The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 86. Nick Clegg: Coalition, Cameron, and Chaos (Part 1)

Episode Date: July 21, 2024

What closed-doors conversations led to the 2010 coalition? What were the coalition years like? How did it all go wrong for the Liberal Democrats in 2015? Rory and Alastair are joined by Nick Clegg to discuss all this and more. If you'd like to hear the second episode RIGHT NOW, it's already available to members of The Rest Is Politics Plus - sign up at therestispolitics.com. If you're not a member, it will be released next Monday (29th July) on the public feed. TRIP ELECTION TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Election Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Assistant Producer: India Dunkley Producer: Nicole Maslen + Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispolities.com. Hello and welcome to the Restis Politics leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alecester Campbell. And we are about to play the first of two episodes with Nick Clegg, who, as he shall explain, has had really three careers. One in Europe, one in the British Parliament, where he became leader of the Liberal Democrats and deputy prime minister, and now as a big cheese in the tech world in Silicon Valley. So we've gone through his childhood, life and times, a bit of politics, where his politics comes from in the first half, which you'll hear now. And then a week later, or if you're a subscriber, whenever you want, you'll have the second part where we focus much more on modern times, more modern times today.

He's got some very interesting things to say about the coalition. Not the biggest fan anymore, I would say, of Cameron and Osborne. No, but also brutally honest about the toll that politics took on him. Fascinating about the need for constitutional change. I mean, yeah, it's so much to get into. I thought he was very open and sort of vindicates. I sometimes think my idea that generally the ex-politicians are able to be more open than the current campaigning ones. Yeah.

He's also the first interviewee we've had where we've now done two members of a married couple because we talked to Miriam. his wonderful Spanish wife a while back. And I'll tell you what's interesting about Nickley. I've actually become quite a good friend of Nick's. And I'd forgotten, but he reminds me in the second part of the interview, he did come and ask my advice about when we went to Facebook. Maybe when we do the wrap-up after the interview,

we can talk about whether that was good advice. We can, we can. But what's interesting is when he was part of the coalition, Fiona used to sort of look at the television and kind of spit angrily, not spit, but, you know, get angry. Providing cover for the Trojord. Because she felt that was what he's since got to know him. And he and Miriam have become quite good friends.

And it's very, very hard not to like Nick Clay, I find. Even though you still meet people who will say he was the biggest sellout at all time. But I think he's a very, very likable man. And I hope you like it as much as we did. First part, right now. So Nick, thanks for being here. You are kind of what Theresa May might call a citizen of nowhere, really, aren't you? Polyglot, lots of different nationalities in your background.

lots of different countries in your education. Yeah, totally. Guilty as accused. Absolutely. Citizen of nowhere and everywhere. Absolutely. Globalist to my fingertips, my core. Absolutely. Everything that modern politics has rejected fully and wholesomely.

Yeah, yeah. That is you. That is me. I am a proud flag-waving globalist. Okay. So when you're sitting with somebody who doesn't know you, where you're from, what do you say? I'm from Britain, but I'm very European.

I mean, my dad is half-referral. Russian. My mom is Dutch. I spoke Dutch before I spoke English. I married, as you know, to a formidable Spanish lady, Median Gautilantes, and my children are raised bilingually. I spent 10 very happy years working in Brussels. Yeah, this, of course, yielded. I remember in the sort of barrage of unflattering headlines when I was in politics from the Daily Mail. There was a double-page spread, which had a very sort of jowly, unflattering photo of me. And the headline on the top was, is there anything British about this man? Question mark, which I think biologically, the answer is not very much. But anyway, by temperament, by culture, of course, I'm very British. But,

for me, I've always worn those different. As I think many people, are you, all of us, I think, wear multiple identities much more comfortably than this pure aisle debate that somehow we have to be 100% one thing or 100% other thing seems to always sort of foist on us. Can I come in on that? Because one of the things that's very prevalent in politics today from both conservative and labor is a very, very strong search for what the political campaigners call backstory. And we have a really remarkable Labor Cabinet, where people like Angela Rainer come out of conditions of real extreme poverty, but not just Angela Rainer. Many of them have come from very, very tough family backgrounds. And you came into politics with sort of Russian aristocrats in your ancestry and your dad was a Cambridge educator and your grandfather was, I I guess, a sort of doctor and your great-grandfather was a kind of English clergyman. I mean, you're the absolute epitome of comfortable English upper-middle class on your father's side and with a bit of Russian aristocracy on the other. Did you feel that that was something that you needed to think about, talk about, that you were lacking a dimension of experience when

you came in that somebody like Angela Rainer has? I sort of couldn't do anything about it. I am who I am. I can't undo my birth, my background. I didn't spend my time sort of beating myself up for who I was. I am who I am and I never sought to pretend otherwise, never sought to try and confect or invent some hardship that I didn't suffer. But it also combined with a very strong instinct that both Miriam and I had, which again, we applied a lot of pressure. You talk about backstory is also great pressure to, which of course flows from America like a lot of like a lot of trends do in politics generally, which is this thing of constantly parading your family in front of the cameras and so on. And we absolutely refused to do that as well. We refused, or rather

Miriam refused, more accurately, to move into an apartment in Downing Street or in Whitehall, which was advised. We were advised to do that after I became deputy prime minister. So in a sense, but not only was I hamstrung by a sort of comfortable hinterland, but also I wasn't really prepared. And I think I made that trade-off in my own mind quite early and quite comfortable. I thought, well, if people want something different, they're not going to get it for me. And so be it. I just never felt that that was a sacrifice I was prepared to make. And I'm very pleased I didn't, because in the end, as you all know, political careers, and boy, do I know, political careers are temporary things. They generally end in failure. And you shouldn't, I don't think you should, I always say to people

who, whenever I'm occasionally asked by people who want to go in politics, I say, be careful. Don't, don't make it your be all and endal. Don't make it your complete identity. Don't allow everything you've ever done before and after and during politics to be subcumed by policy. You're also a human being and you also have human beings who are dependent on you. And I was very conscious of that right from the outset. What made you a liberal and what is a modern liberal? Ah, well, so you've got to remember, I'm 57 now. I was very much child of the sort of Thatcher years. So I was very much of that generation who were repelled by what I felt at the time to be a very desiccated, soulless view of society. You know, she was, I think, I'm not even sure if she ever said it, but she was apocryphly claimed to say there's no such thing as society.

And me as a youngster was saying, well, no, no, no, you know, I had the idealism coursing through my veins that anyone does who was interested in world affairs. So I was repelled by that, and conservatism came across as a sort of harsh, aggressive, but also at Labor at the time, remember, particularly, the 70s, I'm old enough to actually have some childhood memories of the winter of discontent. And it was men. It was always men in suits sitting around trade union bosses, cutting deals over beer and sandwich. Do you think that's a real memory or just the way the myth? Oh, no, but most politics is about myth, by the way.

Yeah. I mean, boy, do I know it. You try and develop stories. No, so, but I'm just saying how I reacted to an environment in which right and left felt to me, just not speaking to me as a young person. And I also, I remember, I went through an intellectual journey without making it sound too ponderous. I remember after I graduated from university, I spent a year in the University of Minnesota. And oddly, it may be the cold weather, so I was confined to barracks in the university library.

But I just spent a lot of time reading basic texts of political philosophy. I remember reading Isaiah Berlin's essay, to liberty. Negative, positive liberty and John Rules. And I remember doing it was. But that could easily push you to labour. No, no. I think liberalism in the end has a greater belief in individual sovereignty and individual agency than more collectivist view of progress. And I say this cautiously to you, I just point

jumped down my throat. But there is always a tendency, I think, and it varies with people and leaders and so on. But there is always a tendency on the left to fuse their politics with morality. To think that basically their politics is better, is morally better and superior to their opponents. And I've always disliked that. And I think a liberal, a true liberal, has a level of curiosity and open-mindedness and a respect for other points of view that doesn't have that moralizing component, which I've always disliked in left-win politics. Let me develop that, because I do think that's right. I mean, as somebody, obviously from the rights, I've been interviewing a loss of people who are now in the cabinet and trying to ask them to work out how they

appeal to somebody like me who's a sort of floating voter in the centre. That's a tall order, Rory, to ask them to be, I mean, did any of them meet your, meet your, some of them got close. Some of them got close. Kea's time was probably better at the others. Some of them really don't want to do it. I mean, some of them genuinely find it very, very difficult, psychologically adjusting to the idea of a Tory and how you'd appeal to a Tory. And I do sometimes think if I was going to be mean, there is sometimes a sense that they

basically think that all the problems in Britain were caused by the fact that the Tories were nasty and privileged. And if people from working class backgrounds with good hearts come in, everything's going to suddenly get better. Yeah, I mean, look, this opens up. That's something you guys, as you discussed in your podcast all the time, which is that there's an attitude towards the balance of power between the state and the individual, which I think, and sorry, the state, the individual, the market. It's the sort of tripod, really, where conservatives have generally fused this rather actually sometimes uncomfortable marriage of elevating treas. tradition and country with the belief in market. And of course, those two things are often in intention.

Thatcherism, oddly enough, subverted many of the traditions her party believed in. Socialism always believed in the state as a battering ram of progress, which of course, particularly the construction of the welfare state and the post-war period and the incredibly successful government atly and so on made a great deal of sense. But it was often insensitive to issues of individual agency and privacy, which is why, in the latter stages, when you were in government with Tony Blair, people like me were, you know, campaign against what we thought were in principle encroachments on civil liberty. Liberalism going right, you know, if you go right back to late 19th century and beyond,

as always, I think, sought, but sometimes very uncomfortably try to sort of strike a somewhat different balance of being much more in favour of the decentralisation of power, the devolution of power, a greater suspicion than people on labour about the power of the state, that it can be inefficient, overweening, bureaucratic, authoritarian, but also a little bit more skeptical that the market is the answer to everything. And of course, even as I just describe it now, that can very quickly topple into a sort of split the difference politics, which just doesn't cut through, particularly when you have polarized choices in elections. And generally the Lib Dems do badly when people feel there's a real balanced choice. When people think there's one most likely outcome,

they'll throw the Lib Dem dog a bone, if I can put it like that. And I think one of the things that Lib Dems, and including under my, I mean, my leadership was more of a orange book, sort of classic small L liberal liberalism, but under whatever the different sort of hues and different liberal emphases of different leaders, I think that's the reason why I cleave to the idea that liberalism, going right back to Gladstone, is a separate and different school of political thought to the left and the right in British politics. If that wasn't the case, let's just say the liberal democrats didn't exist. Right. And let's say we were more like America and just the two parties, Labour and Tory. Through your life, have you been more leaning towards labour

or more to Tory? Oh, more leaning to Labour. We're about without a doubt. Right, because? Oh, because I think the sort of socially regressive policies that, and I saw this myself close up for half a decade, that conservatives would sometimes pursue without sufficient thought about the effects of those policies. And most, most importantly for me, of course, I said at the beginning, I'm an unashamed globalist, this elevation of a sort of 19th century idea of of the state, gunboat diplomacy view of Britain, I just think is serving this country so, so bad. I think it's done such damage. In the name of sovereignty, what the Conservatives have done, I think, in the last two,

three decades is they've actually inhibited our sovereignty, because I just passion. And this is a very liberal thing. I think power shared is power extended in the modern world. And that's a fundamental viewpoint of the world that I think the Conservatives not, and I stress people like Rory and not people like my great mentor, Leon Britton, but the modern conservative party, I think, has really gone down a blind alley on what sovereignty is in the modern world. Nick, can we take you back to the story? So give us a little bit of a sense of your childhood, your mother, and some extraordinary bits of you had an aunt who was a lover

of gawky and HG Wells and some others, yes. And give us a bit of a sense of that before we come back into the politics. Give us the sense of background, family, childhood. So as you said, Rory, if you write it on it. On paper, I had an incredibly conventional home counties, British, what do you call it, upper middle class upbringing. I was at a rugby fanatical country prep school where I did well. I was in the first, you know, top rugby team. Then I went to Westminster School.

Notwithstanding all of that, and as I think you alluded to earlier, my sort of upbringing in that of my siblings, I have two brothers and a sister, didn't sort of conform to that at all. We were perhaps to the views of many people. It was sort of almost eccentricly sort of multilingual. a boisterous family, garrulous family, very warm. I'm exceptionally close to my family, very, very close to my siblings and my parents. And as I say, my father had that jewel idea. His father was a longstanding editor of the British Medical Journal and a very prominent medic. His mother and my grandmother sort of hailed from, as you said, Rory, what they call sort of white Russian aristocracy,

which were sort of dispersed across Europe and like all of that Russian diaspora, they first went to the Baltic states, then Germany, then some basically they ended up either in clustered around Orthodox churches in Paris or London. So, you know, I would go with my grandmother to this incense infused church in central London. I'd spend most of my holiday, every minute of my holidays with my Dutch cousins in Holland with my grandmother's house just near Amsterdam. I was unoriginally called clog rather than from Clegg at school. I mean, you get the picture. So it was a rather odd mix of highly conventional, if you like, on paper upbringing, and a rather sort of oddly unconventional cultural and linguistic hinterland. The only thing I think is relevant least to this

podcast is we didn't sit around kind of ponderously talking about party politics, but you can't come from a family like that. My mother was born in and spent some early formative and harrowing years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, something she didn't talk to us about at all. Oh, well, oddly, actually, was very interesting. She, I can't remember how old. I must have been my mid-20s or something. I'll never forget, we were sitting outside in my parents' house in Oxfordshire, in the Oxfordshire countryside, and I think I was in my mid-20s or so. And there was just all of us were there, all six of us were there together as a family.

And then suddenly my mother just started talking, just started talking, and all just came, it just was like for two hours. And what was the story? Oh, just the horrors of being a young girl in a Japanese prison of war camp, seeing people being killed, raped. Why was she there? Because she was Dutch and it was a Dutch colony at the time that they In Indonesia. In Indonesia. Sorry, yeah, yeah. And were her parents colonial officers? Why were they in Indonesia? No, no, no. So my grandfather worked at that time for Shell and he worked for Shell in Indonesia. I sort of digress, but it was, as it happens, an exceptionally moving moment because I suddenly saw my mum talking in a way. I'd never see my mum talk. And how old was she when she went into the

prison of war camp? I mean, she was certainly old enough to remember it very vividly in Indian. Yes, so she would have been born in 1935, so she went in when she was seven or eight. Yeah, you can... Seven or eight, nine, ten. I need to check, but you can... Anyway, the memories were very vivid. I've often asked myself, how is it, for instance, when many years later as an adult, I went to the House of Commons as an MP. And in sense, my whole background should have almost sort of conditioned me to feel that it was an environment at which I felt comfortable.

Yet I always felt incredibly uncomfortable. I felt like an outside. I didn't like it. I don't think it liked me very much. I couldn't bear the sort of stifference. sort of ceremonial and inauthentic kind of way in which people would communicate with each other. So it's been an odd dynamic. In one sense, I've been raised in a highly conventional manner. In other ways, I've been exposed through my parents and my family's background to just a whole

bunch of inputs, which I believe have enriched me. Nick, Nick, before we come to Parliament, let's just quickly gallop through. So you put yourself in the frozen wastes of Minnesota. Yes. Then you went off to study in Europe. Yeah. You then, which is where you met your wife, you worked for the European Commission, you became a member of the European Parliament, all of this before you became an MP. Tell us a bit about that period in your life. It was an exceptionally happy period of time at almost every level. As you say, I met the most important person in my wife, at the Collège durop in Bruges.

Same as Stephen Heller. Stephen Heller, exactly. And then there's a whole network of people who are exactly from there. For listeners, that's Stephen Kinney. Stephen could have a date for the English Prime Minister. You are the first married couple, both of which have appeared on the podcast. Miriam obviously was first. And a lot better. I realise that.

I really follow modestly in her footsteps. But I met Miriam in the College of Europe in 1990 or 1991, something like that. So this was in the immediate aftermath of 1989. And I cannot exaggerate for those listening to this podcast who don't remember that or too young. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the significance of 1989. This, you know, all of us, I mean, all of us, I think, can relate to this, that we were raised under this dark, dark shadow, this Sordidamacles of nuclear conflict. I remember my prep school that I referred to earlier, I had some mad history teacher who told us, us, us, who told us, us, us terrified 11-year-olds when I, what a nerd I was, I asked him to give us a special session on why he thought a third world war was likely to happen. And he not only told us it was going to happen soon because the Soviets were going to nuke us all, but that we were going to all, we were going to die by Christmas.

I remember very specific, we're going to die by Christmas, and that the nuclear bombs from the Soviet Union were going to land near near the school because we were near sub-military base. Anyway, the point is to go from that to this extraordinary, thrilling feeling that Europe was suddenly open and whole, and that this disfiguring, scary division and standoff between the West and the Soviet Union should suddenly evaporated. I mean, I remember weeping when I was at the time in Minnesota,

I remember listening to NPR on a radio to the coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It marked me so profoundly that feeling of possibility and optimism and that those awful debilitating ideological divisions could now be set aside. It was a period of immense optimism. Then I meet Miriam at this place, the Collège D'Rourg, which was a sort of finishing school, if you like, for the sort of EU elite. I mean, Nigel Farage's nightmare, absolute nightmare. It was a teeming, seething place of Euroelitism.

But we were all there fostered by this great sense of optimism. It was the time of De Laund and Lord Cofield. And indeed, now the Conservatives forget it, of course, in the wake of the formation of the single market, then the creation of the single currency, this real feeling that Europe was on the move, the economy was really starting to move again. So it was a very, very exciting time to be a young man

to meet the love of my life, to then get married, to then become an MEP. I became an MEP. I was the first liberal parliamentarian in the whole of the East Midlands, since I even remember his name for some reason, Ernest Pickering, in 1936, who was a liberal MP in Leicestershire. So it was a very, very exciting and thrilling time. We then had kids.

It was a wonderful time. It was a time of now sepia-tinted optimism compared to what, you know, everything has happened since. Well, on that optimist, you know, we're going to take a quick break, and then when we come back, we're going to talk about your parliamentary and ministerial career. Hi, everybody. It's Dominic Sauerich here from the Rest is history. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics, when

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

of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistaira 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. at 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. So you became an MP. did you always have in mind to become a leader with the liberal Democrats? Was that sort of

always part of your thinking? It wasn't quite as deliberate as that. I had two great mentors in my life. One was Leon Britton. Not so much as a conservative, but certainly as a European I worked briefly for him in his sort of, what they call cabinet, but I was in his private office. When he was in the Commission? Yeah, the European Commission, exactly.

And he was then a really quite unusual figure. He was the one who on behalf of Europe negotiated the creation of the World Trade Organisation. One of my roles was to help him on the negotiations on behalf of the European Union to get China into the WTO. I mean, he was a great mental, but the other one was Paddy Ashtown. And it was actually Leon Britton who introduced me to Paddy Town. And I became very, very close to Paddy. And he became a very dear friend.

And I miss him immensely. And Paddy, much, I hope not to his chagrin later in life, was always very, very encouraging and sort of said, you really, you know, you should think big and so on. And so, and I actually, I remember the sort of if you want an origin story as such, I remember the first moment where I thought, oh, maybe I should become an MP, was when I was working for Leon Britain in Brussels, in his office, I would constantly tell him how irritated I was about this that I'd heard in the scene in the newspapers. And he was being viciously attacked by the conservative party at the time, by the Tory press. And by the way, I think a barely disguised anti-Semitic manner, by the way, at the time. People forget this. It was vile. And if people think these sort of internecine civil war about Europe is a recent thing, it went back a long way and it was vile.

I was very indignant on his behalf, and I kept telling him about this, that and the other. And I remember when he turned around somewhat impatiently to me. And he said, oh, for heaven's sake, if you've got so many views about politics, why you just go into politics? And I, for once, somewhat uncharacteristically, I was completely lost for words. Because at that point... You hadn't thought of it. Well, I'd never come across, other than him. I'd never come across politicians.

MPs to me, what are an alien species like they are to most people. I saw them on the telly. And I suddenly thought, oh, wow, I can be that. There's all those people yelling at each other in the House of Commons. So that really did get me then thinking. And then, I don't know how soon afterwards. I remember we were in Strasbourg at the European Parliament and Paddy Ashtown had asked to see Leon Britten. I said to Leon, if you don't mind, could you say to Paddy Ashtown, you've got someone in your team who's a ardent liberal and liberal Democrat.

When I first told Leon Britain that I was a liberal Democrat, he said, oh, for heaven's sake, that's like being an NGO. He was full of derision about him. Anyway, and very kindly, he did exactly that. And he said to Padilla, I've got this young, young, enthusiastically. guy on my team. He's desperate to meet you. Then Paddy, I remember marched out and I was sort of terribly intimidated out from the officer. I hear you want to be in the liberal Democrats. I said, yes. Like that sort of military poster, you know, the person pointing to you. Anyway, and then he very kindly suggested I sort of seek him out in London and I did. But from quite an early

stage, Paddy certainly was very, well, he just sort of, yeah, and he sort of said so publicly, but it didn't, it certainly didn't, certainly didn't go to my head. He urged me to think of standing for the leadership. Now, when was this? This was after Charles stood down. So this was just after, literally just after become an MP. And I remember ringing me and saying,

I said, you've got to be crazy. I can't have him find my office in the House of Commons. And so, yeah, he'd always urged me very early on and then Ming became leader. And then that didn't last very long. So by the time Ming stood down, which is, what, only 18 months or two months late, two years later,

I was starting to run out of excuses to say to Paddy, why I wouldn't throw my hat in the ring. So where do you go? Did you go, Padillaashhtown, Charles Kennedy, Mincumble, then you? That's right. And it was very striking. It's very early.

You'd barely been in Parliament for two years when you became leader of your party. I mean, we're surprised by how quickly Rishi Sunak and Kirstama did it, but you did it even faster. What do you think are the tensions and the strains of doing it so quickly? And is that a way of trying to understand part of Rishi Sunak and Kirstama's challenges of taking over a party when you haven't been in Parliament very long? It's a difficult one. Clearly, it comes with disadvantages. You just, you know, you've made fewer mistakes in that

shorter period of time. You're just less battle-hardened. On the other hand, the plus side is you can be just a bit naive and fresh, and you try stuff that others who are a bit more jaded by the process wouldn't. So it's definitely a bit of a pros and cons. I mean, again, I didn't spend too much time thinking about that. I thought, well, you don't choose your moment. The moment slightly chooses you, and it was very obvious that if I ducked the challenge of trying to enter into the leadership race at that point, then, you know, then I wouldn't, in a sense, then I would be ducking it for good. But I think it's an interesting question.

How much does experience of Parliament help or hinder? I think it does a little bit of both, oddly enough. You had this speech about how, despite your upper middle class background, you found Parliament pretty appalling. I found Parliament completely appalling. I don't think this tells us anything about Nick and his amazing Dutch-Russian ancestry. I think it's a totally appalling institution. But develop that a bit.

I mean, give us a sense of what it is that's so rebarkative and repellent about it. Oh, I don't know where to start. I mean, I've now worked for, actually, I feel very lucky. I've worked in three what I call bubbles. I work for 10 years in a Brussels bubble, an EU bubble. I worked for, I was 12 years in Parliament for the voters of Sheffel Hallam had enough of me and slung me out. And I've now done six years in Silicon Valley. And what's interesting when I reflect on it is all those bubbles have something very common is that they're completely self-obsessed. They think they're the most important place in the world. And they think that everybody else is thinking about them. But of those three bubbles, the worst by a long way is Westminster. Really? Yeah, because the mismatch between the pomposity and the self-regard and actually the irrelevance of what happens there is just so much greater. I mean, we'll know, I'd talk about it later, but, you know, the sort of hubris of Silicon Valley,

they are kind of inventing pretty consequential things. Brussels, certainly when I was there, was going through. It's just this mismatch between this kind of, this sort of stuck in, stuck in this 19th century view of Britain. And the whole place is redolent of it. You can't even name people. So you have to call people the right Honorable Gallant that learned this.

The way the place is architecturally designed is designed for conflict rather than conversation. It's all about these informal kind of mannerisms that you're supposed to sort of know. And that's what people then deem you as an accomplished parliamentarian. It's just like a weird, it's like a weird sect. As I say, it's odd.

I went, for heaven's sake, to a boarding school. It's like a pastiche of some sort of harrow. Harry Potter at boarding school. It's just like, what relevance does that have to the 21st century? But it's also, it's also not just its old-fashionedness. It's the incredible poor quality of so much of it. I mean, what struck me being on, you know, I went in and I was on the Foreign Affairs Committee and I chaired the Defence Committee. And journalists, you know, incredibly sort of deferential towards these things and saying, you know, it's marvelous, you know, holding the government to account and all these kind of things. And I discovered that we knew almost nothing about the world,

that we were pontificating on foreign affairs, having traveled very little. We didn't really hold ministers to account, I'm afraid. Anyone with any degree of charm could completely sidestep the process. Speeches in Parliament were of such pathetically low quality, everybody looking at their phones, nobody paying slightest attention. And of course, it wasn't helped by the fact that Parliament feels like an elective dictatorship. I mean, it was very clear that Tony Blair or Gordon Brown or David Cameron essentially don't really care very much about what's happening in speeches in the House of Commons.

Yeah, no, completely. And you don't need to invite me as a liberal Democrat to froth at the mouth about the injustice of the electoral system. But you've got to remember, I was leader in 2010, where we ran a campaign which resulted in by far the largest number of actual human beings, voters, voting for us than ever before or since. We've got 23% of the vote. Almost 7 million people voted for the Tory system. How many people voted for the Tories this time? I'll get the full number, but it's not much about it. It's not much different, exactly. And yet we got, what is it, 8% of the seats. So I sort of went, I went into Parliament and indeed into government thinking, this is crazy. I've kind of tried my best to make my appeal on behalf of what I believe in in my party that I was leading to the country. And yet I'm supposed to do that with not only one, but there's almost two hands tied by my back in the mechanisms by which power is distributed.

And I just sort of, of course it doesn't stop there. I've tried and failed to change, but the electoral system of House laws, the party funding system. Nick, I'm going to interrupt as you ask me the question, that Conservatives got 23.7% of the vote and 6,827,000. It's almost identical. It's almost identical to what the Lib Dems got in. Exactly. And we got 57 seats.

By the way, it's a, I know we might talk about it. It's actually tribute to, there's huge tributes to Ed Davy and the Lib Dems. Boy, do they, they've learned how to fight these elections. Well, yeah, because they got what? Almost half that. 13% of that. And they get 72. So, anyway, we'll tie, no doubt.

talk about that later. It means you have to tie yourself up into absurd contortions. But of course, I went into that parlop, not only sort of culturally ill-disposed to the place, but also thinking, what is this? It's like I kind of, you know, I've, I always felt much more comfortable when I was out of Westminster trying to make my case. And of course, there's also, and you guys are way close to this than I am, I think now, but this feted, weird love-hate relationship between the political elite and the media elite in this country. It's so destructive. It's so, and I was bad at it. I was, I was no good at it. I really...

But that being said, Nick, one of the big breakthrough moments for you were the TV debates. Yes. Where you went from kind of almost nowhere with a lot of people to suddenly, I agree with Nick, Cleggmania, all that stuff.

And that is what got you into government. Exactly. Because I finally had a stage which wasn't dependent on how I... How I appeared in the House of Commons or which newspaper editor I was talking about because I can make my case directly. And it was like a sort of breath of fresh air.

But you're right. That was a very, very consequential moment. And I was clearly very lucky. Brown was knackard, tarnished, sort of growling around the place. David Cameron had a slightly sort of inauthentic sort of feel even at that point. And then there was just desperate longing for something different. Just on that, so as you know, I was with Gordon for those five days when between the vote and you finally go into government with Cameron, I can remember one of the phone calls you made to you

where he was sort of, I don't even remember this, but he was saying, you've basically made your mind up, you've made your mind up, you're going with the Tory. And you were saying, no, no, no, I'm talking to you both. So just talk me through that process, those five days. What was the balance that you were weighing up in your mind? So, and I said this to Gordon, and I'm not sure if I said that on that conversation, I said it to him over and over again. The arithmetic was unambiguous.

And I got really frustrated. So why did it take five days? What, to assemble a government. Of heaven's sake, most of the other country were. But you were based, were you sort of... No, because Gordon's insistence. And this is, I have to say, if I'm, if a hint of frustration comes to my voice, I sometimes get asked by people, why did you choose the Conservatives over Labor?

There was no majority of Labor. I think Labor and the Liberal Democrats amounted to, I can't remember, was it, the 312? Yeah. No, he was 313, I think it was. We were way short. But I remember literally, at one point, at one point he started writing on a piece of paper with his black, felt-tip pen. I think he and I were just on our own in his office at the back of the House of Commons. And I almost put my hand on his arm and said, Gordon, you just like put it away.

The sums do not add up. So what I had said before the election publicly and privately, what I said immediately after the election, publicly and privately, was it seemed to me as a basic democratic principle that if no one wins a majority, the party with the most votes and the most seats has in that situation a sort of obvious... So why were you talking to Labour? Because I kept being told two things. A, by Gordon and maybe not you, but maybe like Paddy and Ming and Vince and everyone saying, oh, Labor have got some Labor. And then I, because remember, I was a Lib Dem leader. If you're a Lib Dem leader, you can't do anything without talking to some committee, some group. You know, we had late-night meetings. Patty was adamant that something could be done with me. Yes, Patty was adamant.

And I kept saying to them, I don't see it. But if you want, and they pretty well instructed me. And I couldn't have been more open. I said, I don't understand the maths. You know, at the end of the day in Parliament, the maths has to add up. But I went and dutably did that. And then Gordon put his case to me about this rainbow coalition of a green here, applied cummoo person. I kept saying, I don't see it.

So for me, it was always very clear in my mind. The options for the Lib Dems were either to enter into some arrangement with the Conservatives and then a whole debate about what arrangement that should have been, should have been, full-blown coalition or confidence of supply and so on, or no entry into any arrangement with the Conservatives, and therefore there would have been another election within four, five, six months, which, by the way, I remember Tim Farron saying to me, the one thing we have to avoid as a party more than anything else

is another election within a few months, and get completely crushed underfoot. So, you know, that was the choice that I felt that I was doing what I was being asked to do my parliamentary party by very senior colleagues and dear friends of my night. Patty, please speak to the Labour. There might be something you can confect here. We went through all of that. Can I just slow it down a bit for younger listeners and people who weren't totally on top

of this? Aren't they lucky? Yeah, I have an election. So to remind people, there are 650 seats in Parliament, so you need to cross three to get a majority. And in 2010, after Labor had been in for 13 years, the Conservatives won 36 seats, Labor won 258, and you, the Lib Dems won 57. So the point that you're making is that if you'd added the Lib Dems to Labor, you still wouldn't have had a majority. So you chose eventually at the end of this process to enter into a coalition with the Conservatives.

David Cameron became Prime Minister, you became the Deputy Prime Minister and everything follows from there. Apologies for the interruption. Very good context. As you haul me back to my past, I'm no doubt, I'm no doubt immediately lurching into details which others thankfully don't, don't remember quite as vividly as I do, but to the point about those five days, I think there were two things which you talked earlier, Alice, about myths. I mean, politics is storytelling. And victors tell their stories, and what I discovered is, unfortunately, when you're a loser, you lose control of your story. But one of the myths that has been, I think, rather deliberately, somewhat cynically propagated

by Ed Balls, Gordon Brown and others, is that somehow they were diddled out of some deal by the perfidy of the Lib Dems. And it's like, I never understood this. It's like they couldn't, the maths was there. And I was never, and then here's the other thing. And then they say, oh, but you carried on talking to us to use it as leverage against the Tory.

Damn right, I did. That's my job. My job doesn't look out for the Labour Party, the Tory Party. It was to get the best deal I could for the Lib Dem. So that is a fact. You were using Labour together. Of course I was. But wouldn't you?

So, and particularly on electoral, particularly on electoral, but I cannot believe that, I cannot believe that seasoned politicians like Ed Bulls and Gordon Brown go, oh, shock horror. He's using leverage to get the best for his party. That's my bloody job. By the way, they knew at the time. He was thinking Gordon kept saying, all he's doing is using us to get more than the tourists. But of course, the bloody wild wards, that's my job. Can I interrupt for a second? Okay, so the reason why, again, for listeners, that this is really important and ultimately really controversial is that Nick Clegg comes in.

he becomes the deputy prime minister, he creates this coalition. And that then sets up her dynamic, where in 2015, five years later in the next election, the conservatives win a majority and the Lib Dems are brutally punished. So they go down from 57 seats to some, what was it, eight seats or something. And the reason why this whole thing gets controversial is that, of course, people on the left say that the Lib Dems enabled this horrible Tory government, enabled austerity, enabled the introduction tuition fees and therefore the background to the whole this is that Nick Clegg is about to explain to us why he did it. He's also going to explain why he moderated the Conservatives and they could have been much worse if he wasn't there in coalition. But the reason for all this chant is that

the Lib Dems were ultimately, whether through their own fault or not, came out of it in the next election and in a very damaged position. Over to you. Yeah, no, no. I mean, well, I don't think I need to say anything before. That's a very good summary of half a decade's evolution in British politics and a very interesting evolution because with a distance of time, it was a very unusual experiment. Because what I was, actually, I remember shortly after the 2015 election, Miriam and I had dinner with Tony Blair and Shrevely. And I remember Tony in this very pithy way that he always summarizes these things. He says, Nick, you were just trying to do a politics that just doesn't work in this system. And I think that's and some. I think I tried to do way too many things at once, which just

couldn't fit into the environment not only of the way the system works and Westminster works, but also just the evolution of the country at the time. Remember, the 2010 election was entirely dominated by two crises, a crisis in politics because of the MP's expenses scandals, absolute blind public fury, what they felt was a venal class of basically corrupt MPs, fleecing taxpayers by spending money on to it. And secondly, the greatest economic calamity to have hit this country even greater than Brexit since the war, which was the 2008 financial crisis. I mean, people, I think, already forget how important 2008 is to the modern history of this country. It was an absolute catastrophe.

Isn't that partly because Labor doesn't want really to talk about it, because it's very important to their narrative that all the cuts were unnecessary? Correct. So, no, no, no. Well, we'll get on to that. And Alastair, I've had a good, had several dress rehearsals of this. argument about fiscal policy over several glasses of wine. Well, on my part, at least, in the past, we could do it again. But I strongly agree with you, Roy. I think if you look objectively at the economic or the political economy of this country of the last 15 years or so, there are two events which stand

out, which are by far the most important for the welfare and the standing of this country is the 2008, which is the greatest economic catastrophe that has hit this country. I mean, the economy plummeted by 6% in 12 months. And then there's 2016 Brexit, which by the way is estimated to hit the economy by 4% over 15 years. That just gives you a sense of the enormity. When I came into government, I remember being told by a sort of unsmiling treasury official, Deputy Prime Minister, you do realize that the toxic liabilities of the British banking system are five times the size of the whole British economy. But can I just, can I, because Rory's point is a fundamental one about storytelling. The story that we've seen in this election is fundamentally false from all sides.

Because Labor says everything went wrong since these dastardly conservatives with their sort of useful idiots, the Lib Dems at the side, started having to... Well, we'll come to that in a minute. From 2010. Conservatives don't want to admit that everything went pear-shaped after they screwed things up in 2015-2016. Because remember what the coalition government did, and it's my failure, entirely my failure, that I wasn't able to tell this story. What we did was remarkable. We turned an economy which had been hit harder by 2009 than any other mature democracy in the world where unemployment had shot up into one which was the fastest growing G7 economy sustainably. 3% or thereabouts in 2013, 14, 15 with the highest rate of employment, with more women in employment than ever before.

Earnings and productivity was a bit of a harder thing. Actually, earnings finally started. I remember because I was obsessed by this because I think how people feel is often determined by the relationship of how. how quickly their earnings rise compared to prices in the shops. And earnings finally started recovering after the 2008 crash in 2014-15, and then completely went, flipped into reverse again in 2016. So we've got this whole myth-making where everyone's saying it's all ground zero is 2010. No, ground zero is 2008 and then 2016.

And until people are more honest about this, I think we will keep having a warped debate about how to actually foster the growth that Kirstama quite rightly says he wants. Well, listen, we're not going to disagree with Brexit. Total catastrophe. we can come on to that later. But I think you got used by the Tories as to develop this argument about austerity. I don't believe if you had been prime minister, as opposed to the deputy prime minister in a coalition. And I understand why he became part of the coalition. I've got no

problem with that at all. I disagree with Charles Kennedy. It's one of the few things we disagreed about when he refused to back the coalition. I think you had no choice on that. But I think you got used in defining the storytelling in that period as Labor screwed the economy. We have to make massive cuts. And the first part of that story was not true. It was a very, very partial truth. Well, I would agree with you, Alistair, for one simple thing. It was Alistaird, not me, not George Osborne, not David Cameron, not Daniel Alexander, who said, I remember it vividly in March, you can look it up, March 2010, before the election,

Alistair Darling. Suddenly would have to be cuts. He didn't just say cuts. He said there should be harder and tougher than anything under Margaret Thatcher. And then to prove the point, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, and this is terrifically important, in my view, passed a law, literally legislation in the House of Commons, which by law would have obliged the Labour government, if they'd won in 2010, to reduce the deficit in half by the end of the Parliament. We ended up in the coalition, because of me, by the way, because I

stopped George Osborne, David Cameron, cutting further and faster than I wanted them to. We actually ended up reducing the deficit more slowly, so halving it over five years, rather than the four years as prescribed. So I think one of the great, I'll come in a minute, I think there are totally legitimate debates, and I'm very happy to accept criticism about how the cuts were done, the distribution between tax and spend and so on. The one thing I can tell you, though, it's a complete nonsense that you can somehow reduce that deficit in half over four years, by just taxing the rich more. The austerity for Cameron Osborne became almost like a political virility. And you got sucked up in that. You became their spokesman. You legitimised that.

I think what is absolutely true is that the very beginning of the coalition, There were two things which I think worked rather well symmetrically, which was of the two crises, which was the economic crisis of 2008 and the political crisis of the MP's expenses. And right at the beginning of the coalition, I wanted to be very much, of course, identified, amongst other things with, yes, helping to recover the economy, but very much using the anger around the MP's expenses scandals to really try and introduce far-reaching liberal reform of our political system. What is absolutely true, you're quite right, is the moment that first budget was announced in October. October, I think it was, 2015, the narrative became almost entirely about the economy rather than about political reform. And of course, I failed to change the electoral system, get elections into the House of Lords and so on and so forth. But my point to you, Alistair, is I would concede to the candidly, almost incessant criticisms of the left over the last 15 years, much more readily if I believe that if Labor had gone into power, somehow they would have been able to wave a magic wand, there was no austerity. It is the biggest myth in modern British politics. You cannot.

come into, as we did, with a collapse in the economy of 6%, a dramatic increase in public spending, which happened very, very late on in Labor, in the last 18 months or so, with a legal commitment to halve the deficit in even more quickly than the coalition did, and somehow do that without eliciting howls of pain from the public sector. It is a fundamental, and I think it's one of the reasons why Rachel Reeves is going to have quite a job leading the Labour Party who's sort of been fed on this mythology about austerity over the last 15 years? The mythology is also dangerous because, you know, I tried to say when we were interviewing Rachel Reeves on leading that Gordon Brown had very dramatically increased spending.

And that was one of the reasons why they were making a lot of progress on healthcare, but that in those last 18 months, spending had gone up very, very dramatically, which left them very exposed. And she's absolutely denying... Partly because of the financial crisis. Right, absolutely. But the point was that that was a gamble to massively increased spending, assuming that we're that there wasn't going to be a financial crisis. I mean, this is where we get into this

question around fixing the roof while the sun's shining. So Labor made a decision to radically increase spending, basically assuming that the British economy would continue to grow at the rates at which it had grown up to 2008. When it didn't, the government was spending so much that it inherited a big, big problem. Reducing that deficit became very problematic. So in saying, look, the Tory spent much less on health than labor, it's true. But labor was spending much more in health on a very optimistic assumption of future revenue. But also very late on. I mean, if you look, and look, I cannot tell you not, I was, I mean, obviously from

the obscurity of opposition and the back benches and so on and so forth, but I was violently opposed to George Osborne's, what was it, three botched budgets that he introduced immediately after we were evicted from Dunnishambles. No, the Omnichamble's like 2012. But the point is, but if you just look at the five-year period for which I am rightly held responsible, amongst others, the public spending as a proportion of GDP at the end of these so-called ferocious, ideological, morally unacceptable cuts was almost exactly, in fact, it was higher than public spending under most of the years of Labour in the previous...

But other governments did make different choices. No, no, no, hang on, well, they did, and they cut much deeper. So across you, and I think it's one of the things that, and you should get, have you had Osborne on this? Yeah, we did, yeah. Okay, I'm never sure whether this has been deliberate in Osborne or not, but actually what Osborne did, partly because he was restrained by me in government, he talked a ferocious game of public spending critical strategy. But of course it was partly. By the way, in the same way

that Rachel Reeves and Kirstarmer are now saying, it's a disaster. By the way, it is not nearly as much of a disaster as they're saying. Interest rates are coming down. Unemployment is low. That's for part two. Oh, oh, so part two, sorry. I'm not going to say that. No, but on this, but on this point, on this point, Alistair, I think it's very important to remember that on the day that the election took place in 2010, I think, oh no, sorry, I think two or three days before it is my memory, there was the first major international bailout of Greece. On the weekend after the 2010 election, there were riots on the streets, burning cars, you could see it on your television screens. Alistair Darling, as the sort of standing, if you like, Chancellor, was flying to an emergency

summit. There was a real feeling that Britain was teetering on the precipice. And by the way, we were. We had the most oversized banking system, which had blown up in our face just a few months earlier. One dominoe was falling after the next in Europe. And to your point, other European countries cut their public services way deeper than we did. Way deep. We slowed the increase in public spending on health. We slowed the increase in public spending on schools. We didn't net cut those.

We did in other areas. And I think there are absolutely legitimate debates about what happened in justice and prisons and probation and local government. Absolutely. And if I was Prime Minister, I would have taken different sort of departmental choices. But the fundamental macroeconomics is that actually by ironically, given all the sort of excoriation of austerity in these rather moralising tones from the left over the last decade and a half, people forget that the rest of Europe was suffering way, way worse, even though their banking systems were smaller and less disfigured. I mean, obviously, I violently agree with you and I also agree with you. Actually, should we stop the podcast at this stage? It doesn't mean you can't vote more.

Exactly. Reduce spending. But it does say something very interesting about modern politics that you and I have completely lost the public debate on this, that the dominant assumption is that 2010 to 2015 was this incredibly damaging period of austerity that was completely unnecessary and that there was no reason to cut at all and that was totally different choices available and that Britain did it much hard and anyone else. I don't say it was unnecessary. What I object to is the fact that it was a political strategy run by Cameron and Osborne, because political strategies, frankly, all they did. Alistair is accusing politicians of, dare I say it being politicians, but... Of having a strategy. I don't dare politicians be politicians. The genius political strategy, in a sense, is from the other side that the left has managed to characterize that five years as being completely economically irresponsible and unnecessary. I mean, obviously, we got absolutely hammered in 2015, so let's be said that better, perhaps. But to your point, Rory, I'm not, whilst I think it is definitely the dominant, clearly the dominant narrative if you read the pages of the Guardian and so on.

so forth. I don't think you can claim that it was the dominant narrative in the country for the one following reason. What did the British people do in 2015 and 2000? They voted for the Tories again. So if this narrative of, oh my gosh, you know, these vile people have inflicted such terrible self-harm, surely the British people would have booted them out the first opportunity in 2015. Instead of which, you got it. I got it. You mean you allowed yourself to be used by them? Well, yes, of course. That's your view. But also, but remember, again, memorandum. I'm really sure. In 2015, something happened that everyone's already forgotten about. In Scotland, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories were all, all of them, whether you were in the coalition or out, reduced to one MP each.

There was an absolute bloodbath in Scotland. And the dominant motif in the final stage, because I felt it, oh, felt it. Oh, my God, did I feel it? I can remember it like it was yesterday. The thing that really shifted votes away from the Lib Dems in the final stages of the 2015 election to such a deadest, devastating effect. Yes, of course, coalition, clearly if you had, if you'd come from the left of the Labour Party, like a lot of people had because of Iraq and all the rest of it, and join the Lib Dems and thought that the Lib Dems were a left-wing alternative to Labour. And then suddenly you had this liberal Clegg bloke who was saying, well, of course, tuition fees, chevary, does a lot of damage and so on. Absolutely. And I don't want to duck. So what were you going to say is the big one? No, was the biggest thing was the Tories and the Tory press kept running this fantastically effective

thing that Ed Milibam was going to win and was going to be in the pocket of Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmon. And we could see it on the doorstep. People say, oh, no, no, no, we can't take the risk of voting for the Lid Dems because that might allow this. And they had real doubts by Ed Miliband, and they had particular doubts about Ed Miliband dancing to the tune of the Scottish nationalist. That was actually the thing that was the dominant thing as campaigners that we saw on

the door. I'm not in any way obscuring the fact, my own responsibilities, failings and all the rest of it, tuition fees and coalition austerity played a role. I think in the retelling of it, because we keep talking about storytelling, actually it's been almost somewhat exaggerated compared to some of the other factors that were play in 2015. Finally, before we end this first episode, how would you define your relationship then and now with Cameron and Osborne? I don't have much of our relationship with them now.

So there are no friendships that emerged from that period? No, and look, clearly one of the, again, I thought it was important, and lots of people, of course, roundly criticised me with the benefit of hindsight. So I thought it was terribly important, given where the country was in 2010. In other words, we'd have this near-death experience in the economy. I thought it was very important. And I thought, gosh, we're creating something which I believed in, which was coalition politics, based on give and taking compromise. I thought it was terrifically important to show, to do it with a sense of confidence and with a smile on your face.

And we're going to try and fix things. We're going to do this together. We're going to put country before party. So we did this Rose Garden press conference, which, as ever, you know, pictures speak. a thousand times more than words. That became the kind of, you know, people thought it was a sort of bromance. It was a bon or me of it, sort of. It was never, it was my intention that if we were going to do something new like a coalition

government, you needed to mean it. You needed to be sort of committed to it. Perhaps with hindsight, it would have been better if I stood there sort of grumpily, sort of, well, I'm here, but I don't really want to be here. Don't like this bloke at all. I don't know. I would, but, well, you'd be able to advise me much better than now, Alist. But I think it led to the belief that the sort of bonomi or the,

the kind of sense of relief and positivity of that press conference was therefore sort of leading to some sort of chummy arrangement. It was never like that. No, I was super. I thought as was Cameron. I think we were civilized. We were civilized people. He's a polite person.

I'm relatively polite. I try and listen to me. I don't tend to fly off the handle, maybe occasionally. But I try and conduct myself. And also I knew that this was a question of give and take. We both knew the maths. He couldn't get anything done in Parliament without my support. I couldn't get anything vice versa.

So we had a lock on each other's sort of, you know, preferences. He was quite a supple. He's quite a supple political operator, but it was always pretty hard-headed. And Osborne? Osborne, in a sense, is more... Miriam did not hugely. Well, I think that was... I think Mirro had a slightly more negative summary judgment on the whole thing.

But, no, Osborne was and I think remains an intriguing character. He's, oddly enough, more interested in politics than Cameron, perhaps more versatile on policy substance than Cameron, an absolute inveterate, sort of knife fighter in the kind of battles in Whitehall. But what I always was impressed by Osborne, he has a, and I'm not sure if you've found this in your discussion, he has this, he has an unusual ability

to understand politics from your opponent's point of view. And it's quite a rare gift in politics. Most people in politics are so puffed up with their own sense of sort of justification of their side. He has this rather interesting ability. And he said he was rather clever in the coalition saying, you want this and I want this, can we do this together? In that sense, he was quite an inveterate dealmaker, which is useful in the

coalition. Nick, just final one on that. One of the things that struck me as a new MP coming in 2010, just the beginning of the coalition, is I felt there were a number of occasions where I was hoping that you would be reaching out to me and other people like me who were on the left of the Conservative Party, and you never did it. You probably could have won us over on things like the alternative vote. You might even have been able to bring us over on House of Lords reform. and I was very struck by the fact that whenever I approached you or tried to talk to you, you were rather sort of stiff and standoffish. Oh, God.

And you missed a huge opportunity there. I think there were dozens of us that were very sympathetic towards the Lib Dems, the coalition, and probably preferred your vision of things to Cameron Osborne's that would have been happy to work with you, get behind you. But I think, oddly, contrary to your vision of the Rose Garden, you remained much more partisan than maybe you acknowledge. You weren't very interested in talking to. the young left-wing conservatives. Yeah, I think that's very fair, Rory, and I'm sorry. I'm sorry if I was a luf or standoffish, and that's very rude, and forgive me.

And I think you're all right about the politics of it. I think it was such a struggle. I cannot exaggerate to you what a struggle it was to, A, lead a party that had never been in government before, to suddenly becoming a party of sort of perennial opposition to being a party of government, and then obviously being absolutely kind of hammered. So you're kind of on life support system. And at the same time, trying to keep my head above water my own constituency, keep this coalition going, having a young family. I mean, I was just like, just holding on my sort of fingertips.

But you're quite right. With time, and I think this happened to both Cameron and me, we both became pulled towards our own parties more. You know, he became, unfortunately, in my view, I think it was a devastating sort of error on his part to become ever more obsessed about what the right wing of his party thought and what the Daily Mail thought. the Daily Telegraph thought and so on. And I, of course, became increasingly preoccupied with just trying to keep this sort of beleaguered band of Lib Dems on board for this undertaking. So I think you're quite right. That was my focus.

And it became, yeah, I definitely, I think you're right, Rory. If I thought about it, no doubt, with a bit more sleep and a bit more strategic at Nouse, I remember once having a dinner. Oh, there was Amber Rudd. Nick Bowles, maybe. Yeah, maybe a few. And I think I'd been invited to it. And I remember, I honestly can't remember who was there.

But I do remember one moment where they said, please, can you just do better? Because we need a higher Lib Dem vote in our constituencies so that we as conservatives can win. And I started like going, I'm not sure if that's my top priority at the moment. But I think your strategic point is right, Roar. And it's probably one of the many things that I fail to do properly.

Well, listen, that's all we've got time for in today's episode. We're going to be back next Monday. to talk about what happened after the 2015 election. You go from DPM to XMP in pretty sharp order. We want to talk about Brexit, and we want to talk about your new life with Facebook, aka Now Meta. Episode is available right now to members of the Restis Politics Plus. Sign up by going to the Restis Politics.com.

Hear it straightaway. If not, we'll see you next week. Bye for now.