The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 62. Sajid Javid: Austerity, the Tory leadership contest, and the problem with 'islamophobia' (Part 1)

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

How are politicians working to combat anti-muslim and antisemitic racism in the UK? How does Sajid maintain friendships across party lines? Was austerity the only option for the Conservatives following the financial crash? Rory and Alastair are joined by Sajid Javid, former Home Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Secretary of State for Health, and many more cabinet positions, to answer all these questions and more in part one of this two part interview. 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. Hi there. It's Alistair here. Rory's had to run to a lunch.

And we've just spent quite a long time in the studio here in London with the former cabinet minister, Sajid Javid. And it was really, really, really interesting. And the reason Rory's had to run and Sajadjad has had to run is because we went way over our allotted time. You're going to hear the first part, which is very, very interesting. But we've actually decided to split it into two parts simply because we covered so much ground. We don't want to cut anything out. So we're going to put it out in two parts.

First part you'll hear now. The second part will be in the main feed at the end of the week. but if you enjoy part one so much that you can't wait until Friday, you can become a member of Trip Plus, and you do that by going to therestispolitics.com. You'll get all sorts of other benefits if you do that, but the immediate benefit is you'll be able to listen to the second part of our interview with Sajajad.

And if you want to hear the first part, here you go. Welcome to the rest of politics leading with me, Alice Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And today we have with us Sajajad, who is one of the most, I suppose, senior and experienced members of Parliament in the Conservative Party at the moment. I mean, he's been a cabinet minister in an enormous range of different departments. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he oversaw the business department, he did culture, he was the Home Secretary, etc., etc. So a really, really good way at getting under the bonnet of real government, real administration.

he became a minister very early on. We joined Parliament together in 2010, but he was a minister by 2012. So he's been really up there on the front bench for over a decade. He ran for the leadership, actually against me and against Boris Johnson, and then he ran the previous time too. And was a major contender in the leadership. I remember when we were in Parliament, he was regularly one of the great stars of the Conservative Party

and people talking about him as Britain's Obama. And that's partly because Sajid came in at a time, we'll talk about this a bit, where actually the Conservative Party had been very, very white. He was the first Muslim to hold one of the great officers of state in Britain. Conservative Party's changed a lot since then, so that's something maybe to talk about. But he's also got an extraordinary personal story,

and he's about to leave politics. So this is a chance to get Sajid unbound. no longer worrying about exactly what position he's going to get next or where he's going, but to give us a small, honest view on what it felt like to be a politician. Over to Alastair. So can we start right at the beginning with your childhood? You're born in Rochdale? Yeah, thanks for having me on.

Yes, I was born in Rochdale. But grew up mainly in Bristol. Yeah, I was by the age of sort of three or four left with my parents and moved to Bristol. And just give us a taste of your childhood in terms of, as we've said, father from a pretty poor background when you left Pakistan got a okay job here but you weren't exactly

rolling in it in the way that eventually you were just tell us about a child and one thing I'll be particularly to ask you about is whether whether as a child of Pakistani heritage growing up in particularly in Bristol when you've

presumed you've got memories of that whether you did suffer much racism and how that felt yeah so as As Rory just said, actually my parents were both from very poor sort of backgrounds for villages in Pakistan. My dad came over first before my mum and his first job actually was on the cotton mills in Watchdale and then he wanted to get a job on, you know, that was sort of more regular, paid more relatively and applied to, you joined what I think was a greater Manchester bus company, became a conductor. But you asked about racism.

I just gave an example that he then passed on to me and my brothers was that when he, so he was a he wanted to become a driver. At that point, there were hardly any other drivers in Manchester that were not white. And there was no legal reason, but the union blocked it. The union had rules, had a colour bar policy. And he told me this story. Informal. Informal. But he had, he told me that there were posters and so as informal, but they had post saying, no, you know, no coloured people to drive buses. And he went along to, what was the recruitment office, already as a conductor. And he He queued up, queued up, got to the end. And there's a lady there says, I like an application form to be a driver.

And she said, you can't. He said, why not? And you said, because can't you read the sign? And he said, I know the law. I know I can do this. And she grabbed the paper, chucked it on the floor. You have to pick it up from the floor. And he took him two years to become a bus driver and eventually became one of the first

non-white bus drivers in Manchester. And so my parents faced racism. As a child, I can remember so many instances. I can remember the Rochdale, even though I left so young. I remember walking in the streets as a child with my mum being shouted at, normally packy and sometimes other even worse stuff. And in Bristol, yeah, there were many, many incidents. By then my parents, they wanted to have a business.

My father, first he did market stalls. My mum used to sew the clothes for the stalls and then he eventually sort of graduated a shop. You wanted a shop. We lived above the family shop. But I can't tell you the number of times that, uh, We woke up one morning and there's graffiti on the windows of the shop, you know, packy bastards, packies out. And I'd feel so sorry for my parents. My mum would spend hours cleaning this graffiti while my dad would be trying to sell things in the shop.

I absolutely get why you'd have a kind of reaction to that kind of thing. But I just wonder on the union thing, because you've got quite a reputation as being a Thatcherite, certainly historically. Does that explain maybe why you have a take on the trade unions that is, you know, coming from where I am, is sometimes has felt a little bit extreme? No, I don't think so. I think there's a great question in that would that had an impact on my thinking about unions. I'm not anti-union. I never have been. I think unions play an important role, you know, obviously for organised labour.

But I would say that they have also, in the history of Britain, done many wrong things. And, you know, being unaccepting of people that don't happen to be white was clearly wrong. There are many union members, unions that organise to support people like Enoch Powell and others, when he said what he said. And so you had the sort of right and the left coming together. One of the things I remember when we came into Parliament together is early conversations where you very, very politely and courteously got me up to your tiny little office in Parliament to talk about foreign policy and Afghanistan.

But one of the things that made me wonder is how much of your Pakistani or Punjabi heritage you kept because on the one hand I think you talk about the fact your mother didn't speak very good English so you were having to translate for her when she went to doctor's appointments but did you ever go back to Pakistan? Did you ever see the villages they came from? How did that identity sit with you? Yes, I'm very proud of that heritage that identity in fact Punjabi was my mother tongue I remember arriving at school at very young age not being able to speak English

and at the time I wouldn't have realized it, but today I'm very proud of that that I can speak the language and it meant when I did go to Pakistan first as a child, but obviously that was my parents' choice, but more importantly, when I chose to go as an adult, I have taken my children to Pakistan, I've taken to villages of my parents.

In fact, just over a year ago, my father is sadly no longer with us, but one of his dying wishes to me and my brothers was that please, if you ever can, take your children to my hometown, my village where he was born, which was on the Indian side of Punjab, south of Amritsa, and town near Jolandr, which is now Indian Punjab. And he was part of that partition. And that obviously affected him a lot. And he almost died as a youngster moving from just outside Amritsa to Lahore.

And I did that just over a year ago. I took all my children, my family, my wife, to his birth. place, the house that he was born in the school that he went to in India. And if you ask my children today, if they were here, and they've been very lucky, they've traveled a lot, they've had lots of nice holidays, been to very interesting places. If you ask all four of them today, what's the best sort of trip outside the UK you've ever had that's impacted most, they would all say the visit to their Dadu's birthplace. Before we move on from this, Siddiquan, Homsi Yusuf, Anna Sawa, I mean, there is a group

across different parties, S&P, Conservative Labour, of people who come from the Punjab, right, the Pakistani Punjab, most of them. Do you feel anything in common or is that sort of, when you meet them, is there anything that connects people? Yes, I do. And all three of the people that you mentioned, obviously, all in different political parties, different political traditions. I know them all. I would consider them all friends. I think they would say that. I've got to know them through politics, actually.

And there is an affinity. There is a link. I mean, we can obviously have our different politics and, you know, the way we might vote, the things that we might say in Parliament and elsewhere. But there is a link. And I've worked actually with Sadie Khan when I've been in ministerial positions and we worked incredibly well, became friends with Hamza Yusuf when I was the health secretary of the UK.

He was the health minister in the Scottish government. We worked very closely together, Anas. I also know his father, and he was father. who actually went on to be governor of Punjab. And so, and I feel proud of that in the UK today that you have, first of all, many more people in politics that are not white, that are from various backgrounds, be it black or Asian. But I guess in particular, to see more people of Pakistani heritage coming through.

I was going to come to this later, given that Sadiq's name has come up, it seems maybe I've been signed. Are you one of the first people to come out and criticise Lian, Anderson for what he said about Sadiq Khan, where he essentially said he was run by Islamists as opposed to, you know, run by Londoners. And I think a lot of people listening to this, or hear you say as a politician that they know well through having been cabinet minister and so forth, but you're sitting there saying that you're friends with people of other parties. Is that something that you think the politicians don't say enough when they are actually

on the front line in the big jobs where they're attacking each other the whole time? Because I think that's, I don't know what you thought there, right? I just thought, I think people would find out, oh, God, he just, first thing he said virtually is about his opponents, that they've become friends. Well, there are a lot of friendships, let's say, across the aisle in politics. And sometimes I find that some of those are probably more trustworthy, you know, real friendships than with people on your own side. And certainly during my time in Parliament, I can say there, I generally feel I have friends on the other side, as it were. and respect in the sense that, you know, I might be standing there as a minister at the dispatch box and someone on the Labour side, let's say, gets up and says that's all nonsense, don't agree with it.

But they're doing their job. First of all, if that's what they really believe, then fine, fair enough. That's why they're in Parliament to express their opinions. They might not even really believe it. Their whips might have told them to do it. But they've got a job to do, right? I've got a job to do. But I can think of so many times where I've worked with, especially as a minister with MPs, particularly, well,

I was going to say particularly Labor, but I think a DUP MPs, liberal Democrat MPs, on issues that really matter. Do you think Lee Anderson believes what he said? Do you think he believes that? Does he believe that Sadiq Khan is run by Islamists and he's lost control of the streets of London? Hard to say whether he really believe. I like to think not.

Could he really believe it? Sadly he may. He didn't apologize. He hasn't apologized. I mean, let's be clear. What he said was racist. It was anti-Muslim. hatred in a very sort of blatant

in one of the vilest forms. It was completely unacceptable. I know lots of the ministers out there saying now it's wrong. Of course it was wrong, but it was much more than just like wrong. Why none of the current ministers saying what you've just said? And would you have said that when you were the Home Secretary? Yes. But why are none of them saying that?

They've all been told. Say it's wrong. I said similar when I was Home Secretary about others. I said similar about President Trump when he made some comments as Home Secretary. Just sort of to bring the lessons in who are not professional politicians. So Alice is trying to get into special politics. It is a kind of bizarre, right? It's all over social media at the moment.

Nick Ferrari will say to a minister, so you said it's wrong. Why is it wrong? And then the minister will say, it's wrong. Because he's wrong. He'll be like, why is it wrong? And he'll be like, it's wrong. And they'll repeat like seven times the same phrase. Can you just, now that you're leaving politics, take the veil back and explain to the public.

Why does ministers say the same mind seven times? Well, obviously, this isn't a policy area as such, but there will be, I mean, both of you will be familiar with this, maybe particularly Alistair, there will be lines to take. Right. And the expectation. Better crafted than the ones they've had for this. And the expectation would be, you would take those, right? They might be better crafted, right? And somebody.

And I'm not sure Alist can take many examples where he had to, you know, have a few words with someone when they didn't take the line, even though the line was pretty dumb. So, so to explain, somebody in the centre. has decided that ministers should be saying it's wrong and not say anything else. And it's been written down on a sheet of paper. The guy's gone into the radio studio. And I guess... And also what happens off is before they, just before they go into the studio, maybe that morning, if they're doing what's called the morning round,

they'll have a chat with someone at number 10 or CCHQ, the sort of headquarters. And they'll say, by the way, you will get asked this. And all you can say is wrong, do not cross the line. Do not cross the line. And then they'll feel they won't get promoted if they cross the line. They'll be in trouble. And some of them will be worried about promotions. Some of them are just not good ministers and just weak.

Right? That's the reality. Is that I, I mean, were there things that I said as a minister that I didn't really want to put it like that? There wouldn't be my words I was taken. And of course there were. Right. Of course there were. But there were also plenty of times where I just thought, you know what?

This is just too important. You've got to say. You just got to say what it is. And whatever the consequences is, damn the consequences. Right. And sometimes the consequence might not quite be. what you think. You know, for example, you remind me of something, you know, when I was the local government community secretary, the wind rush scandal had started, it was awful. I mean,

I was reading about it, hearing about it, learning a bit more in government. Obviously, I wasn't in the home office, but everything I was hearing about it internally, reading externally, thanks to the excellent work of Amelia Gentleman and others and stuff, I thought, this is just terrific. This is like, these people are British and I just cannot understand how this could have happened. And I remember being interviewed about it. Obviously, as a cabinet minister, it was the hottest topic. It had very clear lines. You must not admit it's a crisis. You must not say it's a scandal. You must defend the home office. I remember doing an interview and I said, this is awful. This is a massive injustice. And then I said, this could have been my parents.

This could have been my parents. I just cannot understand it. I got a call that afternoon from number 10, I think, you know, I'd say it was, but someone very senior saying, why did you say that? You've caused so much trouble. Was the name Nicol Fiona? No, actually, they had gone by that. Thankfully, they had gone, right? And this, I tell you, it was like on a, something like the Saturday, I get this call saying, you must, you know, the prime minister sub said, she wants to see you first thing.

This is unacceptable. I'm going to interrupt, just to explain to the audience why that would be. it's because the government's really worried. They're trying to hold the line together. And they're worried that if you say this, it's going to create newspaper headlines that the journalists will try to use against the home section. Yeah.

And then, I'm pretty sure the following day, I think the Sunday, Amber Rudd resigns. And you go to the job. And Monday morning, I get a phone call. I do get that phone call from the prime minister about wind rush, really. But it wasn't to bollock me. It was to say, do you want to be? I would really love you to become the Home Secretary, right?

You see, what you've just said there reminds me, we used to have John Reed, Jack Cunning, and Margaret Beckett, Donald Dure, we had several cabinet ministers who you could phone up and say, this is the line, okay, this is the line to tape, then they would go out and they would speak like human beings. They wouldn't say something contrary to government line. So what you did there was actually you didn't go across. In saying this could have been your parents,

you weren't saying this is the government's fault necessarily. So that's the difference. And that's when you talked earlier about some ministers aren't very good. That's what drives me mad about most of today's ministers. They sound like robots reading a script. Too many of them sound like robots. Sometimes they, everyone knows, everyone's listing. I think, come on, you just know.

You should be better than this, right? And it's good, obviously, that they're saying it's wrong, which is better than not saying it's wrong, I guess. But it's not going far enough because, you know, what Lee Anderson said is just totally unacceptable in politics. He shouldn't be in the, as a result, you know, especially if he just wasn't willing to issue any kind of society apology. And since then, obviously, he's double down, which makes me think, back to Roy's question, maybe he just didn't mean this.

He really actually meant this, which is even worse in some ways. You know, people do misspeak sometimes. It gets taken out of context. Isn't he doing it? And aren't the government not sort of going overboard and saying the sort of things that you've just said? Because they think there is a part of the electorate that can't have their own prejudices, challenged. And that's dangerous. So actually you've got a situation with senior politicians are saying we're not going to call out racism because there will be people there who will feel

we're talking about them because that's what they think. I think clearly there's a reason why the lines to people don't go, you know, say this much, but don't go any further. But it is clear, I think, that any sensible, reasonable person, that if you take this instance, your anti-Muslim hatred is as unacceptable as, anti-Semitism, right? They're both completely unacceptable. This is, you know, disliking someone or at worst, you know, hurting them, discriminating them, you know, calling for bad things to be done to them just because of the faith they've

chosen to follow. And I saw both as community secretary, as home secretary, and now it's even worse for both of those communities. Both of those are suffering unacceptable levels of racism because of your activities that are happening thousands of miles away where the people who want to protest against that, or make an issue but they can't just find a sensible, civil way to do that,

and they attack people from different communities. Okay, let's just take a quick break. Hi, everybody. It's Dominic Samark here from The Rest Is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter.

And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Restis History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny. any resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise. People are arguing about Europe. The government has got a few issues with the trade unions. And we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues.

and people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her.

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. One of the things I was always interested in with you is that in many ways you lived a very cosmopolitan life, as you said, you traveled as a child, you worked in Singapore, you worked for these big international organizations. But I noticed when you came to Parliament, you didn't spend a great deal of time talking about foreign policy. So even though you lived internationally, you spoke Punjabi, you had all that background, why was it you were not leaning in more to the war in Afghanistan or what was happening in Iraq or Kashmir or Israel, Palestine? Am I right that to some extent you focus more on domestic policy? Not completely because I've had a huge long-running interest in foreign policy, foreign issues long before I was in politics. You talked about my banking career.

My banking career was most of it was in a field called emerging markets, which were basically developing economies around the world. And one of the things I liked about that particular work for the 20 years I did it was that it took me to some very interesting parts of the world. And I was as interested in the politics of those countries, the economics. The answer to your question, though, but it is right, the final point you make about not talking too much about these issues in Parliament. I think the short answer is really that I became a minister very early. And from that, from 2012, I was elected in 2010, you know, a minister, actually a PPS within nine months, a minister in the Treasury by 2012. And there for almost a decade is in various ministers. So I tend to stick to my brief because there's always a, if I start talking about, you know, there are obviously.

when it's from policy interest, you have the Foreign Office, the International Development Office. So privately, I would have discussions with ministers, including, I think, Rory, with you when you were in those portfolios. In fact, you remind me as something that, you know, there's no reason anyone knows it. But when I was George Osborne's PPS, and just before I became a Treasury Minister, the Economic Secretary, a week before the reshuffle, George said to me, look, we're going to have a reshuffle next week, don't tell anyone. And I think the Prime Minister is really minded to give you a ministerial job, what would be your dream job? I said, Foreign Office. And then a week later, to the Treasury as the economic section. I love that job. I guess it suited my sort of immediate

skill set more, but actually the job I wanted was foreign policy. Because one thing that you were quite well known for, you were very strongly pro-Israel. You chair conservative friends of Israel for quite a long time. I haven't chaired it, no, but I am, you know, Israel is a country that I have been very supportive of and I think it's a it's a country that you know is for all the right reasons an ally of the UK. Yeah and so with what's going on now this sort of

links up with the Lee Anderson stuff and as you said you've got anti-Semitism you've got Islamophobia. I noticed that you were using that phrase anti-Muslim hatred. Yeah. Is that because you don't, what is this row in the Conservative Party about not wanting to use the earth? Because one of my great memories

when we wrote that BBC leadership debate together. Yeah. We were all on the stage against Boris Johnson. One of the things you did at the end of debate is you challenged us all to sign up to an investigation into what you then called Islamophobia. I hadn't done that. It wouldn't have happened. I mean, it might have happened if you become prime minister or I become prime minister, but I was a bit worried it might not happen with Boris Johnson. So that's why I did it.

But at those days, you use the phrase Islamophobia and now you tend to use anti-Muslimatry. Well, actually, I think that particular debate, I used the phrase only because I think the question was phrased in that way. And we didn't have much time. I didn't want to sort of get into a sort of argument about definitions. But I do actually, I do think, I've looked at this a lot. I looked at a lot as both community secretary and home secretary. And I think the correct term is anti-Muslim hatred. And the reason is, is that the definition of Islamophobia, particularly the definition that was, I think, put together by the APPG, a parliamentary group.

And I met the leaders of that group at the time. It was, you know, a member meeting Sada Varsia, Anna Subi, there were others. We had some, you know, very good meetings. But I told them at the time, and it was a decision of mine in the home office at the time, not to use that term because it was too broad. Because it included saying to people, you can't criticize a faith. It was like a blasphemy type law, right? And in this country, you know, for all the right reasons, we have freedom of expression, freedom of expression, religion. And just as we should have a blasphemy law on Christianity and Judaism, and Judaism.

or any other religion, you know, all religion should be treated the same. But what was very clear, and has always been clear to me, is that because someone chooses to follow a particular religion, that there's no reason that anyone can have to discriminate against them, to abuse them in any way. And that's why I think anti-Muslim hatred is the right term. So would you say that your strength of feeling about the issue, in particular, what Lee Anderson and Suella Braverman said at the week, last weekend, that you feel just as strongly as Saeeda Vasi does about what he did, why it's so bad. It's just that there's an argument about what word to call it. I think on the issue of Le Anderson, I think that's probably correct.

I mean, Saida Varsie feels strongly on many issues. I couldn't speak for her. On this issue. On the Leander's point, she's been really clear. And I think I've been very clear. So I think we would be in agreement on that. But there's one other point I just want to make on the Islamophobia versus anti-Muslim hatred in terms of definitions is that as Home Secretary, I also received advice from the police, you know, fighting counterterrorism, fighting terrorism, day and day out and other services. And the police, and this is public, because it was published eventually, the National Police Chief's Council, which represents all the sort of chief constables, they had given me very strong advice in 2019, the definition of Islamophobia that the government is being asked, except is far too broad and actually works against the interests of Muslims, it will feed

extremism. And that is something as Home Secretary, of course, you're going to take seriously. On language, have there ever been times, I mean, here you are today being very calm and moderate and mature discussion with the three of us. Have there ever been times in your career where you feel you have gone over the top with some of the things you've said? I'm thinking about, you call momentum, I'm no fan of momentum, but you call them neo-fascist. There was a time where you were kind of suggesting that Jeremy Corbyn was a bit of a Holocaust denier. Is that back to the point about when you're in the heat of the debate as a frontline politician that sometimes you can go over the top?

Do you think that was going over the top? Well, sometimes, look, first of all, can you go over the top? Yes, you can. You're a human, you're at the heat of the moment. Can you say something that you think on reflection? It was the wrong way to put it. And would you have, on those occasions, would you've thought that? On those, I mean, you mentioned Jeremy Corbyn,

I think Jeremy Corbyn had, he had an issue with Jewish people, right? He had an issue. And I wasn't as well documented and the number of people in his own party that believes he had a problem with Jewish people. And when I made some comments about him, he actually threatened to sue me. And I said, I'd see you in court. And by the way, if I see you in court, you're going to take the stand and you're going to get questioned on your relationship with anti-Semitism.

And he backed off. And so... See you in course. That's quite aggressive. Well, he's the one who... He hired a lawyer. I mean, I don't know who was funding all this stuff from him, but he hired a lawyer and I've suddenly received this letter from him.

But my... Your question was, you know, on that particular... I don't... Not that. But I'm not saying there won't be others. I mean, I can't think right now, but I'm sure I can think of instances where I thought I went too far. So can I bring you back to your time as a government minister, the administration?

One of the loveliest things I remember when I... made it into the cabinet is you gave me a telephone call. And you said to me, Rory, I wanted to get you on the phone because you're taking over first time. You're not junior minister anymore, a cabinet minister. These are my bits of advice for taking over a department. Will you share with the audience a little bit if you can remember what your general advice is on taking over a department? Well, I've done that quite a bit in that colleagues have often were asked, and even recently where they've become the head of a department for the first time. And yeah, so I think that, top things in my head would be having run six of these six departments is that no matter how much you think you're going to do and get done and things, it's not going to quite work out like that because you're not totally in charge, right? First of all, obviously you've got a boss, that's a cabinet. In a department, as you'll remember, Rory and Alastair, you will know, you don't typically pick your junior ministers. The only people you end up picking are your spads, your special advisors. Everyone else is already there. The civil servants are obviously

permanent and they're going to be there a lot longer than you will ever be. So one of the first pieces of advice would be to just find like two or three things, maybe even just two that really, really matter to you, that really matter where you think you're going to make a difference and focus on those rather than trying to have like 10 things, right, because you're just not going to achieve it. Second thing is to make sure you read everything that's put in front of you, all the basis of the paper, what you actually do it yourself and that you challenge and your way you You obviously didn't phone Boris Johnson when he got a job in.

Well, he didn't, yeah, he never asked me for any advice like that. And so, and that takes a lot of time, right? There's a, you know, some of the departments that have been in, Home Secretary, obviously health and the pandemic and things. There's a, there's a lot of stuff. It can, you can spend, you spend a lot of time at night just going through stuff, but you have to do it because there's no, no one can read it for you. They can give you some reason stuff, but you have to really go through this yourself.

And another piece of advice, maybe a bit more on you. usual is that that be nice to all MPs, be civil to all MPs, not just your own side, all MPs. So obviously as a Secretary of State, MPs, as they should, will come to you with issues, either a policy issue or quite often a constituency issue. Those really matter to MPs, as my constituency issues have always mattered to me. But go out of your way to really help them out. And it doesn't matter if they're a Labour MP, a Liberal Democrat, MP or Sative, just treat them all the same because A, it's the right thing to do, first thing, because it's a constituency issue especially. But B, you're going to need those MPs one day and they will remember that you really went out of your way. We had an interesting case of this, didn't we, with MPs coming to Ed Davy when he was cabinet minister about the post office. He was Dominic Grieve, Oliver Letwin. And I was very surprised by that as a former minister that if two of my colleagues had come to me, and they're pretty senior colleagues, weren't they?

Those were kind of big, big cheeses in the party coming to say, we have a really big problem with the post office. And he obviously decided to slightly say, well, you know, I'm getting different advice from my civil servants. The department's telling me that's not a big deal here. Can you sort of think about why that might happen, why a minister might make that mistake? Look, I don't know the specifics of that, of course, but ministers, absolutely. I think of some of the answers where you will get advice and it's wrong, not correct, and I'm not saying it's deliberate. Someone's sitting there trying to manipulate the minister necessarily. But why might that happen?

There can be many reasons. But if you think of responsibility of government and how broad it is, you mention the post office. It's a government-owned company. it's got its own independent board and then it reports into another government quango, or certainly did that at the time, I think, called UKGI, which then reports into a couple of different departments, which then reports

into two different ministers. If you just work your way through that chain, you can see how especially with all the independence involved, you know, as a corporate body, there's a separate body, then eventually it gets to civil service. You can see how things can be lost in that, including super important things.

You mentioned your time as PPS to George Osborne. One of the things that Roy I argue about a lot on this podcast is the impact of austerity and whether it helped or harmed and whether it's partly responsible for the pretty dire state that the country's in at the moment. And I just wanted to tie that to your experience in banking. And whether you agree with me or disagree with me that one of the reasons why populism was born and one of the reasons why it's become so powerful, not just in the UK but in different parts the world is that the sense of the global financial crisis was that quotes shorthand,

the people who caused it got away with it and we the public are paying a price. And that's what's fueled a lot of inequality. It's what's fueled a lot of anger with politicians and with bankers. You know that bankers are not the most popular people in the world. So first of all your assessment and austerity and secondly, what your reflections are about what the modern banker is and does and whether that has helped to fuel populism and inequality. Well, first, you mentioned the global financial crisis, so 2007, 2008, and then obviously it had a big impact on the election result in 2010. Clearly, the banking system screwed up, lots of reasons why it screwed up, but one of the

reasons, both in the UK and US and others, was the poor regulation. And that was a decision by politicians, right? So as you will remember, the entire regulatory framework of banking in the UK was changed by then Labor government. And they made a big song and dance about it. But it's very clear how that then led to some of the problems. Now, you asked me about austerity. When the coalition government came in 2010, when I would get asked about austerity, obviously, especially then, it was very topical. I would say it's about government living within its means.

And so I think you and I will probably disagree on this in that I think the government, in terms of reigning in public spending, trying to bring what was then a record budget deficit of more than 10% of GDP, trying to bring that down and doing so over a number of years, I think the government had no choice. Because if the alternative was to keep spending money that you haven't got, then I was worried at the time. And even looking back, I think it was right to worry that how the, the financial markets might react to that, because you right remember there were other countries that didn't rein it spending in in time, like Ireland, like Greece, like Portugal, and they had to have bailouts. But when you're flitling where we are now, the state of the economy now, the levels of debt and borrowing and taxation now, you don't think there's a possibility, I know we've

had Brexit, we've had COVID, or all these other things, there isn't a possibility that actually some of the foundations for this mess were actually laid during that period? No, I think actually things would be worse if we're. didn't have the controlled public spending that we had during the coalition years. And a good example of that, during 2010, 2015, the government was, it didn't eliminate the deficit. The original goal was to eliminate it. It managed to half the deficit, which incidentally was the plan that Alice Adelaide had. So they basically had implemented Alice Adalings plan by the 2015 election. And then spending more or less was, you know, by whether it's the IMF or

or a bank, they considered the UK had it under control. Then the pandemic comes along and they government spent, I think, an additional 400 billion that it wasn't planning to spend in total with all the support, the health work and all of that. That wouldn't have been, it's hard to think how that would have been possible if posterity, as you call it, or bringing spending under control, hadn't happened. And just before I go about, what's your assessment of Brexit eight years on from the referendum? Well, look, I didn't support Brexit. My view hasn't changed. and I think that clearly obviously we've had Brexit, but the delivery of Brexit, if we call it that, not just because of the pandemic and obviously that happened around the same time as we were leaving,

then the war in Europe and things, there's lots of other things going on, I think, hasn't, so far hasn't lived up to what I think people who voted for Brexit, what they felt they were promised. That said, where do we end up as a country between now and next five or ten years? is as a result of Brexit, I think it's too early to tell. Structurally, one of the problems, we were both on the remain side during the Brexit thing. And a lot of the Brexiteers were arguing then that it was going to be terrific because you'd leave Europe, which was a relatively slow growing economy, and you'd be able to create terrific trade deals

with faster growing economies, China, India, the US. But two things have changed since then. One is that the international security situation has changed. So the idea of betting heavily on China and integrating heavily with the Chinese economy doesn't look as smart now as it might have looked in 2016. And the second thing that's changed is that the world has actually become more protectionist. The US in particular is much less interest in free trade deals than it was in the past. And all over the world, tariff barriers are going up.

So that in a way, the problem for the kind of, I suppose, the free trade right of the Tory party that supported Brexit is that the world's changed since 2016. They weren't able to launch themselves into this wonderful world of free trade because other countries are much less interested. They're becoming more isolationist, more protectionist, which of course makes me think that we should be considering very, very strongly, looking at something like rejoining the customs union, even if we weren't thinking about joining the EU again, because the world's changed since 2016.

Well, it has, for the reasons you've said, Rory, it has become harder to do. trade deals. I mean, there have been some success is the one with Asia, in particular, the CTTP is a particular, but none of that replaces the agreement that it had existed with the EU, not just because of no tariffs, but all the non-tariff barriers as well. And you're right about also the US and China and all that as well. And I actually, I felt even before, you know, whether it's because of COVID or changes in US leadership, I always felt it always going to be hard for the UK to do sort of big trade deals that are going to be clearly in the UK interests with these other big economies outside the EU.

Now we are where we are and I think there is a case for having a deeper trade agreement with the EU. The current trade agreement has to be renegotiated anyway. And so whoever wins the next election, they should be looking to work with our EU partners to see especially how they can start removing some of those non-tariff barriers. So hopefully all of our listeners at home have enjoyed that. If you'd like to hear the second part right now, it's already available to members of the Restis Politics Plus, and you can sign up at therestispolitics.com,

or you can subscribe through Apple Podcasts. If not, no worries, it'll be out on Friday. See you then. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.