The Ricochet Podcast - 1,000 Points of Light

Episode Date: December 8, 2018

We’re a day late (but not a dollar short) and we’ve got two host on the high seas, so we call on our good pal Steven Hayward (the host of the Powerline Podcast) to sit in with Peter Robinson. Later, the great biographer Andrew Roberts joins to chat about his fantastic new book Churchill: Walking with Destiny, Brexit, and the rioting in France. Also, Mueller time, and is it curtains for The Weekly... Source

We have special news for you. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp? We have people that are stupid. If the British Empire and its commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, this was their finest hour. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

It's the Ricochet Podcast number 427. With not Rob Long and James Lilacs, who are off cruising the high seas, it's Steve Hayward sitting in for Rob and James, along with Peter Robinson, today to talk about Mueller time, and also Winston Churchill with biographer Andrew Roberts. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Bye-bye. friend Steve Hayward. Steve is one of the founders of the Powerline blog. He is a political commentator, a policy scholar. He is the host of the Powerline podcast, which is available right here on Ricochet. And he is a very important author and historian who has written what stands for now as the definitive work on the Reagan years, a two-volume work on Reagan's, well, Reagan pre-presidency, and then a volume on

the Reagan presidency. Steve, welcome. Well, thank you, Peter. It's great to be here. Now comes your stick. Oh, well, you know, I'm sure listeners are wondering where is the usual familiar voice of James Lilac saying, it's the Ricochet podcast. But because he and Rob are the two cyberitic scallop eggs they are, listeners have to put

up with us two landlubbers, unfortunately. But we do have Andrew Roberts coming on in a little while. And gosh, he has sure produced a surprisingly successful book about Churchill. I say it's a surprise. We'll take it up with him. So as James would say, let's have ourselves a podcast. Have ourselves a podcast. Have ourselves a podcast. Steve, the Blue Yeti always wants us to begin with a little bit of discussion of current events. Here is my problem.

Today is Saturday, December 8th. Since December, what was it? December 2nd, last Friday, a week ago Friday, when George H.W. Bush died, I have paid no attention to the news. I flew to Washington for the funeral. I wrote a couple of pieces about the former president, and then I taped a couple of shows about the former president. So I have had my head in America as it stood three decades ago, and I'm just now coming back to the present.

By the way, I don't like the looks of what I see particularly, but fill me in if you don't mind. Give me a bit of a brief tutorial on what's happened this week, beginning, if you could, with the latest developments in Mueller and the Russian collusion case, such as they may be. Well, you know, I lead almost as blissful an existence as you do. I try to ignore the day-to-day developments in this whole business because it just takes too much time. But I do know this about Mueller, having met him once, gosh, way back about 15 years ago. By the way, at the home of a staunch Reaganite who's friends of his, and he's a methodical guy. And I don't know.

I haven't known what to think about this from the beginning. But it does look like he's slowly closing the noose around whatever might be chargeable or whatever political problem since he has to make a referral to Congress about the behavior of Trump and the people around him. And so the problem with Trump these days is you kind of measure things in dog years, right? I mean yesterday Trump had a tweet storm, which by this afternoon will seem like 30 years ago, almost as old as the Bush administration. So yeah, I mean people I trust, David French in particular on National Review says this looks very ominous, and I tend to follow his lead on these things. You do? Well, all right. You know what? I have more or less, I've stopped following leads and started sorting. Excuse me. I say this having announced that I've paid no attention this past week. That is true. But let me just put this to you. Everybody I knew said that James Comey was a standup, straightforward, by the book guy. And that

just isn't true. We now know that just isn't true. Go back a little bit farther to the Scooter Libby, that in my opinion, the shameful indictment, let alone conviction. And in my judgment, one of the things that Donald Trump did that was just unambiguously correct, no doubts about it was pardoning Scooter Libby. And everybody I knew said Patrick Fitzgerald, who is the prosecutor in that case, was a stand up straightforward by the book guy. And Patrick Fitzgerald was out of control in that prosecution. I really have lost my faith in the network of how to I don't even know how to put this except that you know exactly what I'm trying to say. We may disagree on this, but you know what I'm trying to say. We both have friends who know people who are in touch with the

law enforcement community in Washington. And three times or twice now, for sure, with Patrick Fitzgerald and James Comey, everybody who knew them or who knew somebody who knew them said, don't worry, straightforward guy. And it just turned out they may have been straightforward, fine, meticulous, upstanding, et cetera, early in their careers. But when they got too close to power in Washington, something happened. And Patrick Fitzgerald and James Comey both, in my judgment, have a great deal for which to answer. So I'm just not so sure about Mueller. Well, two things are possible.

One is that they have gone native, right? They've gone rogue on us, that they're part of, right? Or they've, you know, they've gone rogue on us, uh, that they're part of what is often described as the deep state. But the other thing that's possible is that, uh, Trump or people around him because they were amateurs in some ways did in fact misbehave. Um, and so we have a perfect storm of bad things or bad circumstances. And so I'm, I'm not, I'm not sure, you know, I'm constantly surprised at things. I think people who say, uh, people on the left celebrating that the beginning of the end of Trump was in sight. How many times have we been saying that for three years now?

Yes. You don't count the guy out. Yes. Yes. OK. Well, wait a minute. No, I'm not done yet. Well, I'm now I'm finding myself in surprisingly high dungeon speaking as I am with no knowledge whatever what took place

this past week but the third possibility is that there was the real wrongdoing took place on the other side and there's no sign whatever that as far as i can tell that muller is trying to if there was collusion with the russians it looks to me as though there may very well have been some in the preparation of the steel dossier in what the what the Hillary Clinton campaign paid for through a law firm, through the Podesta firm, to the Steele's firm for the dossier. Steele was talking to Russians. There was something like collusion there. I don't see any sense – I see no signs that Mueller is investigating that. So I don't know, Steve.

I'm just, all right, you can, you can be this, the, you, this week, I get to be the crusty cynic who just doesn't believe anything. And you can be the patriot and hopeful that all this is going to come out right. Okay, so what about this astonishingly slow moving, if it is a shakeup, Trump's shakeup of the White House staff, of the cabinet? Nikki Haley is gone. Tell me what we know about that. John Kelly, what happened? What has happened, if anything real? Once again, it's hard to know what's really taking place.

You hear lots of rumors, and you've heard these for months, that it's chaos inside the White House. They're understaffed. This person is leaving. This person is not leaving. Who doesn't get along? Who's having shouting matches? Some of these stories I assume are true. But you know, Peter, probably better than I because you've been on the inside of a couple of White Houses, that what's actually taking place and what gets reported and

amplified by hostile media are often two different things. So once again, I try to maintain a skeptical distance to what I hear in the media because you never go wrong that way, I find. And Trump is his own thing. I mean, quick story. I remember seeing Larry Kudlow on TV one morning here about two, three months ago, whenever it was, and thinking he'd only been there a month. I thought, God, Larry, I know Larry, you know, Larry, God, Larry looks terrible. And then it was that afternoon, he went to the hospital with a heart attack. And, you know, I asked a mutual friend of ours, I said, you know, is Larry worn out already? He says, it's not worn out. But you have to understand that Trump is a force of nature, who calls Larry and everybody else at all hours of the day or night wanting to

get their thoughts and blowing off steam. And, you know, the point is, I think this is going to be this description of the White House in chaos. That's going to be the Trump administration to the very last day, whenever that day is. I don't think it's going to change. Right. France. What's happening in France? That one does have – click online. I see images on the Drudge Report of fires in Paris, Arc de Triomphe with graffiti all over it. Good grief. If there's one holy secular symbol in France, it's the Arc de Triomphe. Where were the police that permitted protesters to deface that monument? What on earth is happening in France? Well, one of the things we're realizing is that the current generation of French leadership is not even the pale shadow of Charles de Gaulle, who would have had out France's very competent riot police if he were in power today. And I mean, what you hear is, and I think this is correct, is that the people are revolting over proposed increases in gasoline and diesel taxes. So what listeners should know is that the existing fuel taxes in France come to about $3 a gallon.

They're already taxed a lot to drive. And Macron wanted to raise that by another substantial amount to suppress consumption on behalf of the whole climate change business. And people are saying no. And Macron, whose approval ratings, by the way, are below 20%. I mean, that's worse than Nixon at the worst levels of Watergate, which shows you how discredited his government is with the people, has already backtracked on this tax. You see a lot of other countries backtracking on a lot of their ambitious climate policies. At the same time, everybody's meeting in Poland right now to continue with the same circus. So I'm watching this.

Wait, wait, what do you mean by everybody? You're referring to a climate conference or to an EU meeting? Yeah, there's another UN climate conference happening right now. There used to be big news and not so much anymore because this has become old news. But the funny part is, is over here in the United States, you just had a group of bipartisan, a bipartisan bill in the House for a carbon tax in the United States. Some Republicans signing on to this, believe it or not. And the people behind us, I know a lot of these folks pretty well, they're saying, no, no, our carbon tax would be completely different from the French carbon tax because we want to do a tax and dividend. We're going to tax carbon and then give you the money back. And I keep thinking, right, the check is in the mail and they'll still respect us in the morning. Right. Steve, you are actually an expert on climate. You've been,

for years, you wrote an annual environmental report. Explain, first of all, make sure that I'm right in what I say. Correct me in this assertion if I need to be corrected. And the assertion is simply this, that of all the major industrial countries of the world, only one, and you and I are recording in it right now, has actually lowered its greenhouse gas emissions. Not slowed the rate at which the increase is taking place, but actually lowered year on year or from five years ago, we now produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions than we did before. No other country can make any such claim. Is that correct? That is absolutely correct. We are the largest reducer in greenhouse gas emissions, whether by raw tonnage or by percent.

We're now back to, I think, about the level of 1990 in our emissions, which is a considerable reduction. And what really infuriates the left about this is that all this was done without a White House signing ceremony. Because, you know, if you're liberal, you can't ever fix a problem without a White House signing ceremony on the South Lawn, right? So tell us how it was done. Yeah, okay, go ahead. You're going to it. This is the chief driver of this is aside from just increased energy efficiency, which is a long running story, is the natural driver of this is aside from just increased energy efficiency which is a long-running story is the natural gas revolution from hydraulic fracturing uh and um you know environmentalists hate that i mean they only like reductions in pollution when

you know the epa does it when the marketplace does it it drives them out of their minds and that's the real story here so so we are now back to our 1990 level of greenhouse gas emissions. We didn't sign the Tokyo Accord. Donald Trump withdrew us from the Paris Accord. That means nothing. The fact is, the huge fact, the staggering fact is that the United States of America is actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The press doesn't pick up on that. I don't believe – you tell me.

You're with students all the time. I don't believe even students, people who are reading and writing all the time, even students who would consider themselves environmentally aware, my impression is there isn't one in ten of these students who could tell you that fact, correct? That's absolutely correct. But I would add that most students that I encounter right now are bored with climate change. They hardly ever bring it up. Oh, that's interesting. Fascinating. Environmentalism, I mean, there are some who are interested, but for most students, environmentalism was like your grandfather's Oldsmobile. It's, you know, a 70s issue. Okay, so I did notice this is just before former President Bush died. I saw this, it got linked to all over the place. Barack Obama gave a talk somewhere, he's sitting in a chair, and he's carrying on and on and on. And

one of the other aspects of this fracking revolution, a technical technological revolution in the production of energy in this country, is that the United States has now overtaken Saudi Arabia and Russia, both of which used to trade places as the major oil producers in the world. The United States of America is now the major oil producer in the world. And Barack Obama looked at the audience and said, that was me. Say thank you. How do you answer former President Obama on that one? Well, I think I would remind him of things he said while he was president, such as we can't drill our way out. The future is in renewables and electric cars and so forth.

And his administration did everything it could to block the oil and gas revolution. And by the way, I argue and I argued at the time that it was precisely the energy revolution that got him reelected in 2012. I mean, you know, the boom in oil and gas production that began in his first term accounted for an awful lot of the economic recovery of his first term. And if you hadn't had that, I think the economy would have been much worse than it was and might have cost him his reelection. And so the chutzpah of the guy seems to be unlimited. And so we should just remind him of what he used to say. All right. Now, on to George H.W. Bush.

Did you pay much – while you were reading the news, I was there at the funeral. Did you pay much attention? Did you watch television or bits of the funeral at all? I did some, yes. All right. Well, here's the question. For reasons that I think are understandable, it was George Bush's day. During the funeral, Ronald Reagan never got – well, he got mentioned once in passing by Alan Simpson.

Reagan never got mentioned. And, of course, George Bush spent eight years as Reagan's vice president. And that's natural because when you're vice president, you're number two. And that isn't the role anybody wants to celebrate on the day of someone's passing, certainly not the family. All understandable. Nevertheless, there is this fact that those two are going to be linked in history forever. And there's a bit of a tendency, more than a bit of a tendency, quite a tendency, I think, to view them as on a reputational teeter-totter. When one is up, the other is down.

You can't say something good about one without implying a denigration about the other. They were stylistically so different. Ronald Reagan used speeches. George H.W. Bush was suspicious of the whole business of giving speeches. One moved the country at large. That's Reagan. George H.W. Bush paid much more attention to working the politics of the beltway itself. And on and on and on and on the contrast go and yet what george hw bush

is doing in his term is completing in many ways what ronald reagan said in motion he's wrapping up the cold war that ronald reagan had effectively won how what is the correct way it seems to me there that although there were some tensions between the staffs and all of that, we know that fundamentally the two are complementing each other and involved in the same large piece of work. What's the correct way? I ask you who've written the definitive account of the Reagan years, what's the correct way of understanding George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan? Well, you know, Peter, before I give you an answer, I think I'd want to get a good night's sleep and rest on it for a moment. Oh, almost Lylexian, and thank you for that prompt.

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code ricochet at checkout. Again, that's casper.com ricochet and use promo code ricochet for $50 off select mattresses. Terms and conditions apply. Our thanks to Casper, truly our thanks to Casper for sponsoring the Ricochet podcast. Steve, you were saying about George H.W. Bush. Well, three quick points because I don't want to keep Andrew Roberts waiting long. The first is that, as was widely said at the time, Bush's presidency represented the third term for Ronald Reagan. And I think he tried and captured some of Reagan's sensibility. Other ways, not so much. But second, you know,

I was a little disturbed all week by the hypocrisy of the liberals in the media who talked about how much they love George H.W. Bush when they hated him at the time. But third and most importantly, and I think this is what unifies all the previous two points, something that was missing from the evaluation of him last week is that he was called the last of sort of a bygone era of more bipartisan comedy. He's the last of the patrician wasp elite. And I thought those were not fully accurate. I actually think what Bush represented was something of was Benjamin Harrison, who used to go around giving lots of speeches about local events and mostly unifying general themes. We'd call it pablum today. But when asked about issues, he would often say, I think it would be inappropriate of me to comment on particular issues that are before Congress and need to be debated by your elected representatives. So he represented a person who understands the president was intended to administer the

government. And, you know, Bush famously said he was not big on the vision thing, right? That was one of his more endearing aspects, I thought, in many ways. Oh, that is absolutely fascinating. Leave it to you. I thought I had heard commentary from every conceivable angle because, as I said, I spent a whole week in this world of people commenting about George H.W. Bush. That is completely fresh and new.

And I – he's so – he was quite good at giving speeches. Our friend Andy Ferguson, Andy was a speechwriter for Mr. Bush when he was president, I when he was vice president. And we both agreed Dan Quayle, George Bush's vice president, was right. Dan Quayle had a piece in the Wall Street Journal, oh, I think the day before the funeral, in which he said many things about George Bush. But one of them was that, I'm paraphrasing here, he would have been better served if he had paid more attention to his speeches and written more of them himself because his letters proved that he had a wonderful, natural, clear style.

And Andy and I agreed that Quayle was right about that. Why all these personal letters from George H.W. Bush? I have some. Andy has some. These are not rare. He wrote letters to all kinds of people. And he had a voice. It was a natural style. Why didn't he do more writing himself?

And I'm sure you're right about it, that that just was not giving big speeches, moving the public. That was just not quite part of his conception of the presidency. He made it, I think maybe if given his druthers, he'd have run a McKinley style campaign for president, which he gave a few speeches from his front porch and that was about it. Right, yeah. I mean, the poor man, he had to follow Ronald Reagan. What a tough act to follow.

But yeah, I mean, to restate my position in one sentence is he was closer to the model of what the founders thought a president should be and how a president should conduct the office after a century of presidents of both parties inflating and breaking the bounds of the founders vision of the of the office absolutely fascinating point well let me try one other thought um and see what you make of this steve it had occurred to me now this is this is the sort of thing no historian certainly not andrew roberts who will join us in a moment would countenance because it brings in well you'll

hear it but there are moments in american history maybe the leading example is the death of john adams and thomas jefferson on the same day july 4th 1826 the 50th anniversary of this of the declaration of independence there are moments when you say to yourself, oh my goodness, that is providential. That is so good. It almost, not only does it shore up your faith in the American system, it almost makes you wonder that somebody's watching over this country. I have almost that feeling that as the Cold War was ending, as the Soviet who was president of the United States at that moment was someone whom all world leaders knew, knew personally. They dealt with him for

years. They knew him to be prudent and cautious and a man of very careful judgment. And that was a very important fact for those years to go right. Do you buy that? I'm in heated agreement with every syllable, including and and the. All right. Steve, would you do me two favors right in a row? I'm going to ask you to do our next spot, and then one historian, introducing another, ask you to introduce our guest, Andrew Roberts. Spot first, Steve.

You know, I'd like to think of some kind of good quip to get us started with, but that's hard to do. Nicely done. Well, you know, my ambition would be to put James out of a job, although that's preposterous and impossible, right? I don't know. I don't know. Let's hear your offer. No, go ahead. So when you think of the perfect gift, you probably don't think of an electric toothbrush.

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Ricochet podcast now the great Andrew Roberts, distinguished British historian, currently the Roger and Martha Mertz visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. And we're here to talk mostly about his terrific new book, Churchill Walking with Destiny, which has made it to the New York Times bestseller list, has attracted astonishingly glowing reviews from some unlikely places, including the New York Times, which called it perhaps the best one-volume biography of Churchill ever written. I say that's astonishing because the Times is often inclined to be hostile to Churchill. So, Andrew, congratulations and welcome. Thanks very much. It's great to be on the show. Andrew, Peter here. Steve and I have both, Steve taped an interview with you,

I think two days ago, I taped an interview with you you a day ago so the world will be able to have a fuller picture of you but we wanted to chat a little bit before you head back to london later today churchill dead since 1960 what was the date of his death 65 1965 he was an aristocrat and he believed in the british empire his date of death is a long time ago. The aristocracy has faded. The British Empire is gone. What difference? Gripping story, yes, a fantastic read. But what is the relevance of that long ago figure to us today?

Well, thank you very much, Peter. It's actually, I think, more relevant than ever before. The qualities of leadership that Churchill displayed, his moral courage, his capacity, and indeed his physical courage, his capacity to show foresight and also to learn from his mistakes, are all things that we need in leaders, always have done, and definitely do today as well. So I don't think that these are just simply because the British Empire was a long time ago and so on, that the relevance in any way declines when it comes to this particular statesman. And I know Steve wants to come in with what we both have lots of questions, but you've written a book, which is a, as Steve correctly said, it's getting glowing reviews from all kinds of places, including very unlikely places.

And I actually have the feeling that sooner or later, some people are going to begin having second thoughts. And here's why you have written an old fashioned history. That is to say, it proceeds chronologically. It focuses on politics and wars, and it is a book about a great man. You are detailed in cataloging his faults, his errors in judgment, and yet at the same time, there is no doubt when one puts down that book that the case for Churchill's greatness as made by Andrew Roberts is incontestable. All those things in the academy in Britain and the United States alike are considered old-fashioned, behind the times, by professional or people who regard themselves as professional historians. How do you answer that argument? Well, I think you're absolutely right. Of course, it's not the old-fashioned way of telling

a story in the way that people want to hear it. Exactly right. You're too popular. They'll hate you more because this book is selling so many copies. But being able to slip in the thematic approach into the narrative,

into the chronology, is I think what history is all about. I frankly couldn't care less about what the Marxists or the determinists or the weak historians think. I think that philosophically they've got it completely wrong in thinking that great men don't matter and that history is just driven by what T.S. Eliot called dark impersonal forces. And I think that great individuals do matter, and I wouldn't be dedicating quite a large chunk of my life to writing about people like Napoleon and Churchill if I didn't think that way. Steve, over to you.

But is it not wonderful? Oh, it certainly is. He has all the right enemies as well, Andrew does. Oh, that's absolutely true. So, Andrew, I haven't read a thousand existing Churchill biographies, but I've read a lot of them, including all eight volumes of Martin Gilbert's official biography. And I thought, you know, it's really not possible for someone to do something new and fresh about Churchill, and you proved me wrong, not just from new sources, but also, you know, the shrewd judgments, you know, what to include and what, sadly, you have to leave out, and producing an extremely balanced and fresh and up-to-date picture of Churchill.

But my question is this. I know you've written, you know, episodically about Churchill in many of your previous books, and that you always wanted to write a biography about Churchill as, I think, maybe the capstone of your career as a biographer. But you moved it up a bit, I think. So what fit of audacity made you decide to take up the subject now sooner than I think you had planned to? Well, it was this avalanche of new sources that have come out in the last 10 years. I rather feared that if I wasn't going to write this book, somebody else would. And so I leapt at the chance when it came. It's really very unusual that somebody who has been written about so much,

Winston Churchill has had 1,009 biographies of him, should be able to still have lots and lots of new and important new sources come out even beyond half a century after his death. So I was very fortunate, for example, to be allowed by the Queen to be the first Churchill biographer to use her father's diaries. And King George VI met Churchill every Tuesday of the Second World War, and they had very extensive discussions. Churchill trusted the king with all of the great secrets of the war, such as the nuclear secrets and the ultra decrypts and so on and grand strategy. And the king then, after these meetings, after these audiences, wrote down everything Churchill said. So we have a huge number of...

We can look into the mind, the hopes and the fears and the apes-sous and the jokes of Churchill every Tuesday of the war. But that's only one source. We've also had 41 sets of new papers that have been deposited at the Churchill archives in Cambridge since the last major biography, including Churchill's daughter, Mary Soames's 1940 diary

and other really important insights into him, on top of lots of other things to do with the war cabinet verbatim accounts, the Ivan Maisky, the Russian ambassador's papers, various other family members and so on. So actually there is something new. In fact, there's something on pretty much every page of this book that has not appeared in any Churchill biography before. Andrew, Peter here, you mentioned the King's Diaries,

and that reminded me that one of the reviews, I can't remember which one, you may, but one of the reviews said, this is a paraphrase, but I think a pretty close paraphrase, that the King's Diaries expressed sentiments of, and this is the bit that I think is a close paraphrase, but I think a pretty close paraphrase that the King's Diaries express sentiments of. And this is the bit that I think is a close paraphrase, almost inexpressible banality. Close quote. Yes.

Do you remember you remember reading that? I did. But written by written by, I think, written by a a Republican with a small R, an anti-Mars. It's just simply it's simply untrue uh the uh the fact is that um you get time after get a time after time these um these insights into churchill's mind whether or not the uh king um was uh repeating them verbatim i think he probably was on many occasions. There are new jokes. There's all sorts of things.

There's a marvelous moment. Can I just give you one, for example? Yes, please. No, no, please do. Let me give you an example. After Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland in his attempt to make peace in May 1941, he was deputy fuhrer, of course, and didn't warn Hitler that he was going to do this. And then a couple of days later, it was the time for the audience and Churchill saw the king.

And Churchill's first thing to do was to make a joke about it. He said, well, I certainly wouldn't like Anthony Eden or Max Beaverbrook to do that to me. But also, when you look more deeply into what Churchill goes back to again and again, which we see in the King's Diaries, but which we don't see otherwise, because it was just too secret to let out, he couldn't possibly express it in public, was this fantastic sense of frustration and irritation with the United States. Yes, yes, yes. How anyone can call that banal strikes me, let alone inexpressibly banal, strikes me as impossible to understand. You know, here is Churchill railing, basically, about how this was a war for civilization and democracy. And the United States were not getting involved until, of course, Hitler declared war on America in December 1941. It's a really important insight.

So I began by saying that the old world that Churchill inhabited is gone. Still, the prime minister to this day has a weekly audience with the queen. This piece of it still goes on. So just what light does this shed on the British Constitution? At one, I read that piece, the review that said the king is inexpressibly banal. Of course, my own immediate thought was, well, it actually wasn't the king's job to form opinions. It was to reign. Yes, exactly.

And the reason that the prime minister still meets the queen and has done on a weekly basis since long, of course, long before it goes back to the mid-19th century, is because the queen has a duty to, quote, advise, encourage and warn, in the words of Walter Batchelor, the great constitutional historian. And she does do that. And we know from all of the prime ministers, the ex-prime ministers, when they write their memoirs, one of the things, and you can imagine they don't have that much in common, this group of people over the last century. But what they do all say is that they found that hour and a half every Tuesday, an extremely helpful thing, because they, first of all, of course, they're talking to somebody who they know is not after their job. Yes.

Unlike most of the cabinet ministers they bump into on a daily basis. Somebody who is only interested in the good of the country and is able to put the interest of the nation absolutely first and foremost. And also somebody who has seen so many prime ministers. The present queen has had 13, I think it is, or 14 prime ministers. Starting with Churchill himself. Starting with Winston Churchill himself. And so when Tony Blair in his biography said that he was rather overwhelmed when he had his audience

and realized that the first prime minister that the queen had seen was Winston Churchill, and now he was in that place it puts politicians in their place occasionally very useful thing to do for a group of people who can tend to be a bit pompous and hubristic so so there's you you find nowhere in churchill's correspondence nothing that the king writes that suggests churchill thought that an hour and a half every tuesday when he had so many other pressing duties, was wasting his time. He would on occasion, at the time of Dunkirk, for example, the evacuation from Dunkirk, where he had to be in the defense committee, the sort of situation room, as you'd call it today. There was a point where he had to put the audience off until 10 o'clock at night.

Because it usually happened about 6 o'clock. There's no occasion when he cancelled it altogether. He would sometimes, as I say, postpone, but that was only in the gravest crises. Otherwise, he found it extremely useful. It's a shoulder to cry on. It's almost like a shrink, really, to have somebody who you can tell all your hopes and fears to, in the certain knowledge that it's not going to go any further because at their lunches, they serve themselves from side tables so as not to have any servants present. I'm going to indulge myself by asking one more question before Steve gets back in. And that question would be as follows. Can you convey for us, again, you've written a book that's not quite a thousand pages long.

No one should find that daunting. It reads, it's gripping, and if you don't want to carry a book that big, download it on Kindle or iPad. Don't be daunted by the size of the book. It's magnificent and thoroughly engrossing and readable. But we can't go through all the material, obviously, in a podcast. Thank you so much for saying that, Peter. I really appreciate it. I speak the truth.

Paint us a portrait, if you can. Take a moment or two to say what it would have been like to have lunch with Churchill at Chartwell, his home in Kent. Well, I'm afraid this is something I literally dream about. I've had three dreams in the last four years about Churchill. And at each time, I'm meeting him for a meal. It's a rather weird psychological situation to be in, I have to say. Luckily, many, many people who did this, who did have lunch or dinner with Churchill at Chartwell,

did his beautiful house in Kent, his old Elizabethan manor house, did write about it afterwards. And it was Churchill at his absolute best. He loved that house totally. He loved nice long lunches. They were usually about three hours long. He'd start off with one or two glasses of champagne and then one or two glasses of white wine and then one or two glasses of red wine, and then he'd have one or two glasses of brandy. And during it all, the conversation would flow completely freely. He tended to dominate a bit because, you know, he had led a very interesting life and people had gone there to listen to him but he some of these things could be monologues but nobody has ever complained

that the monologues were boring they weren't they were amazing he would refight the battle of jutland using the salt sellers and the pepper pots as the various um dreadnoughts he would um he would pretend that he was a statesman in earlier periods of history and give the speech that he would give if he were Oliver Cromwell, say, or Charles James Fox. He would have the audience roaring with laughter at some of his sallies. He would get very emotional, especially when remembering friends who died in the Boer War or the First World War and so on. He also invited the most fascinating people. He would have Charlie Chaplin and Lawrence of Arabia and he would mix them all up.

And the one rule was that nothing should interfere with the rancor and disparity of party politics. So if he had somebody from the left there and somebody from the right, they could go hammer and tongs at it so long as, of course, it was considered in a gentlemanly fashion and that no personal bad temper was to come of it. So you could debate politics as hard as you liked so long as you didn't get sort of unpleasantly personally involved. It was a totally wonderful thing.

When you look at the visitors' books of the hundreds and hundreds of guests that came down to Chartwell, some of them many, many times over. You can understand what a magnet it must have been for the most interesting and eloquent people of the generation. So, Andrew, Steve again, with two last quick questions. Your recollections of the way Churchill conducted himself at lunch or dinner

do remind me of the famous anecdote of him yelling, I think at Randolph Churchill, his son, stop interrupting me when I'm interrupting you, which, right, that was imported into the darkest hour movie. And so my quick question is, is who do you think portrayed Churchill best in the many films that have been made about him? Does Oldman take the prize by far or are there some other worthy contenders? I think Robert Hardy actually still is the, who was, who played Churchill in the Gathering Storm in the 1970s, still has him. He was a great Churchill scholar, Robert Hardy.

So he really understood the background of it. Also, the scenes in the House of Commons were, I think, even better than ones in The Darkest Hour. I thought Gary Oldman was excellent. His prosthetics, of course, made him look exactly like Churchill. But he also had that wonderful sort of glint in his eye, the chuckle, the good humor. He caught Churchill extremely well. I think that he's up there in the top three, certainly.

And then finally, I want to ask you briefly about Brexit. And it's too big a subject to try and cover in two minutes. So just a specific question. We're about 72 hours out from the scheduled vote in the House of Commons on this dog's breakfast of a deal that Theresa May has worked out with the European Union. So do you think the vote is going to come off? I hear a lot of uncertainty about that. And if it does come off, what are her chances of winning? I think she'd be insane to call the vote. At the moment, it looks like there's a good chance that she could lose by as many as 100.

The Ulster Unionists who are keeping her in power have all said that they are not going to vote for the deal. A huge group of Brexiteers, of course, aren't going to because it's a disgraceful deal. But also some Remainers are not going to either because they don't think it goes far enough. So she's caught in a parliamentary maelstrom and I think that she would be insane to call a vote

that she knows she's going to be humiliated in well andrew i wish we'd linger longer but i know that you are packing to return to london this afternoon so congratulations on this triumphant book and we are going to look forward to your return which i know is coming in a few months but that's not soon enough do we have to you you to? You really are packing? I have 27 more questions, Andrew. I'm sorry about that. I'm back in July.

All right. We'll see you then. Thank you very much. We'll see you then. Thank you, Andrew. Bye-bye. Steve? Yeah. How do you go from Winston Churchill to Margaret Thatcher to the current group over there now.

Boy, I don't know because I've long argued that the British system was in some ways superior to ours because it places a premium on oratorical skill. And it really hones the sort of killer instinct you saw in Margaret Thatcher and even John even john major to some extent i think he's an under uh underrated and underappreciated person um but you know david cameron who by the way is a good friend of andrew's uh they went to they were cambridge together i think uh cameron's at oxford but all right what's that cameron was at oxford and andrew went to cambridge that's right. Well, they know each other. I know. They know each other. Sure. They told me once quite well. And well, it just seemed to have been a decay. And by the way, I talked to Andrew about this privately a few days ago. The only thing that's keeping Theresa May in office right now is the sheer terror of the labor leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who makes Bernie Sanders look like a middle of the road Rotarian.

I mean, he's completely insane and everybody knows this. Otherwise, I think this government would already be gone. Right. So what does happen if she doesn't – I thought she more or less was committed to calling the vote early next week. I thought there was a date of December 11th, but Andrew and you both are assuming that she need not call the vote if she doesn't want to. First of all, if she calls the vote, she loses. What on earth happens then? And if she doesn't call the vote, what happens? There's this deal that she struck with the European Union, but parliament must approve it before it takes effect. The whole country is just frozen.

I think we're in uncharted territory here in British politics, and I think that they are approaching one of their – I think it will be a crisis not unlike the crisis they had around 1910, 1911 over the House of Lords blocking a budget that had been passed repeatedly by the House of Commons that led to some constitutional changes. I think there's going to have to be a new election called. I'll just add here, and I can't resist. It's my favorite joke I've thought of this week. Actually, a friend of mine suggested it to me, is they're doing a big fear campaign. You know, if this doesn't pass, we're going to go through hard Brexit, and it's going to be a disaster for the British economy. And so I spotted a- Explain that term, explain that term hard Brexit, just briefly.

Well, it means you leave without a deal, and you go back to World Trade Organization rules, and, you know, all kinds of and all kinds of customs restrictions and travel restrictions between Britain and the continent, which would be inconvenient and probably slow up commerce and so forth. So they're running a big fear campaign where they're saying the ports will be closed. No one will come here. of this whole situation was that British pharmacists are stockpiling several million Viagra pills, which immediately led me to think maybe they should have a warning. If your hard Brexit lasts longer than four hours, you better call a doctor. All right. Sorry, I couldn't help it.

Steve, Steve, Steve, we have another spot to do before we close our chat this morning. Home chef, with all the options out there, how can you decide what meal delivery service Steve, we have another spot to do before we close our chat this morning. Home Chef. With all the options out there, how can you decide what meal delivery service is best for you? Home Chef offers 16 different delicious meal options each week from steak to chicken to seafood to vegetarian, which you can mix and match based on your preferences. Once you join, it's as simple as selecting your meals and customizing your delivery dates. Your box will arrive at your doorstep each week with recipe cards and fresh pre-portioned ingredients. And then voila, you have a home cooked meal in about 30 minutes. They even offer five minute lunch options. See why their customers are raving about home chef. By the way, we ordered three different home chef meals at once. We.

Here's what happened. My oldest daughter and my wife sat down and looked at the options and ordered three different meals. They arrived, and then all three of the ladies in this house, my two daughters and my wife, had a wonderful time chit-chatting away in the kitchen. I know, yes, attack me for being sexist. It was gender specific. The girls made the order and the girls cooked it. And then we all sat down and enjoyed these wonderful meals all at the same time picking and choosing. It is delightful. And it's also an opportunity to have some fun in the kitchen. Special offer here. Go to HomeChef.com slash Ricochet for $30 off your first order.

That's HomeChef.com slash Ricochet for $30 off your first order. HomeChef.com slash Ricochet. And our thanks to HomeChef for sponsoring the Ricochet podcast. Steve, what else do we need to do? What's going to happen this coming week? So give me a prediction for the coming week. Well, you know, this may seem kind of narrow to you and me and people like us who are in the media world to some extent, but we're really waiting to see what news we hear out of Washington, D.C. on Friday about the fate of the Weekly Standard magazine. That's when the staff is meeting with management to hear what their fate is.

You know, the news just broke this week that Media DC is reorganizing. They're going to expand the Washington Examiner in a bunch of ways. And the news came out that the Weekly Standard has been shopping unsuccessfully for a buyer for several months. And so, you know, I was just at the Weekly Standard a week ago Thursday, about 10 days back, talking to editors about several prospective pieces, and they actually have a piece of mine in the can. Sorry?

You publish often in the Weekly Standard, and both of us have half a dozen friends there. Right. Oh, no, a lot of great friends there. And I think I've written, I haven't counted, but maybe close to 10 cover stories I've had in the Weekly Standard. So I'm very sad about the idea of it possibly disappearing. Aside from the controversies about whether they've been too strongly anti-Trump and so forth, I do think they've been caught up in a changing media world. I mean when the Standard began in 1995, we still had a predominantly print world.

Time and Newsweek were still 2 million circulation apiece. And now we've moved to this online world, and the standard has tried to do that too. But I think print publications, National Review has struggled in this environment. And so they're partly a victim of the changing media environment. And I think there's some other difficulties there that they haven't been paying attention to, unfortunately. Steve, by the way, we wait to see what happens with the weekly standard. This may be the last time you and I get a chance to speak to each other before the holidays are upon us. And so let me ask the question that is always in my mind when I think of you teaching up there at Berkeley.

How has that gone this term, this semester? It's going just fine. My joke is I'm an inmate at Berkeley, or maybe for this audience, I kind of thinking of myself as the Rob Long of higher education, right? I have to talk to – I'm surrounded by liberals. Yes. Right, and I have to deal with administrators who are probably like studio executives in their sluggishness and cluelessness and particular dispositions that stifle creativity. But I'll say a few things. I mean I've had a number of liberal students sign up for my classes because they say they wanted to hear something different.

And I've had some of them come back for more than one class saying, I'm still liberal, but I just like the way you do the subject differently. By the way, students who don't know that I'm a conservative. If you're still liberal, you're not doing your job. Joking. Well, you know, funny thing. And by the the way other conservative faculty will tell you this story too if they don't know what your ideology is every once in a while a couple of students will come up and say by the way they always come in pairs because they need to get their courage up and they'll say we think maybe you're a conservative and i'll say why do you think that

and often the answer is because you present both sides of the issue. Isn't that amazing to hear? Wow. Good for you for doing that, Steve. Good for you. I have to say I kind of enjoy it. You're not supposed to use this phrase, but I like fighting in Indian country. I like fighting surrounded. So I'm having fun. And also God put you on earth to teach. You're just a good teacher. That's probably right. Steve, thanks so much. This podcast, number 427, I'm still staggered that we're deep into triple digits now.

This podcast was brought to you by Casper, Quip, and Home Chef. We thank them all. Please join up at Ricochet.com yourself. Become a member at Ricochet.com yourself. Become a member of Ricochet. And if you enjoy this show, take a moment to leave a review on iTunes. Your reviews help new listeners to discover us, which helps to keep the whole show on the road. Steve, Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas to you, Peter. Read in the paper about a man killed with a sword.

And that made me think of my friend George People said the man was five foot six Sounds like Georgie with his killing stick Hey bro, what's the word? I'm talking about my friend George Hey bro, what's the word? Talking about my friend George You're talking about my friend George

I knew George since he's eight I always thought that he was great And anything that George would do You'd know that I would do it too. George liked music and George liked to fight. He worked out in a downtown gym every night. I'd spar with him when work was done. We split lips, but it was all in fun.

Hey, bro, what's the word? You're talking about my friend George. Hey, bro, what's the word? You're talking about my friend George. I will keep America moving forward, always forward, for a better America, for an endless, enduring dream and a thousand points of light. This is my mission and I will complete it. Ricochet. Join the conversation. you you you you