewer in bringing to light in that conversation how absurd and indefensible the scheme would seem to the public.

Can I answer just quickly on this journalist thing? I think it is interesting. I mean, how many other major British politicians were professional journalists, as opposed to successful politicians who wrote journalism on the side, having done other things in their lives? Well, I think the first thing is there are some people who were so rich that they could have done anything, but they chose to make their name in journalism. And that was true of the Marquis of Salisbury. Churchill was a writer, but he was everything. But he first came to prominence, really, as a journalist and a journalist. And he was editor of the Evening Standard, before he became a member of parliament. They come immediately to mind. There are other people who started out in journalism. And then I'm trying to think how many there were really in our time. In our time, fewer. Yeah, a lot of lawyers. Yes. A few doctors. Yes.

Gordon Brown was a journalist. So, I mean, he was also an economic historian, Dr. Gordon Brown. But he was a journalist with Scottish television. And in fact, it was his brother, his elder brother, John, who gave me a job at SDV. But you're right, I think that... Peter Manderson was at LWT? Yes. I think there's a mix.

And again, there are some people who thought about journalism, but that went almost immediately into being special advisors, you know, George Osborne. And as I say, Ed Balls was a leader writer at the Financial Times. Evette wrote for the independent before then becoming a special advisor and so on. And just in passing, you know, some people are scornful of special advisors. I think, again, it's impossible to generalise. There are some people who become special advisors who get high on their own supplies, as were, of inside dope, you know, as Damien McBride has acknowledged that he did, there are other people who are undergoing a very serious apprenticeship in the art of politics and go on to become successful ministers.

Okay, Alison Michael, quick break and then back for more. This episode is brought to you by Revoluted Business, the All in One account, to manage your finances. Now, politics has its share of bad deals, trade summits, late-night negotiations. Often, somebody walks away with the short. straw. And we've seen enough botched negotiations in Westminster to know what happens when numbers don't add up. Business is no different. Nothing empties your pockets faster than hidden exchange rates. Revoluted business changes that. Over 25 currencies exchanged at the same interbank rates that banks use during market hours within plan allowance. With automatic orders and price alerts, the guesswork

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This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, Cancer Research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lung vacs, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer. It builds on TracerX, the world's largest cancer. Cancer Evolution Study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs. Lung Vax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying

faulty cells before cancer develops. So it's not treatment, but preventative with the potential to stop lung cancer before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year, focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit Cancer Researchuk.org forward slash the rest is science. Hi everybody, it's Dominic Samaruk 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 Rest is History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise,

people are arguing about Europe, the government has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues. And people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing,

which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. And we'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1970s. 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 grimest 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.

Let me just ask about your time as a journalist. And I always get the sense that Rupert Murdoch was a sort of huge figure in your life, a big influence. I don't know you've listened to the excellent mini-series that The Rest Is Policies is running at the moment about Rupert Murdoch, but it's fair to say, I'm not as big a fan as you are. how big an influence was he? How do you define his contribution to public life?

And do you think we've got the relationship between media and politics right? So I'm a big admirer of Rupert Murdox. And I admire what he did at Whopping. I think that he saved or certainly gave significant extension of life to the UK newspaper industry. The Independent, Yvette Cooper's paper, would never have existed without that change. I think that he is someone who loves journalism and who devotes a significant additional amount of time

and energy to journalism out of proportion to what it generates for his business empire overall. I think he's shown even recently with the Wall Street Journal publishing details of Trump's cartoon that he put in the Epstein birthday book, that he's prepared to stand by journalism even when there are sometimes political enemies who would rather that he crumpled.

And I once went to a retreat. Rupert Murdoch used to organise them every three years or so for executives and journalists from his newspapers and for outside business people and politicians. We went to one famously in Australia, you may remember, Michael. The one I went to was in the US. Gordon Brown and Douglas Alexander were there, sorry to drop them in it. I'll be it briefly. Was this a moment when Tony Blair was in government, they were plossing against him trying to get themselves in pole position?

Possibly. It was in the early, I'll defer to Alistair. It was. I don't know, my brother. I think it was in the Blair first term. Yes, yeah, exactly. I think they're probably there without permission trying to set up Brown's run. Very suspicious. But the thing I remember is that he, Rupert Murdoch sort of gave the closing speech, the equivalent to the leader's speech at a conference. And in it he told the story, which I dimly knew and had never heard, and certainly not from his own lips, of the attempt. that was made on the death of his father by the Adelaide establishment to take his father's newspapers away from him and his mother and effectively close him down, his determination not to allow that to happen, the freezing out of his mother, and his determination then not to allow the establishment to crush him. And I got a sort of affirmation of that sense then that he was a restless, creative, you can't keep him down, spirit. And, and, you know, and, you can't keep him down,

spirit. And most of Rupert Maradox's political positions are very similar to mine. And I've arrived at them for my own reasons, but they happen to coincide in, not in every area, but in most areas. So I can't help liking and admiring more for that. And then on the relationship between the media and politics, I think that's changing. So I think you can argue the dominance of certain newspaper titles at certain points meant that the playing field was tilted in terms of print media against the left. I think that's true. But I don't think that holds any longer just because of the way in which the media landscape is much more diverse now. Can I bring you in on Murdoch and Michael? I mean, having spent a long time thinking about

Ruth Murdoch. What's your response hearing Michael talk about all that stuff? Well, I agree with him that he's a phenomenal. The reason we did the series is an extraordinary figure in media and political history. And that's why we talk about him a lot. I think that I do think that the relationship was exposed brutally at Leveson, and I regret the fact that that hasn't led to serious change. I think that was criminality and mendacity of a pretty institutional kind. And I also will talk later about America today. But I think Fox News has been an absolute catastrophe for the world. So I come at it from a very different place.

One thing I do want to ask you, though, is whether you think that Murdoch backed Tony Blair in 1997 because he's believed in Tony Blair and Labour or because he knew we were going to win. Both. So I actually think that at the time, he saw in Blair what he would also have seen at certain points in his career in Australian Labour, he saw a tough right-wing leader who was unsentimental, who had little time for what substance became known as political correctness or woke. He knew that the Conservative Party was exhausted and discredited at that time. In particular, he felt cheated by the Conservative Party over their treatment of Margaret Thatcher. And while John Major was hardly a tough, he had very little time for the sort of the wet grandees who were around John Major at that time, you know, the Douglas

Heard figures and so on. They were the people whom he really didn't like. Is that kind of weird class, though? Well. Because he wasn't working class. No, he wasn't. But he was a Marxist when he was at Oxford, briefly. It's an Australian thing. And it's also, you sometimes see it in America, which is that they dislike a particular

type of grit condescension that they detect, even if it's not actually present. but they do detect it. So I think that actually he would probably have been on balance inclined to support Tony Blair anyway, and the fact that Labour were almost certain to win, just put the cherry on the cake. One more. You mentioned that you coincidentally have a lot of views that you share with him. But I wonder whether, I've always find your stance on the Middle East and Israel strange. Yes.

Because you strike me as being uber passionate. Yes. Which I always felt Murdoch was as well. I remember witnessing once a huge argument between Murdoch and James Murdoch, his son, in front of Tony Blair, about Israel-Palestine. And so I just wonder, is that an influence or how have you independently got to a position that feels to me a little bit extreme? It predates it. It's certainly the case that if you look at the sort of spectrum of opinion, particularly in the UK at the moment, I don't think you could describe my position as mainstream. I think that's probably fair.

I don't know how often you can describe any of my positions as mainstream. That is certainly true. But it's something that I have grown up with. So I mentioned that my mum was a regular attender of the Church of Scotland. And as I grew up and attended it with her, the Church of Scotland at that time, things have changed, had a very close attachment to the Holy Land. And the story of the Jewish people was part of the sort of backdrop to my growing up.

And I had a romantic attachment to their story. And again, you may recall Alastair, Rory, the speech that Gordon Brown gave in the Knesset. And this was, of course, some time ago, you know, when he talked about for generations, you did not have a land. Now you have a land. And it reflected a similar, but not identical background. Obviously not identical. And his father was a minister in the Church of Scotland. So there's that.

And then the second thing is that I feel a very strong identification love, actually, for the Jewish community in Britain and everything that they've achieved and done and admire so much about it. And then the third thing is that when I look at the position in which Israel finds itself, I can run through my understanding of the history, which you both might want to correct or challenge. But it just seems to me that this is one of the most amazing stories in humanity, and Israel's achievement, is one of the most moving and powerful. And that obviously doesn't mean that it doesn't make mistakes. But my overall view is there's a queue of people who want to criticize Israel. And that's fine, but I'm not going to join them.

I'm going to be on the side wherever I can defend it. Even when they're doing what they're doing in Gaza? Of course I can take a view that they're making mistakes. And, you know, for example, you can look at individual tactical decisions like the bombing of the Hamas political leadership in Qatar. In Gaza, I think that the fundamental issue there is Hamas' control. But if you'd have been part of a war cabinet in Britain, engaged in a military conflict with whomesoever it may be, would you not have wanted,

to argue more for genuinely seeking to protect civilian life? Well, I believe that there were people who did, and I believe that the IDF, which is a citizen army and a rules-based democracy, has done everything it can. Really? You believe that? I do. In a grotesque conflict.

And arithmetic here is horrendous, because we're talking about individual lies lost, and we're talking about the lies of innocence who've been caught up in this horrible, horrible, horrible war. But the arithmetic would suggest that if you're talking about counterinsurgency warfare in an urban area, the level of casualties that the IDF have inflicted has been lower than we did or the Americans have done insimilar through not identical conflicts. Now, it's horrible because previous generations as well, attitudes change. Attitudes change and so on.

But we have never, thank God, been in a position where. we've endured what Israel endured on October 7th, nor have we faced what the people of Gaza have had to face. So emotions are bound to be engaged overall, and it's difficult to put oneself completely in those shoes. But as I see, there are so many people who, I think, fairly and with sincerity and good faith, will criticize Israel. I sometimes think those criticisms are wrong. but I don't think that, I mean, there are some people who do argue in bad faith, but I think it's important to have some people who do see things instinctively as a starting work from Israel's point of view. And the instinctive bit interests me because given that you've decided to take such a strong position of us,

how much time have you spent in Israel in the West Bank in Gaza? I mean, how much do you actually know about this region? I mean, so what worries me, obviously, listening to you, I think spent a lot of my life working in that region. Yes, of course. And when I was in Parliament, I avoided taking pro-Arab or pro-Israeli positions when you were right in there. Yes. How much time have you spent in the region? I think I've been to Israel and the West Bank five or six times now.

And for how long at a time in the West Bank? Do you spend the night there? I have never been overnight in the West Bank. I've spent days there. I've visited Romala. I've talked to people in the Fatah political leadership. I've talked to people in Palestinian civil society. So you've been there for...

I've talked to Palestinian academics. You've been there for a few hours. You've been there maybe 20, 30 hours? I would say, yeah, that would probably be. I would say more than that, but not much more than that. Okay, so 2030 hours. So if I went to said I've been to Manchester on five occasions, and I've met some of the leaders,

and I'm now going to make Manchester my big issue. And I'm going to have very strong views on Manchester. Would people not say, what the hell do you think? think you're doing? You've spent five days on the ground. You don't know anything about it. Well, the first thing is, I have been there. The second thing, though, is... I've been to Manchester, too, but I'm not setting myself up as an expert on Manchester after five years. No, I'm not setting myself up as an expert on, for the sake of argument. The precise boundaries of... And also, you may remember that we're... The country's tired of experts.

We'll come back to that. The precise geography of a particular settlement and a particular location. The other thing is that the fate of Israel concerns us all. because it is the case that the criticism directed at Israel falls into at least two categories. There's the natural criticism that one democracy would extend towards another when it believes that a fellow democracy or an ally is falling short of the standards that you would expect. But it is also the case that there is opposition to Israel, not because of what it does, but because of what it is. Israel's success is a standing rebuke to a particular view of the world, two particular views of the world. It's a standing rebuke to the Islamist view of the world, and it's a standing rebuke to the left-wing decolonization narrative. Because Israel is a nation composed in almost entirely of refugees and asylum seekers with no natural resources,

that when it was born, had all of its neighbors attempting to strangle it in its cradle. It's now become the single most... Michael, you don't really need to give me a lecture on that history. No, but I have to explain that it is the single freest and most impressive jurisdiction. The single freest and most impressive jurisdiction. From Morocco to Delhi. And you have to ask, why does it, why has that happened? But also, why does it inspire such strong feelings?

So, why was at Labour Party conference? asked Owen Jones why he spent all his time criticizing Israel and didn't show any concern for Sudan or for what was happening in Xinjiang. And could it possibly be that Sudan is not presented as our central ally, that Sudan is not a country that the United States has been providing billions of dollars to direct military support to, that Sudan has not been at the center of our entire political structures for 60, 70 years in the way that you, and that actually to compare Israel to Sudan, given that Israel is a liberal democracy and one of our closest allies, is profoundly patronizing to Israel.

No, I think what happens is that people want to... Because it seems to me it's a possible double standards here, right? Well, there are double standards, and they apply to Israel. On the one hand, Israel has held to different standards from other countries. This is becoming very what about it. So, on the one hand, a liberal democracy within a rules-based international order, And on the other hand, Sudan. Okay?

These are not comparable countries, right? If Denmark suddenly started doing something and I said, well, how come you're not criticizing Congo in the same way that you're criticizing Denmark? The answer would be Israel would hope to be held to a higher standard than Sudan. And it does operate to a fall higher standard. But the question, of course, is why is it that the United Nations has chosen to single out Israel in the way that it has with the Zionism is racism, motion being passed? Why is it the case that there is such hostility that's directed towards it? American support for Israel is like American support for Germany and NATO. It's support for democracies that have been embattled.

Why is it that all of Israel's enemies, its neighbors, until recently, have tried to not just check its manners or see an alteration in its policy, but eliminate it. And why is it that it's so important that we recognize that? Because anti-Semitism mutates over time in anti-Semitism from having been a religious prejudice and having been an ethnic prejudice is now a prejudice against the Jewish home and a desire to tear it down. Last one on this, Michael, because, look, I understand your position. I was always profoundly confused in Parliament by British parliamentarians setting themselves up as advocates and friends for foreign countries.

I didn't take paid trips to Denmark. I didn't take paid trips to India or Israel or Saudi. I mean, these things were, I didn't think I needed to be a conservative friend of Israel, conservative friend of the Middle East. When people said, you know, what's my position on Kashmir? My answer would be, I'm a British politician. And that's somebody who spent most of his life working on foreign affairs. So one of the things that interest me is, would you say what you said about the Jewish community in Britain about the Muslim community?

Would you say that you feel, what was your phrase? I would say love and affection and admiration for what they've achieved. Would you say that about the Muslim community? I would say that about people from within the Muslim community. I would say that about very, very dear Muslim friends. But I think there is something about the Jewish story. and in particular the Jewish experience in the 20th century and the efforts which we've seen to destroy Jewish civilization,

the Jewish race and Judaism, that touches me in a way that isn't true of other communities. And I think that it is the case now that history teaches a certain lessons. And one of those lessons is that the safety and security of the Jewish community, in any country at any time is the surest guide to how admirable and liberal that country is. It's supposed to how we look after the poor. It's supposed to how we look after prisoners. It's supposed to how we treat Muslims.

I think it is the absolute acme. It is the gold standard of how civilised society is. Why logically? Because history shows you that whenever countries are moving towards authoritarianism, whenever they're moving into dark territory, it's the Jews who are turned on. But Michael, it's also the case that if one looks at those societies that were most liberal at any time, the Netherlands, for example, in the 16th and 17th century, Britain at the end of the 19th century, America throughout most of the 20th century, the most enlightened countries are those in which Jewish people have felt most safe. In which Jewish people feel most safe, and I agree with you on that, and in which minorities in general feel most safe, and in which human rights are respected, and particularly the human rights of minority groups, of which the Jewish community is an incredibly important example. But the treatment of the Muslim community in Britain would also be a gold standard test for a civilized society.

The treatment of British Muslims, the treatment of British Hindus, the treatment of British Sikhs matters to me because like you, I have a certain idea of Britishness, which means that how you treat every citizen and indeed every person, even if they're not a citizen, who is subject to British laws and paying British taxes, is a key element in civilization. All I would say is that there's never been, thank heavens, anything to compare with the Holocaust. It was a unique crime, the worst evil of which mankind has ever been guilty. And it was directed not at a section of any population for random reasons. It was directed explicitly at the Jewish people. And that is why when we see a rising tide of. of anti-Semitism now. It's a moral obligation on all of us to ask why to look at it. And certainly, of course, you can make a judgment about the government of Israel and its actions, but to blame the

government of Israel's actions automatically for an increase in anti-Semitism as though that were a mathematical formula and a rational one is once again to blame Jews for prejudice against them. Who's doing that? Well, I mean, you're talking to me, so I'm doing that. No, you're not doing it really. Okay, right. But it is emphatically the case that if you venture onto our streets or walk into the whirlpool of social media, you will find people who will, we've seen it in recent weeks and some of the people who've been commenting on whether or not the fans of Maccabee Tel Aviv

should be allowed to watch their team play Aston Villa. that doesn't mean that you can't make a judgment that that might be in stake in good faith, but there's a lot of bad faith out there. But Michael, there are a lot of Muslims who feel deeply unsafe in Britain right now. Yes. If you were walking through central London when Tommy Robinson had 150,000 people out on the streets, and I mean, I don't like the what aboutry, but I sort of feel there being lost in this debate. And I also, would you not agree with me that one of the consequences,

of what's happened in the last couple of years in the Israeli debate, is it's kind of been exposed as a bit of a myth that they ever really believed in a two-state solution? Well, I don't think it's a myth. I think that it was very strongly the case that a lot of the Israeli population, a majority, have believed in a two-state solution. There's a very powerful speech that Bill Clinton gave,

I think when he was campaigning for Kamala Harris, when he explains the missed opportunity where the Palestinians were offered what was not a perfect, but certainly a good deal and they walked away. I think things have changed, undoubtedly. I think support for a two-state solution in Israel has been ebbing, and I think it's been ebbing as a result of what's happened in Gaza. Israel, of course, withdrew, Hamas took over. The nature of that rule and other factors has meant that that's diminished. And then without, I hope, being naive, because who knows where the Trump peace plan will go,

If it is the case that you have an absence of violence and Palestinian civil society is given the chance to develop, then I think that you could see support for a two-state solution within the Israeli population growing again. Because I think the number of people in Israel who actually think the Palestinians should never have a state is small. the number of people... They're very powerful. There are some very strong advocates of that position. That's not your position. No. I think that there are a number of people in Israel who think,

I can't contemplate a Palestinian state at the moment if that Palestinian state is going to be run by or under the influence of the sort of people who were running Gaza when October the 7th happened. Now, the original plan that Roy and I had was to get through much of your ministerial career in part one. We haven't even got, you haven't even become an MP yet. Yeah.

Can we move on to that? Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating aspect of your personality, this desire. Maybe it's your debating thing to be immensely combative about Israel, which we had no real interest in talking about. As you could tell, it is it is an issue. We were really hoping that you could talk about stuff you really knew about, like schools and justice. Oh, he doesn't know anything about schools. But what is it that when you have the opportunity to talk about stuff you really know about and a really absorbed? in, like all the work you did on schools, all the work you did on the environment, all the work you did on justice.

To be fair, we did ask him. Yeah, I don't know. But it becomes something where it's disproportionate, it feels to me. And it's something that interests me because I think it's a theme in your life that it's that compared to the really interesting stuff, which is the granular, absorbed detail and stuff that you actually do and do well, you have these massive ideological things. that you want to have huge arguments about? I don't want to, but I'm certainly prepared to. You love arguing.

I love getting to the heart of certain questions, but both as a journalist and as a politician, both member of parliament and minister, I spent far more time thinking, talking and worrying about other questions. So as Alistair established, my views on this question are not mainstream UK views. And as you've heard, they're very strongly and passionately held.

And I think it's a very important issue. But the amount of sort of bandwidth that I've given to that in my professional career is relatively small compared to other questions, the questions that you've just touched on. Well, so we've got, Michael has not yet really become an MP as this canter through his life.

But what we're going to have to do in part too, Michael, is cover your entire ministerial career. And in particular, two subjects in which I'm very, very interested in argue with you, education and Brexit. Looking forward. If you want to hear part two straight away rather than wait for a week, just sign up. The rest is politics.com.