The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 53. Seb Coe: Corruption, gender, and the geopolitics of sport

Episode Date: January 1, 2024

Will doping ever be defeated in sport? What was it like going from world class runner to government whip? Are the Tories finished in Britain? In the first Leading episode of 2024, Rory and Alastair are joined by Seb Coe to discuss all this and more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen 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. Welcome to The Restis Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alecester Campbell.

And, Anastair, you're going to do our introduction today. I think I have to, because we're talking about somebody who's well-known as a sportsman. And sport is not really Rory's forte. But this is a sportsman. who having been possibly, many would say, the greatest British athlete of all time, given how many Olympic and World... I sense I know the direction.

This is already travelling. No, it's fine. I'm absolutely saying it as it is. Possibly the most graceful, beautiful runner we've ever produced, winner of multiple Olympic goals, endlessly world European championships, and then, pretty successful businessman, and then had a period as a politician,

As a Tory MP, I'm saying nothing. We'll get to that. Then something happened to him, lost an election to New Labour, I believe they were called. I think they were called that then. What are they called now? They called New Labour. And then worked on the kind of staff side, Chief of Staff to William Hague, when he was Tory leader. And then discovered a whole new career, I guess we call it as a sports politician.

key figure in landing the Olympic Games for London 2012. That happened under a Labour government. The Games actually happened under the coalition government, and you were there right the whole way through the lot. Now the head of World Athletics, top dog in the sport, and Tis said possibly looking to try to become the head of the IOC and run the Olympics as well. So, Lord Coe, Companion of Honour,

you've had quite a lot of careers. So I think my first question is if you take all those different careers, sport, business, parliament and politics and sports politics, order them in terms of the greatness that they've given to your life. Do you know, I'm not sure I can do that because I don't tend to look at it in that way. And I've never been somebody that sat there going, well, this is what my CV should look like.

I've been very lucky. I recognize that, that I've tended to do things. that have interested me. But if you wanted to meld all those elements onto a CV, and I wouldn't have even seen it until it came together, and that was really, I guess, over the Olympic bid and then the delivery. Being in sport and having competed in the Olympic Games was helpful because I understood the landscape and the language.

then having spent a good time in sports politics and cutting my teeth in an Olympic movement headed up by Samarange. And then doing a stint modestly, it has to be said as a member of Parliament, and for a short period of time, a government whip which comes out in your book so wonderfully. Rory, for those who are listening to what I'm watching. Yes, I'm sorry, yeah. And then in a way it all came together. And I think in part the great, well, I like to think that one of the things I think that I did bring some skill to in the Olympic Games, it was an amazing team of people. I will probably never, I've never worked with and I will probably never work again with a group of such smart, enlightened, driven, visionary people. Headed up, I have to say, by our mutual friend Tessa, who was seismic in that journey.

This is Tessa Jowell, who was the Secretary of State at Dessah. DCMS. She was the Secretary of State when she famously persuaded your friends, the Prime Minister at the time, to bid for the Games. And this was not a grand project in the UK at that time was not... We're not to regar. Can we come into that for a second? Why was it not an obvious thing for people to do? Why did Test Jal have to persuade people to bid for the Olympic Games? I think if the Cabinet had been a vote as opposed to a decision that was taken and followed discussion, it would have been a no. Why was that? I think they thought it was expensive would end up being way more expensive than we promised,

and it was a bit of a distraction from all the other stuff. And so despite all the sort of drive of New Labour, Cool Britannia, they didn't think the branding opportunities, the Olympics would be amazing. I think there was a deeper pathology, if you don't mind me saying. If you think in the lead up to people like me standing up and saying, yes, we're going to build a new city inside an old city in seven years, we're going to regenerate a parcel of land in East London that had bypassed any economic development criminally, actually, for far too long.

That we were going to build venues that London had never had. We were going to pull the most complicated piece of project management, frankly known to man, under normal circumstances in any city. And then the next question you would get was, what about the Millennium Dome? What about Wembley? What about the cost overruns on the BBC, the Scottish Parliament? So it was a moment where all those things had happened,

Yeah, and this wasn't a backdrop of unalloyed joy. And there was a deadline attached to it. And there was a deadline attached to it, which actually mercifully was absolutely critical. But I think if I'd been sitting there and I'd been Tony Blair or whoever was in senior positions in the government at the time, I would have sat there and gone, well, hang on a minute. We don't obviously seem to be doing this very well. And the great thing that I think came out of that was that people did actually see beyond that. And I do also think in a way it rescued, we didn't actually need our reputation rescuing because we were doing that actually far better than people thought.

But I do think it gave people comfort and confidence to go out again and think actually big projects in the UK are not beyond us. And I think there was an element of nervousness that was just expressed in understandable political motivations. Of course, back again now with HS2 and Hinkley points and all these kind of things, where again we're worrying that we don't know how to do infrastructure. So maybe we need another Olympic Games immediately. Did you know something, Roy, there was a really insightful moment for me. I was in Japan. I was bidding. And I sat down with a very seasoned sports leader in Japan.

Guy had been really around for a long time, very cultivated. very smart. And he was talking to me about the games. And we were about a year and a bit out from the games. I was taking through the complexity of it and all the things that we've just sort of touched upon. And he looked to me and he said, why are you nervous? And I said, well, you know, and I started to go through the litany of all the things that. And he went, you are strange people in Britain. He said, you are running large parts of the global economy. He said, most of my colleagues and friends have actually been educated at some stage in Britain. Their children want to be in Britain. If they don't want to be educated there, they want to start their career there. If they don't want to do that, they want to come

across your theatres, your clubs, you do pageantry, you do Wimbledon, you do the Grand National, you do cut finals. He said, what are you worried about? And it was interesting. I suddenly realized that we have a monstrous ability in the UK to actually doubt our own ability. and yet there's this guy sitting in Tokyo into his early 70s who was looking at me thinking, why are you worried about this? This is going to be okay. So a few minutes into this interview,

and I've known you for a long, long time, I find it really weird that you don't immediately want to talk about being an athlete. Because that seems to me, I think to have done what you did as an athlete, I don't think you can ever top that. And I wonder if your life's just been a kind of never-ending struggle to make a try. Is that not because you weren't an athlete and you've done all the stuff in politics, you have a massive envy of athletes that you imagine that?

Totally. Totally. Are you sure that if you'd been a great runner and then gone on to do what you'd done, you'd always see the running as better than the other stuff? I think if I'd have done what Seb did as an athlete, I'd think that's pretty much the best I'm ever going to do. And I always feel sorry for these footballers have become pundits and stuff because I feel they're trying to replace it. But I'm probably a slightly odd cove here. I knew I wanted to be involved in politics before I ever thought that I would be a successful athlete. It's a desperate admission, but that's what I wanted to do.

I wasn't actually sure whether I wanted to be party political. I thought for a long time about maybe writing, being a political writer. I thought about the civil service at some point. And politics has always fascinated me. And I came from a political household, but not a party political household. Well, your dad was Labor. Oh, my dad was old fascist. I mean, was old labor.

My mother was old liberal, Joe Grimond. But I have Indian heritage as well. So my grandfather was Indian. And the political side of the family is actually Indian. My uncle was a high commissioner in Bangladesh and actually did a stint over here. And then at the United Nations, I have an elder cousin who was heavily involved in the political scene in India. Can I just on that side? Because it's a fascinating part of your whole story that I keep trying to get my head around.

So you've got these very kind of grand Indian relatives, quite kind of well-known, prestigious Indian relatives. Then you went on this show, which was looking at your DNA, and you found out that you had all these quite grand ancestors, famous painters, as Governor General. But at the same time, you also have a very kind of working-class identity. How do these different bits of your family come to go? Yeah, because my father was working class. My father was born in East London in one room on the Cambridge Heath Road. It's actually always interesting that that was the part. I mean, I never even thought about it.

But of course, the world he was born into was the world that 70 years later, 80 years later, I'm sort of trying to put some regeneration concepts behind it. So, yeah, it's... And your mother's family, on the other hand, both on her mother's side and her father's side, were from a quite different background. He very different. Her grandfather was a well-known portrait painter, a member of Rolika de Mission. His brother, they're Irish.

So his brother was a very well-known painter of animals. and their father was the first president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. And how did they meet? Do you know something, Roy? That is the question that nobody's really been able to answer. It's a mystery. Why? Well, because nobody really knows.

They knew. They knew, but they sort of met at a party. My dad was 13, 14 years older than my mum. He'd been married before. I had a half-sister. And his idea of a first date with my mother, who actually, subsequent to the first date, didn't speak to him for four months, was to stick her on the back of a motorbike

and take her along the old Portsmouth Road at about 100 miles an hour. My mother was an actress, so she was rather trained and did restoration comedy in London theatres and Birmingham and Worcester Rep. But if I can say on the sporting career, which clearly neither of you want to talk about as much as I do, but your relationship with your dad was endlessly fascinating. When people wrote books about your relationship with your dad,

because he became your coach, even though he wasn't, as it were, an athletics coach. He wasn't even from an athletics background. Cycling. He understood the endurance. Yeah, for sure. Do you think part of his strength

was the ability to come in and just not accept any conventional wisdoms? But that was him. And I think that's quintessentially the essence of engineering. You sort of have this fascination about seeing something and then wanting to take it apart

and putting it back together again. You can only understand my father from his wartime experience. He was a 19-year-old in the merchant marine. He was sailing for the blue funnel line out of the port of London and gets sunk in the Atlantic, is in the water for an improbable length of time, gets picked up by German battleship

because kids of his generation learnt German, and he got a scholarship to Westminster from East London. He didn't like Westminster. So he ended up at a manual school. And so because he spoke German, and they put him in the ship's kitchen. And he was at sea for three months on this battleship. And then he landed in La Rochelle, which was German occupied.

And to cut a long story short. In France, yeah. There were only about five of them made it off the boat. And he jumped off the train that was heading from La Rochelle to a prisoner of war camp in Hamburg. He slept by day, walked through France by night. And he was walking with a Canadian who sort of chronicled this. And they decided they had an argument. about which way to go at one point.

And the Canadian thought he wanted to try and get to the coast of Marseille. And my father wasn't sure whether it was occupied or not and decided to walk through the Pyrenees, got through and then got promptly arrested for not having any papers. And the worst part of his warning openly would admit to you was actually being incarcerated in one of the worst camps in Spain at camp called Miranda, which was famous for being infamous. And my grandmother thought absolutely resolutely refused because they thought he'd perished at sea. Just on that one, because other people did escape through the Pyrenees into Spain and then got safely to Britain. But he ended up in a camp with Spanish Republicans and other opponents to the Spanish government.

So what was going on there? He didn't have any papers. And they just wouldn't believe that he was a British citizen. No. And he did six months late. After about six months of a pretty unpleasant time, he was then brought home. But my grandmother throughout all that, I think there was some memorial at the Port of London for those that had gone down on it. It was the AD Huff was the boat.

And she refused to go. She said, I'm not going. I know he's alive. And they all went and they sort of said, look, you know, it's been eight, ten, twelve weeks and we've got the letter. She's then, no, he'll turn up. Good for him. And a year later he walked in. Was he very tough on you, do you think?

Yes and no. He was never tougher on me than I was on myself. Right. In fact, interestingly, some of the tabloid stuff was it was a sort of spengali portrayal and it was much more nuanced than that. Just tell us about the portrayals before you tell us the nuance. So the cliché, the portrayal on the tabloids was what? Well, you know, it was the classic parent living through their children.

It's not an accusation without merit on some, you know, I've seen that. Right. And that wasn't... And Tiger Woods' dad and... I mean, I don't know whether this is fair, but a lot of the time the time it's fair. Some of it's unfair. But actually, the great thing he brought to it was balance. And my mother was a massive influence in that because she was absolutely insistent that my life was not simply...

Running. About running. So, you know, which he'd take me to the Halle Orchestra in Sheffield. My father was also actually far more balanced and an incredibly good artist. I mean, he could pay... He was absolutely... taught. But he was brutal with you if you weren't performing to your best. Yeah, but he was never more brutal with me than I was on myself. And actually, the great thing he brought, which is actually

overlooked in the quality of a coach, is that his view was always less, was more in Los Angeles a few days before I went out to defend my title. He came in, he didn't, he came from London, he didn't actually stay with me the whole time, watch me running on a track. at the training session was something like six by four hundred meters with a couple of minutes recovery and after about three he went I've seen enough you know off you go and some nights he would sense that he would sense that I was you know when I was coming through the sport I was a little bit nervous he'd take me to the pub and say have a pint you'll be fine so he was much more much more relaxed but he didn't suffer fools and he really grated against the authorities authority

And the media. Yeah, I mean, probably more the Blazer Brigade than the authorities. It was everything that he hated. He hated the thought that, I'm not saying he was a class warrior, but he really, he did dislike being told what to do by people he thought didn't merit their position and weren't that smart. So just to give us the sense of what kind of training you need to do in your teens to be an athlete of your stature and quality, how many hours a day are you training, what are you actually doing? just give us a sense of that alongside your normal schoolwork,

what are you actually doing to get into the peak position? Well, how would I put it? I joined an athletics club when I was 11. So from that point on, I was training probably Tuesday nights, Thursday nights, Sunday. By the time I was 14, I was training every day. And by the time I was 16, I was probably training twice a day. That's how many hours? It's difficult to quantify hours because you could do a training session.

that might take you 30 minutes and would render you absolutely speechless and physically inactive for the rest of the day. There are training sessions I've done, particularly in the weights room. There were training sessions I would do there where I would have to sit in the car for probably three-quarters an hour before I could even unclench my hands to be able to hold the steering wheel or even feel comfortable about controlling the clutch or whatever it was. You worked really hard. Mileage was tough, so my morning runs were probably 10 miles, training again at lunchtime. You're running 10 miles in order to be able to run 800 metres or 1,500 meters.

Yeah, because you need that endurance background, and that's effectively what you do. So, I mean, the theory really is you build the base, which is your distance work, which builds your, sorry, we're going to get technical here, but it builds your V-O-2 max, your ability to shift oxygen. And then there's the speed endurance component that is really aimed at replicating the fact that in an 800 meters at world record pace, you're effectively running at 20, 21 miles an hour the whole way. you can only probably absorb physiologically about 20% of the oxygen that you need.

When you're actually at the most critical point in the race and you're trying to think straight and the physiology is collapsing all around you, that's where you need the speed endurance. So the speed endurance is really to replicate and be 10 times worse than anything you confront on the track. Last question before I go back to Alice, because you understand this is much better than I do, but give us the sense of how it works at that kind of distance and whether you can stretch up to much longer distances or stretch down to much shorter distances. Great question. And I think it's as much about mentality as anything.

I tried a 5,000 metres once. I ran it in the Yorkshire Championships in Barnsley. And I knew that this wasn't really my event because I really wasn't. enjoying it. Two laps of the track, 800 meters, hard as it is, it's done and you're out. Three and three-and-fourter laps for the 1500 meters, four for the mile, obviously. And I got into this and I'm thinking, why am I doing it? And I think my boredom and disinterest permeated the mining community that had bothered to turn out and probably pay good money. And halfway down the back straight. You didn't drop out. No, halfway down the back straight,

clear of the field and coasting, I suddenly felt, well, it was the contents of about half a pint of beer thrown at me with the immortal words, get a fucking move on. So the 5,000 metres in the Yorkshire Championships was my one and only. So to come back to your question, it's a good one. I don't think, I mean, we often talk about you picking a sport. I think your sport picks you. I think your sport makes a judgment about your mentality, you know, whether you want to be in a team, whether you want to be individual. I was fascinated by your autobiography because I absolutely share with you the adoration of landscape.

Your long walks in the Lake District for me were replicated in my runs in another part of God's country, the Peak District. The ability to actually be comfortable in your own space. And, you know, there are some people that just don't like that. They want to be involved in a team of it. My kids all love team sports. They didn't really want to be in solitary confinement in a sport, which relay teams come together and you travel as a team. But it's a very individual sport.

You're on your own. And also, you are back in those days, you were sort of treated, partly by the media, but by the public. You and OVet was like kind of Ali Frazier. was this heavyweight contest that was kind of happening all the time. You were either for a co or you were over it. Now, you've talked endlessly about the rivalry between you're on the track, but just give me a sense of your relationship now off the track.

Sorry, just for listeners who don't know, right, these were the two dominant stars, and you were chasing each other at 8,500 and beating each other in those races and critical races. Yeah, yeah. He was a year or two older than me. I'm precocious, Dalla. I mean, when I was trundling around Yorkshire cross-country courses,

This guy was silver medal in the European Championships in 1974. I mean, he was an outstanding, probably the most naturally talented athlete I ever competed against. And I didn't really know him. And we came from not only different parts of the country, but we came from very different elements of the sport. Steve was based in Brighton. He was a sort of 200 metre, 400 metre runner, but he could run half marathons. I came from what was the old Harrier tradition, which was cross-country. and track was something that happened between the end of the cross-country season.

I mean, our great mutual mate, Brendan Foster said it didn't really matter what he'd won on the track. When he won the national cross-country title, then people started to recognize in the north of England that he was a great athlete. So we both came from very different sides and elements of the sport. We came from very different parts of the country as well. And that landscape and geography, I think, has a massive impact on who you are. and how you think. And so, Aparth's first crossed

in an English school's cross-country championship. I think he finished second. I finished ninth. He was running for Sussex schools of Yorkshire schools. Our paths then didn't cross again until 1978

when he stuffed me in the 800 meters in Prague, my first European championship. And then our paths crossed again massively in the Moscow games. Like when you were in the kind of, you know,

about to go on the track and you wouldn't talk, you wouldn't, there was no connection. On the flight going over to Moscow, I had arrived late and I sort of got onto the plane. The British team were all in their Hepworth suits. I remember I walked down the plane and I'm thinking, please, no. And somebody in the British Olympic Association obviously got a good sense of human.

It was the only vacancy was next to Steve. We hadn't spoke. I mean, we didn't even really know each other. Has the sport changed? I mean, nowadays you would have been presumably training together, quite a lot in similar camps in the run-up to the Olympics, as opposed. No, no, you didn't. I mean, the basis of athletics in my generation was very much club-based.

So Steve's training partners were all from his club in Brighton, my training partners, because by that point, I'd moved to London. I was at Loughborough University, so I had training partners there. Then I moved to London and joined Haringay Athletic Club. So all my training partners were my clubmates. So what did you talk about on the plane? We didn't because, no, no, we didn't because one of the UK athletics officials realized this was not an ideal scenario. So they sort of shuffled the pack around and we ended up sitting in different seats.

And I don't think I saw him until the race. The races where we were and we traveled down in separate cars and got to the track under separate circumstances. Okay, Alastair Seb, quick break. Hi everybody, it's Dominic Zavarik here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics, when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alastair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The 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. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for the rest.

is history wherever you get your podcasts. Now, obviously, we're called the rest of this politics, so I want to fast forward to you a little fellow. So having been an incredible athletic legend, you entered the House of Commons, elected as a member of parliament, 1992. This is the last five years, the John Major government. Yes, timing is everything. Timing is everything. And you're coming to the House of Commons where presumably not that many MPs had the name recognition that you had or the success that you'd had in your past.

I suppose it was Ming Campbell, maybe, had been a runner. Well, there'd been a few. I mean, Ming, actually, athletics had been well represented in the House of Commons because, of course, Chris Chatterway was a postmaster general, world 5,000 metre, and a Commonwealth Empire Games champion. I mean, it was an interesting experience. I mean, the whole process of politics is completely bizarre. So, presumably you arrived, thinking, okay, I've made pretty big success in myself.

I mean, the more interesting side of this is I went to see the candidates, It was Cecil Parkinson's chair of the candidates. And he had an old roller decks on his deck. And he pulled out and he said, you can try this one. I'd just got on the candidates list. You know, you probably did the same thing. The weekend in Slough, you know, can you write and pick up a knife and fork? It's that sort of thing.

And I went to see Cecil. And I'd known Cecil for a long time. Cecil was actually a good, talented athlete. And he said, look at this one. It's Falmouth and Campbell. And he said, they'll never, he said, don't worry. He said, you won't get elected there. They won't vote for anybody out of the county, but you can cut your teeth on this.

And so I applied, I got a letter back inviting me to an interview on a Sunday morning in September. And I had to pick up the phone to the chair of the association. So I'm really sorry, but I can't make that. And she said, well, what would be so important that you can't make that? I said, well, I'm running in the World Cup final in Barcelona. And she sort of, you could hear a sort of groaning on the phone. And she gave me an interview the following weekend at 9 o'clock in the morning on a Sunday in the Falmouth Hotel. I didn't actually make, as my agent subsequently told me, I didn't actually make the long list of 36.

And it was only apparently two grandmothers in the constituency party that said, look, bring him down because we'd quite like to get autographs for our kids. So that was a moment of candour from my agent, who we've both had a few pints in the middle of the, 92 election campaign. So it was an odd. I mean, I loved being in Cornwall. It was independent. It was a great, good streak of Yorkshire down there as well, where they're sort of done much like being told what to do. And it was a fascinating period, but, you know, you guys were untouchable in 97. So you came in, you'd had this big name. Yeah. I've done some pretty interesting things. It's a disadvantage. Yes, I do. And actually, interestingly, If I'd been a little harder, nosed about it, I probably, because I wasn't an insider,

and because of that particular thought that, well, you know, he's only doing this because, you know, he wants to maintain a high profile and politics as a sort of secondary thought. It wasn't. It was the first thing I wanted to do. And I probably, if I'd been a bit cynical about it, would have gone for a safe seat. But I didn't want anybody to, I wanted a marginal. seat that if I won, I won off my own back, not because I'd been parachuted into Kensington. Give us your favourite start, about 1997?

Yes, at the end of a pretty traumatic night. I had the smallest swing against me in my constituency than any conservative constituency on the night. Well, done, so. Little consolation. Well, it was you guy, you put Emily's list together. I mean, I, when my... before you get back to your loss. You can't concentrate on your time in Parliament for it.

So you're right. No, I'm still dealing with my loss. I'm trying not to take it personally. In the land of Arthurian legend, I honestly thought, like most people in politics, you know, at some point your time's going to be up. I didn't think I'd be taken out by a woman from Islington called Candy. Thank you, Alistair, for putting her in there.

So just to continue, you must have thought, I'm bringing a certain amount of experience. I've seen quite a lot of the world. I'm older than many MPs coming in. Presumably you would have liked to be a minister quite quickly. And in the modern world, you would have been. I mean, Rishi Sunak was a minister within a year. He's prime minister within five years.

So were you sitting there thinking, when are they actually going to give me something to get my teeth into? Not really. And actually, the one thing I recognised, and it was probably from the athletic background, and you entered politics. It was an outlier time. The 97 election defeat had a massive impact,

not just on a change of government. It took out one, even two generations. So people got advanced far quicker. So when I went into Parliament in 92, you did not expect to be. You know, if you were making sort of semi-decent progress, you were probably a PPS after a year and a half, which I was. I then did a year doing that. There was a resignation or a sacking.

I can't remember. There was a shuffle. I ended up in the Wips office. and then for a period ended up also as Michael Heseltine's PPS when he became deputy PM. So that was actually at that stage, that was seen as reasonable progress. And then probably if I'd stay, you know, if I'd survived and the next five years, you'd have probably made it to junior or, you know, if you were doing okay, probably. Shadow. Emma, well.

Well, well, I wasn't, I didn't want to stay. No, I'm not very good in the rearview mirror. So I'd made a judgment that night when I lost the seat that I really couldn't bring myself to give a dying love to serve it in. You liked it enough to go back and work for William Hake. Yeah, and that was slightly securitus as well because it was Alan Duncan that came to me and said, who do you think should be the next party leader?

You're speaking you to say you, Alan. Yeah, probably. Yeah, actually. That did bypass me at the time. And I said to him, well, I think there are two very different questions here. Who should it be and who probably will get it? And he said, well, who do you think it should be? I said, well, if you're thinking long term and I would, I'd go for somebody like William Hague.

And I knew William a little bit. He was a Rotherham boy of Sheffield. Our paths crossed not politically, but, you know, as we were often on the same programs at the same, you know, calendar and Yorkshire television. And so I ended up, I actually got asked to introduce him at one of the election rallies. I think they were holding it up in Coventry. And then I did a little bit more and went in there into the campaign team because of my background as a whip with James Arbuthnot.

He went on to become Williams' chief whip. And you know what an election is like? Everybody lies. And we looked at the numbers and everybody was thinking. thinking that they got so many votes. And James and I looked at it and went, they're saying, well, so-and-so is going to support him. We're going, not in a million years.

It doesn't matter what they've said. I remember him in the wits office. He used to lie then. I mean, so I ended up doing that. And then at the end of it, I said, right, I'm going off to do, you know, what I was happily going back to do. And I ended up as William's deputy chief of staff. Then William said, look, could you do a few days?

because when you leave government after 18 years, there is no structure for opposition. We went into your old offices only to realise you'd never been in there because you ran the whole thing out of Millbank Towers. No. Well, there was a clapped out fax machine. Telephones that led nowhere. Yeah, we'll do the telephone. It was pretty clear that you had never been in there.

So my first role there was just to sort of connect things. And then I agreed to do two days. and then, of course, classically compromised on seven days a week for the next four years. And just give Rory and all Tories a sense of what it's like being up against a formidable Labor government, Seb. It's not whether it's a formidable Labour government. And at that point it was, I absolutely concede that, you know, you were all absolutely at the top of your game. Your Chancellor was untouchable. Tony was Teflon.

You know, you'd got good people coming through. and look, the British electorate rarely make bad judgments. Brexit? Well, a general election and a referendum are two entirely different things. I thoroughly disapprove of referendum. I really do. That's not, that's the abrogation of political responsibility doing that. But it was pretty clear to me that, you know, we were not,

John Major was a thoroughly decent and a good guy, and actually, as the weeks past, you realize actually how good he was. But we weren't a good government. And the electorate got it right. It was time for a change. And where do you think the electorate is right now? I think they've made the same judgment. You think the joys are done?

I do, yes. And so when you, Kevin, you look at people like Imran Khan, did you think I'm going to be prime minister? No, that's where I'm going. No, it really wasn't. And I know there's, you know, Michael Heseltine famously, you know, on the nap in the 25, 30, 40, God, he got close.

He'd have made a good prime minister. No, I really didn't. Genuinely, I didn't. I mean, I was ambitious. I didn't want to be a PPS. I thought I could make a contribution. But I think if you come from a background and sport is very objective, there's no subjectivity about it.

In my sport, it was the stock watch. It was a photo finish. It was, you know, you win or you lose. I think the thing that frustrates people that come into politics from different backgrounds, particularly if they come from very objective backgrounds is just the ad hoc nature of preferment and the Whips Office making judgments about abilities and talents. You mentioned Roy's book.

Do you think it's become more or less dysfunctional? Do you think it's just always been like that? I always felt politics was functional and I always think it's because this particular government has been terrible. If I'm being blunt here, I think political discourse in the last few years has reached an all-time low. And I don't think that is. just the politicians. No, no, it's certainly not just the politicians and it's certainly not

just UK. I mean, I really enjoyed your book and I enjoyed it on very many different levels and all the things that you've done. If I was able to trim in any particular direction, I genuinely think politics is in large part an honourable profession and I think it is in large part undertaken by people who genuinely do have an ethos of service and wanting to contribute, it's the different direction that you all take to probably come to pretty much the same landscape. I just, I sensed that your book was a little pessimistic. I mean, when I think about people like Liz Truss or Boris Johnson, I think they're sort of, do we have to, well, they're sort of shock jocks. I don't think they're there for this sort of

grand, honorable vision of public service. I think they're generating. sound bites. They're brilliant at getting the media's attention. They're good at putting out stuff I don't know. I don't know and I've never really met Liz Truss. I would slightly trim the Boris view. I did see Boris in the Olympic years. I saw him as he wasn't a bad he's very good at taking credit for other people's work. Look he wasn't a bad mayor and he did actually have some quite good people around him and Neil Coleman who was Ken's Eminence Gris. I mean on I actually persuaded Boris not to be tribal, not to get rid of people he thought were, you know, just sort of labour stourges. And Neil stayed on. And actually Boris and Neil worked incredibly well.

I'm not, look, this is not an apologia for Boris Johnson. But I did see probably some of the better angels that were masked from others. But you also surely saw that if that guy becomes prime minister of this country, this country's in a bit of trouble. I sense that he was probably mildly unsuited to becoming the prime minister. Talking the Olympics, is that when you felt most round peg and round hole? Because you seem to be, you seem to be absolutely loving it at the peak of your game. I don't know. I don't think I probably think like that.

Was it something that I thought could really make a difference? Yes. Well, did I wake up every morning thinking, actually, I have a purpose here? The first purpose was to get the games. Actually, interestingly, when your boss asked me to take on the chair, if I'm being honest, the reason I took it on was I thought I didn't think we would win. I know nobody did that time. I just didn't want London to be embarrassed because we'd had three previous bids and I'm a great believer in regional cities. I was brought up in one.

But, you know, we'd had two bids from Manchester that had really barely got double digits in terms of over. We'd had one from Birmingham, perfectly good bids, but I just sensed that I'd always said, if we'd throw London into the mix, then people will take it seriously. But we had had such an inauspicious start that I thought the most I'd be able to do was to make sure that the defeat wasn't an embarrassing one. It was only when we started to get into it that I realized that we'd got some momentum. And Paris, towards the end, just stopped making it. They thought it was theirs to lose, which was fatal.

And it allowed us to be very active right up to the last minute, including obviously the PM. And, yeah, we just snuck across the line. One of the things you reflect on a lot is kind of language and politics and the media. And I wondered how that affects sport. How have things changed since the 70s to today in terms of celebrity, sport, what it means to be an athlete? And how being an athlete compares to being a footballer or a boxer? other kind of high celebrity sportsmen in terms of public attention, wealth, celebrity, and what that does to people's personality.

Well, let me, let me throw this one to you. Could your mum today name any British athlete? No. So this isn't she would have done. Yeah, she would have been able to do. Yeah, no, that's, so that's something I've always been very interesting. I mean, maybe it's my generation. But obviously, I felt I knew who Mohammed Ali was.

Yes. I knew who you were. Yeah. I struggle more with contemporary boxes and contemporary runners. So what's happened? Well, free to air television. of course. So, you know, you have only a handful of people relatively, in relative terms, are watching big title fights. They're watching it on pay-per-view. They're watching it on,

you know, on cable. It's not what it was. And this is one of the things that I've been really wrestling with and hopefully shifting a bit in terms of how athletics is seen. Free to air television is really important for that. And everybody, you know, we talk a big game about all sorts of things. Television is still a very important medium for sport. And athletics, we were lucky for one interesting set of circumstances. In the 70s, English football was not what it is now. We were banned from Europe. We had hooliganism and, you know, it was not a savory place to be. I mean, football fans still went, but you weren't that mad about your kids going. Our staple sports were really underperforming. We didn't have an Andy Murray in tennis. You know, cricket was

sort of in and out rugby. We were, you know, getting hammered pretty much. And then suddenly, off the back of the 76 games was a disaster. Brendan Foster was the only medalist in the British team on the track and got a bronze in the 10,000 metres. And, you know, we went back. And interestingly, Australia at that time had an equally disastrous 76. They didn't get really any virtually no, I don't think they got a single gold medal in swimming, which demanded almost a national autopsy there. And they responded in a very different way. They created the institutes of sport in Canberra and it took 10, 12 years before it started to pay off. But Australian sport really did. We sort of thought, well, just one last heave will do it.

And a few athletes will come along. Mercifully, they did. And in that period, I sort of came into view. Steve Ovet did a young Steve Cram, Daly Thompson, Tessa Sanderson. And suddenly you had not just British athletes winning things domestically or even in Europe, you had them winning world titles, which outside of boxing we weren't doing in any other sport. And suddenly these were the athletics was the back page lead. Brendan always tells me an interesting story. I mean, he imagined putting this into today's setting. Newcastle United would ring him up when he was organizing the gate said,

international meeting and they'd say, Bren, are you going on Friday night or Saturday afternoon? He'd say, well, why? He said, well, if you're going Saturday afternoon, we'll move our match to the Friday night. So the world has moved on and it's not that athletics is really any less popular, it's just that

you're in a very much more competitive landscape. And football is just, it controls everything. On your current role, just very briefly go to take us through three of the big things on your plate, doping? Russia and trans. Yes.

Quite a lot to be getting on with it, really, isn't it? It's quite a lot, as though, doping? Yeah. Sorted out or not sorted out? Will you ever sort it out? Is it sorted out? Probably not. So I inherited a sport that I remember arriving,

having won the right to become president of the sport. I've been campaigning for two years for it, and it wasn't a huge majority, but two weeks into the job, somebody appeared. my receptionist came knocked on my office door. I'd only been in the building a couple of days. And he said there are some people to come and see you. And I thought it was a nice local custom. There were a glass of champagne, a piece of cake. There were 17 French policemen, three from Interpol and a mustachio guy who introduced himself as Judge Renovann Wrenbeck.

Great name. Who was the senior prosecuting judge for cross-border corruption. And finally, Five hours later in a police station locally, I was advised that my predecessor had been arrested in Paris that morning. His son was on the run. The head of anti-doping had been arrested. The legal counsel had been arrested and the CEO a couple of days earlier had advised everybody who was going backpacking in Australia. Give this this a bit of background.

At that stage, the French believed what had happened. What was the allegations? They believed that, well, as it was subsequently proven in the French, but it was a bit of French courts two years later, that there had been corruption on a fairly grand scale. And one element of it was that Russian athletes had been approached to have their tests either slowed down or disappear for extortion. And this had been taking place for some time. Then the circus starts, select committees, are you corruptor?

Were you asleep? You know, I was one of five vice presidents. It's not like a footsy. 100, you meet three or four times a year. But it doesn't matter. So I then... Did you suspect? No, really not.

Subsequently, it was pretty clear to me that there were just too much power in the hands of too few people. So I really then took a flamethrower to the sport. We rewrote the constitution and we created something called the Athletic Integrity Unit. So we took the doping control out of the federation away from politics where it is entirely independent and anonymously. You guys can tell me this, but why do we have these big corruption scanners? I have a sense that we have

terrible complaints about football governing bodies. We have terrible complaints about the Olympics. We have terrible... And what's going on? I'm not defending sport, although I probably by even starting off on that, I'm probably about to do that. I don't think there any

more livid than most areas. Politics and British politics? Well, I'm not saying British politics. I think British politics. I think British politics is in large part incredibly clean. Has been. Well, okay, but you know you compare it with models around the world

Alistair, you know what I'm saying. But sports, let's be honest, sports had a reputation for a long long time. Well, yeah, but any more than the city, any more than inside, big insider trading case, any more than... Well, it's money and power. No, it's interesting. Three paragraphs

into some big, investigative piece on corporate greed and most people are switching off. But if you You've got names and you've got a sport and you've got football or you've got athletics and high profile names like mine or whoever come up. Of course they're the 50 pound notes of journalistic currency. I'm not saying we haven't had those. Of course we have. I know it from my own experience.

You've only got to look at football. But yes, we have those problems. And one of the challenges is the most sports have been until relatively recently very badly governed. No checks and balances. I remember as a sort of backbencher in the sport, daring to suggest in one council meeting, we might have an audit committee. You'd have thought I'd have announced the culling of the first born in every family. Obviously, given the context, what they were all up to.

So going back to your initial question about doping, yeah, I mean, Russia were at it, state-sponsored, I mean, industrial scale. And it was a monstrous incursion into the integrity of the sport. And it was on my watch and I had to do something about it. As far as you're concerned, they've shown nothing that would lower them back in. It's very interesting. So we created a task force. I appointed a guy called Runa Anderson, who probably knows more about this subject than anybody.

And slowly but surely, we did get them back to a position where, had it not been for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they had made the journey. So the athletic integrity unit do the testing. We have two or three independents inserted into their federations. the member federation for Russia, the Athletics Federation. And we felt that by process and by being tough and not by keeling over like other sports did and say, well, it's too big to deal with, we suspended them. And so for seven years, we wrestled with this,

but we did get it back to a position. Of course, the next box set appears, and that's the decision that the council took around not, accepting them into international sport after the invasion of them. So they run in a neutral vest? Not in my sport. They don't. So the International Federation has primacy in deciding the eligibility of competitors.

So we have said they will not be in Paris. Now your son once said to you, stop calling it my sport. And he's right. So why do you keep calling it my sport, Seb? Yes. Slap on the wrist. The sport. The sport.

Um, trans. Yes. Difficult. Yes and no. And I'm trying not to oversimplify this or sound too brutal about it. My mandate gives me one very, very clear responsibility. Well, lots of clear responsibilities, but one overarching one, and that is protecting the female category. You have two categories in sport.

You have gender and you have age. Age because you assume it's better that you haven't got Olympic champions competing against 16-year-olds in the Grasmere sports and gender because if you don't protect the female category, then no woman will ever win another event. So we have two issues that are quite complicated and complex. One is something called DSD, which is differences of sexual development. and that is one element, trans is different and should not be confused with that. And the council made a judgment that the science around being able to have transgender athletes in that transitional phase reducing their testosterone, the science was not clear whether that would have any impact on the residual effect of going from male biology. physiology to female biology and physiology.

And at this point, we've said we're not prepared to take that risk. And it's for only the elite sport. So I will die in a ditch over the ability of transgender competitors to be involved in participatory sport. We're talking about a very, very view at the elite level. And I have to protect the female category. My final question. I mean, it's an extraordinary career. I mean, absolutely unbelievable all the different things you've done.

Will you leave listeners with some experience or insight on leadership? You've been in many, many different types of leadership position. If you were counselling somebody on leadership, what would be a tip? Do what I've consistently done. And actually, interestingly, going back to my athletics career, the one thing I did learn, my father was my coach, but he brought probably the smartest brains of their generation into a backroom team. They tended to be American because at that point in Europe, sport physiology was a very dry academic subject. The Americans turned that dry academic subject into something that was of practical application.

How do you make the boat go quicker? How do you get people to cycle? How do you improve the cadence in competitor and athletics? And so from that funny little group that worked with me, I learned two or three things, which I just applied. I'm not an MBA parvered grad. The first was do what he did, although he was probably one of the most intelligent people I know, but do surround yourself with people that are far smarter than you.

And when you find them, trust them to get on with the job. Don't sit on their shoulders, which is exactly what I did in London. I did bring to the table the smartest people I could find. You know, Paul Dighton, who was my CEO, obviously politically people like Tessa, But, you know, if you look at that team that created and drove the London Games, I was very privileged to be sort of chairing it. But they were the most extraordinary people.

The second thing is just remove all the inhibitors you possibly can in a leadership role from preventing the people that you have trusted to get on with the job from derailing what they need to do. And that sometimes means taking one for the team. So, you know, in the Olympic years, it meant going on Radio 5 on a 4 o'clock on a Friday afternoon and getting beaten up by taxi drivers because you weren't going to be able to access the Olympic lane along the embankment for a, you know, two weeks. Why would your highly intelligent CEO spend his time rehearsing for select committees or doing those sorts of things? So I think find the people, if they're world class, trust them to get on with it and remove all the inhibitors from their day that would stop them from doing that. And just find really, really smart people because if you do, then it's probably self-preserving as well. Now, my final question relates to something you said earlier, which were really very rapidly moved on from before I could develop the theme, which is when you said that you thought the Tories were done.

I thought it was a rather benign response to that. Obviously music to my ears. So you're a member of the House of Lords, Lord Co, Companion of Honor. If you did still have a vote, would you vote for this lot to come back? Look, of course I would vote Conservative. I am a Conservative, and that's not going to ever vary. I know what kind of Conservative I am, and I don't witness maybe as many of them around at the moment as I would.

It's a different party from the one that I joined, but the Conservative Party has to remember that it has been at its most successful when it's been operating at the centre, as most political parties do. There are elements of the party that I don't find particularly edifying at the moment. And you think they're done?

You think Labour are going to win? I think the electorate do make a decision, and whether they've actually articulated it, whether they've even come to... But there is a moment, and I think this may be it. Well, thank you very, very much indeed. It's been a great, great pleasure. Thank you. I've enjoyed it. Seb, love to see you. So, Rory, Lord Coe, companion of honour.

Yes, Lord Co. Sir Seb Co. Lots of all these different things. He said, every honour ago. And you kind of seem to know him quite well, and I've seen you, you interviewed him in GQ, didn't you? I was fascinated by that interview, which will include maybe in the newsletter, because he gives these very kind of monosyllabic answers during the GQ interview. So I thought maybe he was being a bit grumpy there. No, I'll tell you what that is. That's because this one, because of the one, because with our actual voices, whereas GQ, we tended to kind of edit them quite a lot.

I see. But no, I don't think, Seb is very rarely monosyllabic. Right. Seb's a good talk. Seb does a good talk. But he has had, when you go through it, I could have gone on talking all day, because he has had a ridiculously varied life. Was he a kind of hero of yours in the 70s?

Yeah, he was. I mean, I actually loved them both. I loved Coandova and Steve Cramm and Peter Elliott's the other one. He doesn't overly praise over it, does he? No, actually, if we got onto that, I happen to know that they've got a much better relationship now. But it's odd. Given an opportunity, he didn't immediately say he's an amazing guy. Well, they were unbelievably competitive. No, he was a hero.

Because honestly, if you look at his running style, he's just a beautiful runner. And it's interesting how our lives are sort of interwoven. So when I was working for Tony and he was working for Hague when he was an MP, but then I went through the Olympic period. So I'd say he's a good friend, and he's one of the people who persuade me not to be an MP, partly because he actually shares your view of a lot of what Parliament is like. Yeah, he said something like he was going to lie down on the street to prevent you or something. He said, you'll absolutely hate it.

The place is filled with wankers. The processes are absolutely balsaking. And if you ever get the temptation again, phone me and I will come to lie outside your front door and prevent you from leaving the house is what he said. Oh, that's very good. So one thing, given we talk a lot about multicultural Britain, were people very conscious of his Indian heritage in the 70s? No. I think even some of our listeners might be a little bit surprised by that. I would say that if anything, even though he was from a working class background in Sheffield,

he was kind of seen as the middle class guy. Right. Compared to Steve Ovette. Compared to Steve Ovet, who was the kind of, you know, the warrior. But I think that was partly the way he ran as well. He just ran so beautifully. But no, so back then they were front and back page in a way that today footballers would be. And so I think then to go on and do all the different things, business, it's a pretty successful business.

And have the other guys done that? Well, Steve Kramm is very, very good commentator. I think Steve O'Hale lives in Canada now. I'm not sure what he does. But they haven't gone on to be members of Parliament and run big Olympic committees and run Athletics Federation. We didn't get onto the fact that he probably would have

given us a stone warning answer, but the word is he's trying to get into the IOC to run that as well. It's fascinating. And do you think those, and we should have maybe got into that, but do you think those are actually genuinely satisfying or fulfilling jobs

from a distance? They seem like nightmare jobs running the International Olympic Committee. It seems like a horrifying job. Would you want to do that? Yeah, yeah. You don't think it's all bureaucracy. No, well, it's politics.

A lot of it's politics. It's international. It's stuff you like. It's geopolitics. It's building relations with every country in the world. It seems pretty kind of thankful. You always end up in a French jail. Whatever you do.

I think quite a bit out there if you're corrupt. I'll actually quite a lot of them who are corrupt don't end up in jail. They seem to have sailed through pretty well. But I think Seb's a, I think he's a very, very talented guy. He's also kept that kind of calm manner you see. I think most of the time, that's what he's like. And do you think he could have been a professional? Minister? Oh, God. He'd be better than what we've got. He'd be better than the last few.

I've never really thought of that because, of course, he was only there for one term. And as you said, it was a period where you had to hang around a fair bit before you became a minister. But certainly, what I saw of him running the things that I've seen him run, be it a company, be it a campaign, be it an organised, pretty big, complicated, multifaceted organisation. You can certainly do that. Well, thank you for getting him along. No problem.