TRIGGERnometry - "I Knew Something Was Badly Wrong When They Censored The Scientists" - David Davis MP

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

David Davis has been a Conservative Member of Parliament since 1987. He joined the Government in 1990 and served in both the Cabinet Office and the Foreign Office, where he was responsible for government negotiations on Europe, NATO enlargement, the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the updated Geneva Convention. He went on to serve as Conservative Party Chairman, then Shadow Deputy Prime Minister. David was Shadow Home Secretary from 2003 until he announced his resignation in 2008, forcing a by-election to raise awareness of New Labour’s relentless erosion of civil liberties. Following the EU Referendum in which he campaigned to leave, David was appointed Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. Since leaving Government in 2018, David has campaigned on issues including Brexit, educational reform, tax fairness, social mobility matters and civil liberties. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Intro  02:03 David's Life Before Politics  09:07 Why David Became a Conservative  15:25 Does the Parliamentary Conservative Party Value Freedom? 17:57 Sponsor Message: Manscaped 19:20 Why Did So Many People Support the Government During Covid? 28:31 Is the Conservative Party Still Actually Conservative? 37:59 The Unwillingness of Current Leaders to Make Unpopular Decisions 46:49 Predicting the Next General Election 51:46 How Would Thatcher Have Handled the Ukraine Situation? 59:32 Are We in a Second Cold War? 1:01:39 Updates on the Brexit Situation 1:07:34 What’s the One Thing We’re Not Talking About? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Did you skip the SAS bit in this? I did, yes. How can you skip the SAS bit? That's what the people want to hear about. Back when I was 18, back when I was 18, we've at long last got the point where Brexit is now looking like it's working as it broadly should. Do you think that this Conservative Party values freedom? No, no, not enough.

Well, I've already characterised it, but the single most important things relate to freedom. to freedom, right? An assumption the state doesn't know best. I don't want Whitehall managing my identity. I own my identity. If I'm going to have an identifier, I want it under my control. You may remember early on,

some of us said, this looks like a virus that's come from a laboratory. And God, did you get pilloried for saying that online? Band, not just pillory. You get banned of... And indeed a Nobel Prize winner. That was the first point, by the way, in this whole process where I saw a French Nobel Prize winner effectively banned

from talking about his expert subjects, you know. And I thought, you know, this is wrong. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishon. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is one of the few MPs in this country left

who actually cares about civil liberties. David Davis. Welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you. It's great to have you on the show. We don't normally talk to politicians because it's hard to get a straight answer out of you guys. But I get the sense that, A, you've kind of, you've been there, you've done it, you've spoken up quite a lot about the things that you care about. And also, unlike many MPs, you actually had a life before politics and an interesting one.

So I thought it would be a great place to start, actually. Tell us about your life and how you are where you are. Okay. A quick, sort of quick, quick, far summary. born son of a single mum, 1948, when it was unfashionable. Controversial right off the bat, excellent. Brought up by my grandparents, because in those days, you know, you just didn't raise your own child. So she went off to do work, to do a job.

They raised me in a prefab, you know what that is? No. Asbestos box. In the Second World War, when a sticker bombs went down the street, they would bulldoze, the street and put little asbestos boxes, ready-made houses, made-dened factory, prefab. They're quite famous. And so I grew up in one of those. Everybody thinks it's terrible, you know, awful.

Sounds like a Monty Python sketch straight off. Actually, it was fantastic because they were well-designed, had nice central heating and so on. And albeit rather cramped. And so I lived just inside the walls of York. Other kids had bouncy castles. I had a real one. So that was early life. Then my mother got married, my stepfather working class shop steward, actually.

And we lived in a slum in South London, just south of the river from here. Literally, two up, two down, no electricity, gas, no indoor loo, no bathroom. But tin, tin tub and all that sort of stuff. Nothing unusual. I mean, that, frankly, it sounds terrible, but actually it was not that unusual post-war. Then, past my 11 plus, probably most important event of my life. With a past my 11 plus went to grammar school. Did well at grammar school.

Enjoyed sports, broke my nose lots of times, playing rugby. Ended up, I'll foreshorten this. I left home, you know, rather violent, disagreed with my stepfather. End up going to Warwick University. study science, molecular sciences, and computer science. It was pretty much the first computer science degree in the country. While I was there, Margaret Thatcher was the Education Secretary, and I became the national leader of the conservative students,

a thing called a Federation of Conservative Students, about 15,000 strong organizations meant I get to see her about 10 times a year, get to see Ted Heath, the Prime Minister, about four times a year. in a funny way, a rather privileged access. Then we lost power in the 70s. I then went out, I then went to business school, London Business School, took an MBA, became businessman, spent my time working for Tate and Lyle as their troubleshooter, principally, putting right, companies losing money, gone wrong, and did that, and did that,

until the early 80s, then became an MP in 1987. Did you skip the SAS bit in this? I did, yes. How can you skip the SAS bit? That's what the people want to hear about. Back when I was 18. Now, people don't understand this because they all think it's terribly glamorous,

if not, I need it to earn money. Basically, I'd left home, right? I was supporting myself. I had to get a job. I'd earn money to get university because in those days were grants and my parents weren't going to support my grant. They weren't even going to fill in the fall. So I couldn't get a grant.

So I'd have been able to university. So one way of doing it was to join the Reserve SAS, which was arduous. The pass rate in the selection was 8%. You know, mostly people. This is like the Navy SEALs. for American audience, right? Harder. Harder.

Yeah, harder. There's a lot of angry Americans now. That's fine. That's fine. Well, if you just take it in objective, pass rate terms, the pass rate for the SS is a little lower. And of course, the SAS in the first instance was probably the first of the modern special forces. Started in the Second World War, David Sterling and all that. I mean, I used to do it. He was still alive when I was around.

And we had a very, the reserve SAS, not the regulars, had a rather dramatic, one level mundane, one level dramatic job. Our primary role in warfare would, in the event of a conflict in Europe, was to jump in behind enemy lines, up to 300 kilometers behind enemy lines, find the hard, maybe create the targets by causing the odd traffic jam. Tank traffic jam. Well, as you've seen in north of Kiev in the last year, in truth, our job was to sort of create that, find it, and target it by Morse code, send in the locations and call in missile strikes, probably nuclear missile strikes in a conventional war in Europe. So survival expectation wasn't very high.

In fact, I mean, I was, when I was doing parachute school, Abingdon in just north of Oxford, R.F. Abingdon used to be there. We'd had this incredibly dramatic screw up on the jump, whereby my parachute tangled with somebody else. If somebody else flew his shoot over mine, dropped, because there's a low pressure zone above shoot, dropped to it. dangerous. His feet came through.

I looked up, so his feet, about 150 foot above the ground, thought this shoot can't carry two, so I pulled down the one side of my shoot to get him off. Instead of sliding off, he slid through the shoots, so the two shoots just collapsed into one another. And he was hanging about as far away as you are, screaming, mother, mother, not again. I won't tell you what I said back. And we just fell towards the ground. And I was lucky.

I walked away from it. He broke, he shortened his leg, broke all his leg bones, and broke his back. It was in a bodycast for six months. Anyway, the point about the story is not that. As we came back into the barracks on the little black and white tube television that they used to have in those days, about this big and deep, there was a picture of Soviet T-62's invading Prague, August 1968. I thought, I thought, expletive deleted, I'm only going to live three months.

So that was, but that was the backdrop there. And we did lots of other things, but those I can't talk about, but that bit's public domain. Right. So before you jump in, David, you mentioned a whole bunch of things that I want to dig into first. But here you are, you're growing up sung of a single mother. Yeah. I mean, you say, you know, it was pretty common. But you're not, you're not living in the lap of luxury.

No. And you become conservative. How did that happen? Well, I wasn't initially because my grandfather was a communist. In fact, my grandfather had been in prison on a couple of occasions for supposedly leading a riot, actually leading a demonstration. In those days, they didn't distinguish much. That's how liberty, the organization came to formed.

It was a National Council of Civil Liberties because of the treatment of demonstrators by the belief. And so I grew up in a Marxist background, and I thought of myself as very left-wing until I went to university and a series of different things came together. You know, for example, when we had a mock election at my school, I stood as a communist candidate, you know, got one vote. It wasn't mine. Just take power anyway, David.

Yeah, that's right, just take it. Take it by other methods. But the, anyway, the, so very left to center, I was, left to center. The left to center liberal, not left to center Marxist, really. So for example, I was in favor of homosexual law reform. I've always said, when people say to me, who was the greatest Home Secretary of your lifetime, I say Roy Jenkins, which surprises conservatives. Because he introduced censorship reform, abolished the death penalty, homosexual law reform,

all those things came in under that government and I was entirely on side with those. And I still am. The, I have slightly nuanced views on death penalty, but not important ones. The, and, but then I went out to work, to earn a living, was in the army, and so I had to look quite hard at what the Soviet threat really was in a way that other people didn't. I mean, we had all the classified briefings and looking at what their, what their war plans were and so on. And I went university during 1968, which was an extraordinarily pivotal year in all sorts

of ways, social ways, modern ways in terms of modern society. And all of that led me quite quickly, within a course of about 12 months, to come to a view which is really that the most important thing in a good society, in a civilized society, individual freedoms, rights under the law, robust democratic systems, by which I mean ones that don't collapse, and I'm going to annoy your American audience again in the way that the American one has sort of got bent out of shape by Obama, Trump, Biden and so on. All those things became very important to me. And it seemed to me the best institutional representation of that was the Conservative Party, right? Didn't mean I agree with everything that.

did or believed in. In fact, I actually signed up my entire student, Federation with certain of students, to Amnesty International, which of course knows some heartburn. Because, you know, at the same time as believing in a capitalist economy, which is the best way to deliver things I've talked about, and an economy where the rule of law is predominant, again, the best way. I also believed in things like not torturing people, not imprisoning people with things that have actually lasted into my life, really. So that's really where it came from. It was the first time, frankly, I thought properly about it,

rather than just inherited views. You see, because my grandfather was a communist and my stepfather was an ex-communist, labor voter. We had row after row after a, he was a shop steward. And so we'd argue all the time about trade union, although I'm very pro-union. We argue all the time.

So up until, as it were, I acquired my independence, I didn't really exercise my brain. Once I did, it was a very quick decision within a year. And what does it mean to you to be a conservative? Well, it means the single, well, I've already characterized it, but the single most important things relate to freedom, right? An assumption the state doesn't know best, all right? And this has resurfaced in the last decade or two, but we'll post all the counterterrorism stuff,

and now the woke stuff, where somehow there's a view that the collective approach to things is more important than the individual. And that's almost invariably wrong. And the trouble is it's also written into the mindsets of even some of our more talented conservative politicians. I mean, let me give you an example. Again, I'll annoy somebody else.

I'll annoy lots of people. Excellent. The views are going to be through the roof. Michael Gove, clever man, I was his referee and so on and all that. But he talks about Florence. When we're talking about what Britain's going to be like post-Brexit, it talks about Florence and how he attributes to the Medici's, all the successes of Florence. It was all to do with the Medici.

It was all to do with the chaos of Florence. Florence is a city full of alchemists and weird of religious sects and so on. And because it allowed the freedom of all that chaos and bad ideas, out of a thousand bad ideas, a half a dozen really good ones and half a dozen geniuses, you know, the Michelangelo's and so on, emerged. And I think human nature is such and a well-designed institutions are such that if you allow a lot more freedom than you're quite comfortable with, you get a really good outcome. eventually the best the best emerges. It's a sort of intrinsic meritocracy of chaotic societies.

How's that for a new theory? I completely agree with you, David. And I think that freedom is one of the things that I value most highly. Do you think that this Conservative Party values freedom? No, no, not enough. One of the difficulties with freedom, when states, particularly in a sort of democratic state like how address a new threat, I'll use the word mildly, invariably that impinges on freedom, and all the sort of the sort of the disciples of freedom, the intellectual disciples of freedom, privacy and things like that, right? So let me give an example. During the Blair years,

Blair was absolutely obsessed to the idea of identity cards. He's just come up with it again last week, you notice, him and Hague. And at the time, because this was being presented as a way of protecting people, you know, we can find terrorists more easily. How, I don't know, you think they're right, terrorist down as their occupation. But they had this idea, right? And 80% the public agreed with it. 80%.

I forgot that part of it. What the polling said, right? And I was a shadow home secretary at the time. I'd love to be out to tell you, well, you know, my persuasive powers switch. Nah. What actually changed the public's mind was that the state lost two CDs tax records of 26 million people. All the home addresses, the bank accounts, and they just disappeared.

the two CDs. And within a month, it was 70% against, rather than 80% in favor. Because people saw the dangers of centralized data on people. And this resurrects every time in Whitehall, just down the road from here, believes in something called identity management. I don't want Whitehall managing my identity. I own my identity. If I'm going to have an identifier, I want it under my mind.

control. I want it my solicitor or my lawyer or my bank or whatever. I don't want to stay control of my identity. But they think it's a great, they think it's the answer to everything. Of course, when you give them the data, they mess it up anyway. They get it wrong. They lose it. They attribute to the wrong people. But, but it's, you know, it's a, I think, you know, identity cars is quite a good demonstrator of what looks like a very sensible, you know, plausible, managerial idea. Actually, when you do it, they make a real, unholy mess of it. David, can you explain something to me? I'm not from this country.

I was born in the Soviet Union. And when I came here in the mid-90s, I was like, oh, this is a country that believes in freedom. Yeah, right? That's what I thought. And I cannot tell you how shocked I was in the last few years, particularly with COVID. Now, I remember the ID card debate. I remember opposing it at the time. Didn't remember 80% of people supported it, which is kind of relevant to my question.

Because, look, in a crisis when there's danger and fear, of course the government is going to use that as an opportunity to seize more. power to accumulate more data, to do all that. That's understandable. We've seen it all around the world. But the polling from people that we saw, you know, 20% of people want nightclubs closed down, irrespective of COVID, all of this stuff. I was going, what the hell's going on here? Right. Now, what I'm hearing out of you is people perhaps are less well-informed. People are terrified, and they were terrified by the government, by the media and so on. But, I mean, what happens during COVID? Well, look, I mean, two things, to get straight first.

Number one is most of the time, most people don't think about politics, right? I mean, it was true... Because they're sane. Because they're sane. They delegate it to people like me, right? And it's my job to have these fights on their behalf, and they don't think about it very much. So that's the first thing to understand. Second thing is, when they do first think about it,

not the eventual conclusion, but what do you do first think about it, the first template, the first test quite properly, is how will it affect me or my family or whatever? And if I'm frightened at my granny or my mum or me, will catch COVID, you know, and they're in a risk category, then I'll forget everything else.

I'll say, yeah, right, okay. Do what's necessary. Lock him up. Whatever. And that's perfectly natural. That is, you know, as human beings, we're built to defend our families. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution of programmed us that way. But then people think, they start to think about it in carefully, and then they balance things up. And there's that sequence, first not paying any attention, then the first, the first attention, what's my own, there's a sort of hierarchy of needs type argument, and then as a more

thoughtful thing. I mean, you saw this. I mean, in 2008, I had a by-election because we lost the vote in the Commons over 42 days' detention without charge, and because I didn't believe that when it came down to it, when the government brought it back as they would just before an election, that David Cameron would resist it, I didn't want to be that. Home Secretary is going to impose that. So I forced a by election.

Now again, at the time, 70% of people thought 40 days detention without charge for terrorism suspects was a good idea. Indeed, some people said, what's wrong with 42 years, you know? But they heard the terrorism, they didn't hear the suspects, right? And it was in the aftermath of the seven bombings and all that. So you can understand. They imagine this terrible event, we should do everything possible. Of course, later on, they start thinking through the details.

Who are the people actually get held for six weeks, what it is, without charge? Well, it's people against whom you have no evidence. It's the people who live in the same house as the person who did it, not the person themselves. People who themselves get, they get charged in five, six days. So what happened over the course of, I don't know, about five weeks of a local, localized, by-election, was that people started to think about it.

And again, that one went from 70-30 one way to 70-30 the other way over the course, because I made people think terrorist suspect. Right? So again, it's just that people, they ration their time, they ration their thought process, they ration the effort, the interest, they waste on things. They want to raise their children. They want to do their job. They want to save for their pension, whatever.

They don't want to spend that time. thinking about things that the state you should do properly first time. But David, is that what happened during COVID? Because I don't remember it like that at all. It seemed to me that the level of authoritarianism both in the government and the public increased over time. And it hasn't yet reversed, you see. And I think that process is a slower process going on at the moment.

And part of the problem is the sort of public censorship was going on. It was very difficult to get a proper hearing. I mean, in the Conservative Party, for example, I wasn't a member of it, but the thing called the Coronavirus Research Group, I think it was. I mean, one, its chairman is now a cabinet member. So, you know, there is at least some thought there, but I think what's going to happen is slowly over time, the weaknesses in the state argument will become apparent. You're seeing it today.

You're seeing it with the, while, as we sit here, the front of the front of the fact, the fact, the phase of Daily Telegraph is a story taken from Matt Hancock's WhatsApp exchanges, suggesting that he wasn't actually going from science at all. He was going from whatever other, other convenient, politically convenient reasons he had for making those decisions. We'll see the outcome. But what's happening? We saw somewhere else.

We saw, you may remember early on, some of us said, this looks like a virus that's come from a laboratory. And God, did you get pilloried for saying that online? Banned. Not just pillory. You get banned of places like Twitter. And indeed a Nobel Prize winner. That was the first point, by the way, in this whole process where I saw a French Nobel

Prize winner effectively banned from talking about his expert subjects, you know. And I thought, you know, this is wrong. We need to deal with misinformation at the source. David. Nobel Prize winners. Well, your old country knew how to deal with it. Misinformation at the source, which they did for 70 years. Yes, exactly.

But the, so, so the, that's beginning to break up. That's beginning to come apart. And one of the, one of the things I am going to be focusing on in next year or two is trying to make sure that the inquiry is, is, is, actually looks at all the facts and takes them all on And why is that important? Why does that matter? Well, it matters because there is a unique characteristic to this. And the unique characteristic, which I've never seen before in my lifetime anyway, is that every single ruling establishment in the world, possibly accepting Sweden, made the same mistake. And ruling establishments are very bad at admitting mistakes. And

when they're defending each other, you've got the World Health Organization, you've got You've got the American government, the British government, all of these, all the European governments, they all essentially made the same mistake. And so it's going to be quite hard to tease it apart. But I think it's going to be one of the big jobs in the next couple of years, two or three years to get it right. Because, but partly protect freedoms from unnecessary incursions, but also partly to make sure the next time we have a pandemic, we respond in a way which actually deals with it rather

than sort of behaves in a sort of politically defensive way, which is really what we're looking at, political defensiveness by every established in the world. So the last time something like this happened probably was when the Catholic Church was a dominant force, and I know the 10th century onwards sort of thing, you know, when you only have one allowed mindset. And so, you know, it's going to be a The next five years, not the next year, the next five years, it's going to be a long, long battle to get the facts straight.

And are you going to be covering misappropriation of funds as well when it comes to PPE? Oh, yeah. I mean, look, we skim past all sorts of things, but I used to be the Public Accounts Committee chairman. And I take the view that proper operation of the state in terms of looking after people's money is one of the first responsibilities.

It's the first duty of the state, not to take your money and waste it or throw it away, or worst of all, hand it over in a corrupt process to your favourite supporters, whatever it might be. And if that's what's happened, I'm not going to prejudge these things,

but if that's what's happened, then the judicial system should come down on it like a ton of bricks. Absolutely. David, a real criticism that people have of the Conservative Party and I think is a very valid one, is that the Conservative Party isn't conservative. It no longer represents conservative people.

It got elected to implement Brexit, which they've done. But you look at some of the policies that they've brought in, and I'm not a conservative, but I'm looking at that going, that is almost more centre-left or left than it is conservative. Well, the first thing to say about the Conservative Party is it's pretty bloody difficult to define what conservative means, right? If you looked at my philosophy, and this hasn't changed since I entered Parliament, you could probably more accurately describe me as a Gladstonean liberal,

you know, low taxes, free trade, free movement, rule of law, all the things we've talked about already. And the Conservative Party is an alliance. It's not a single entity, you know. it's always had a range of, a spectrum. Okay, let me put it in a more specific way. People, if I'm a red wall voter, I don't think I voted to have, for example, this is just one example picked out of random. I don't think I voted to have 40,000 people come into this country legally in small boats. I don't think I voted, look, I'm allowed to say this as an immigrant myself.

I don't think I've, when you told me tens of thousands, I don't think I voted for hundreds of thousands, right? So, irrespect of whether that's a conservative policy, I know, I think Francis' point is it's not a government's delivering on his commitments. Not yet, no, it isn't. I mean, part of the problem. I mean, we're talking at a difficult time in terms of answering this question because you've had, obviously, Brexit, you've had more importantly in many ways COVID, you've got Ukraine, you've got the fracturing of the world trading system, which is in many ways

may be the most important. Yes, okay, all this, all right? All these really, really important structures have been bugged up. Am I like to say that one? We swear all the time on this, say whatever you want. And of course we've had three changes as a leader, really, I mean, since Cameron, I mean, through all this. And so in terms of political distraction, it's been quite the normal focus, you know, as I say, the low taxes,

control of our borders, all those standard Tory, actually standard good management things, really, have slipped. No doubt about it. Well, that's a very gentle word to use to describe what's happened. I'm a kind of person. We've got the corporation taxes, every tax that I can see is going up, right? No control of our borders whatsoever. Like, I think it's, I think, look, this isn't an attempt to attack you or the Conservative party.

I mean, as Francis says, neither of us is conservative. But it's not good. Like, it's not delivering for the people who voted for their Conservative Party. Well, one of the, one of the difficulties is that, and this is, this applies to all parties. You're not just a conservative party. There's a tendency in this day and age, and it really mostly started, not uniquely, but mostly started under Blair and has got worse ever since, is there's a tendency to replace actual answers with populist answers.

So let me give you an example on migration. Okay. I have opposed the Rwanda policy, partly because I think it's sort of uncivilized, but also partly because I don't think it'll work, right? Yeah. But if you went out on the street and you stopped 100 people, 80 would think it's a great idea, which is why, in my view, it's the policy. And we've seen this, they say, says Blair, Blair used to talk in, in, in a, in, you

in big terms, you know, about cracking down in migration on, you know, and all the various anti-crime things. Crime got worse under Blair, but, you know, we had all sorts of things he was talking about and on terrorism, of course, as well. And the trouble is that people hear the policy, if it sounds tough, great, that's wonderful. Truth is what we need to do on something like the votes across the channel is some of it's down to some really simple, sensible things. I wrote to the Prime Minister before Christmas.

You wouldn't necessarily remember with initially 50 other MPs on the letter, but it turned out to be 100 after I got a bit coverage. Say, look, just define Albania as a safe country because it is. Albania's had fewer references to European Court the last 10 years than we have. We should all be fleeing to Albania. Exactly. I have a better case to go to. to Iran than they didn't come here, right?

And let's first do that. It doesn't solve the problem, but golly, it knocks about 15,000 or 12,000 people out of it straight away, you know, the third of the overall total. Let's do that, get that under control. I've also said, not in the letter, but I've said to the various people involved in this, you know, you've got to improve the cross-channel surveillance. You know, a British company provides Frontex, which is the European border agency, with the surveillance for the Mediterranean.

Light aircraft, twin-engine light aircraft at DA62 for your techie viewers, complete with synthetic aperture radar, with infrared, with long-range cameras, with devices that detect mobile phones, and the combination of all of them, they can spot people arriving at the beach in Libya. They can spot people arriving at the beach in Libya from international airspace. They can spot people arriving at the beach in France from British airspace. The French tell us they can't do it because of privacy concerns. Well, I'm a privacy enthusiast, and I don't see that, but never mind. That's their view.

But we could do that, and we should have been telling them every time somebody, they're there, every single one. So why don't we? I think it's a government competence thing. I think the Home Office throughout really since, remember I made my reference to Roy Jenkins, really since those days, I don't think the Home Office has been functional. And there have been desperate attempts to make it work. Prisons have been taken out.

Justice have been taken out. And they still quite haven't got the Department of probably functional. I think there is a serious problem of competence in Whitehall generally, declined of competence over the last 20, 30 years. I can see why you're not administer any. Well, I mean, I had this conversation once. I probably shouldn't tell you with whom. But let's say somebody who was at the top of the Whitehall regime.

And I said, you served in the Lawson Treasury, you know. Tell me, is today's Whitehall as competent as it was? in Thatcher's time and he thought for a second he said no I said why not he said well in the Treasury case you know you've got the very clever youngsters who used to go to become Treasury policy principles you know and now making a million a year in a city you know post Big Bang post Blair Blair gave a lot of extra power to special advisors the the Alistair Campbell's of the world and so on which of course he took that power away from the policy advisors and the foreign office and in the cabinet office and so.

So what happened was that we basically aren't doing as good a job. We also rotate people too often and lots and lots of tiny techy things. Like Blair made it the case. It used to be, in order to become Perm Secretary, you had to serve in the Minister's Private Office. Now, serving the Minister's Private Office is a nightmare. You work in seven days a week, you know, for long hours. I can call you up at midnight and all that, and I used to.

And say, what did you just come on the news? What's going on sort of thing? But, you know, if you want to get to top, that's what you did. Well, you know, changes, lots and lots of changes in rules like that and other ones as well has reduced the effectiveness of Whitehall, I think. And over COVID, you know, you also saw another decline in the effectiveness. You saw it with the case officers, the rate of the case officers clear. or dealt with asylum cases

down to 1.4 a week well that's sort of madness you know it should be about five times that a day you know it should be four or five a day and and those sorts of things you know you've got a real you've got real serious competence issues I think

given the size of the problems and I'm sorry it's a long when you'd answered your question why are we not doing the surveillance and I think that's part of the reason we also got we've also got young and you've got young politicians too. Before I came into house, I'd been working in business. I was a main board director of a Futsi 100 company before I became an MP. And that's not that common anymore. So

it's true for some, but most people, most is probably putting it too strongly, but a very large proportion of MPs coming in now are expads. They've done nothing but work in Whitehall and so on. And actually, you know, if you're representing people, you want to have done something in the outside world, not just something in government. I think it's really, really important that. And that's decline. There's no individual's fault. It's a social trend that's happened. David, you spoke in an interview about how there's only been two transformational prime ministers, one of which was Margaret Thatcher. And I look at the current political cohort that we have, and it seems that they lack one fundamental quality necessary to be a good leader. And that is

the willingness to be unpopular and to be hated. And I look at all our leaders and they don't seem to want to be disliked. They don't seem to want to annoy people, which if you want to transform things, if you want to make things better, you've got to make unpleasant and difficult and unpopular decisions. Well, let's be clear about one thing. Margaret didn't want, want. She had to get used to it. Yeah, right. Okay. But she was prepared to. But she was prepared to, right? But she was prepared. The lady's not for turning. But when I first knew her, she was Margaret Thatcher Milk Snatcher.

You're both of you too young to remember the scandal. But she had cancelled free school milk for certain categories of youngsters. And she got used to her. But the thing you have to understand is that Margaret was very calculating. it's probably the right word about that. She, when she took on a big problem, let us say she took on the issue of overmighty unions or took on the issue of the minor strike or whatever, right?

She would take this big strategic aim, she'd set out the big strategic aim, but then she'd salami slice it into small pieces and do it one piece at a time, ideally only one enemy at time, not a thousand enemies. Well, see, in 1974, Ted Heath lost the election because he basically made an enemy of about 300 different groups over industrial relations and then got thrown out by the unions, really. She would cut it into little bits.

So give you an example. With the minor strike, number one, when Derek Ezra tried to precipitate it before she was ready, she sacked him. She didn't sack anybody else. She sacked the head of the coal board. During it, she won that conflict. albeit at great social cost, but during it, she was scared by the dockers coming out on a wildcast, right, which she had not prepared for.

And so ever thereafter, until I changed the mind, she avoided having a conflict with the dockers. And then I said, we've got to reform the scheme, the dock labour scheme. And so we did all. But it took a long time because she was very, very careful. She was much more a woman than a man on this. I think women are much better sometimes at dealing objectively with risk than we are. We're sort of sometimes brought up

to sort of rush headfirst into risks. Not clever in politics. She understood what need to be done and she did it. And notably, she always did the unpopular things in the first year or two. So sort of unfair to apply this to Sunat because he hasn't got spare time to do this.

But generally speaking, I think you're right that people, modern politicians haven't got in the habit of thinking through right. Okay, what am I going to do in year one, year two, year three? Because by year four, she always had the results to show. You see? And she always went to year four, you know, and in a very calculated way. So this wasn't sort of, you know, the political equivalent of winning a Victoria Cross. You know, Margaret was about winning the battle. And all right, there was some pain to take early on, but she knew, she calculated it out.

And I think people, very few people in the House of Commons have a real memory of Margaret. All right. So, for example, when Liz Truss was presenting herself as a modern market, nothing like it. Margaret would never have done what Liz and Quasi did with that budget, you know. frankly, in my view, a mad budget, because it lost the markets, it lost everything. She would have done that calculation properly. She would have got Lawson or How or whoever, whoever was the chance of to sit down and work out what you could do and what would maximize the effects and so on and minimize

the risks. So, yeah, she was willing to be unpopular. Really, really, that post-war general. was much more tough-minded, I think, in many ways. It doesn't matter what the poll, you know, Tory or Labor, or liberal, for that matter, less liberal because they weren't really in play. But Tory or Labor were willing sometimes to stand up. I mean, Barbara Castle, if you read your history books, Barbara Castle and the place of strife,

trying to sort out the trade unions. Harry Wilson ran away from it, but at least started down the road. So that's a, that's something that's a generational thing, you know. When I came into House of Commons, my two predecessors, the ones, the members for Howden and Holton Price were the last two double decorated members of the house. They both in a military cross and a distinguished service order. That's always preyed on my mind. These are people who, you know, were patriotic in the sense of vain, putting themselves in harm's way for their country, but also looked after their regiment in North Africa

for two or three years. So, well, I've got to do with a constituency issue of somebody's planning problem or somebody's can't make ends meet or whatever. You know, they've got Jimmy whose wife has left him. They got Johnny who can't pay his debts. They got Frankie who's an alcoholic and so on. And they had to deal with all that. So they, from the beginning, had a far closer grasp, I think, of ordinary people's concerns than subsequent generations have had. I was going to say, but this is a very real problem, David, because if you don't understand the concerns or the lives of ordinary people, with the best will in the world, how are you then going to enact policies that are going to help these people.

I agree. But I think it's a systemic problem. Now, against that, you've got a circumstance where the caseload of MPs is much bigger than it used to be. So the counter argument to me will be what that brings them closer to the people. But I think, I just think that British society has become more stratified, got more layers in it now than actually it had when I was growing up. I mean, nobody wants to wish a war in a country.

But the, one of the effects of the second, well, actually, one of the effects of the 1930s and the 1940s together was to make us feel more of a nation. Yeah? You know, didn't always help the Tories. I mean, after we got wiped out in 1945, you know. But I think there was, and indeed the Tories had more working class votes in those days as well, even than now. But that sense of nationhood was very important. Nationhood, society, call it what you want. It's a commonality.

And we've lost a bit of that. And I think although we all know what everybody's thinking because of social media these days, it's an incredibly fragmented society it reflects. You look at strands of social media and it's so intolerant of other viewpoints that instead of having a debate where if you sort of did a distribution diagram of people's opinions along a spectrum, it would tend to be that shape, you know, be a normal distribution. Sometimes it was like a dromedary, you know, two humps, you know, slightly different.

there was always something in the middle. I sometimes, usually, talking about, I don't know, Brexit or COVID or woke issues or whatever, I sometimes feel it's just two competing echo chambers. And there's nowhere in the middle. In fact, if you stand in the middle, you get shot out by everybody. That's right. Well, that's what we do. It's a lot of fun. But David, I want to move on from the party politics, but first, I want to ask you a final question on that. Is your party going to lose the next election? No, not necessarily. I think if you'd ask me that,

six months ago. I would have said we had a one in ten chance at best, if not zero. I think it's improved to one in five. I mean, literally... That is 20%. That's 20%. From 10%. So that's doubled in a wheel.

That is a politician's schedule, isn't it? I'm finished yet. Because we've got a budget coming up. Yeah. All right. And I think what the budget does is. does is very important. The issue you've been talking about of borders, you know, I think there are some solutions available. I've talked about the Albanian issue and the more

practical issue of how we deal with it. I think there's quite a lot going on there. I've been talking a lot to number 10 about those things. I used to be shadow home secretary for five years. I mean, I used to be a specialist in removing home secretaries when they were label ones. So, you know, you can imagine I have views on that. And I think those three issues could move it the other way. I mean, that's the thing. So, you know, I've been around in politics long enough to see much, much worse circumstances

were in than we're in now. And I think the... Really? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, bear in mind, I was an MP in 1997, you know, when we had 100 and whatever it was, Fort. No.

That was worse for the Conservative Party. I don't think the country was in a worse state than it is now. No, no. The countries are the good state. I mean, the amazing irony there was that we delivered a fantastic economy and we got zero credit for it. So no, no, no, no, there's no doubt that the countries, but all countries in a difficult state.

Yes. I mean, what's, I said to you before, I'm a sort of Gladstonean liberal in my intrinsic politics. In my view, the greatest positive thing that's happened in the history of the world in the last century happened in 1995. And what happened then was the World Trade Organization and the Gat Round had a dramatic reduction of extra tariff barriers around the world. And what that did was it led to about one and a half billion people, billion,

1,500 million people coming out of absolute poverty. In my view, probably the greatest event in modern times. And if we're not careful, that trade liberalization could go into reverse. Ukraine, China, Taiwan, the Chinese state capitalist behavior, Huawei and all those other issues. So you've got that, that's huge. You've got other knock-on effects. Obviously, Ukraine, what is in effect, the attempt to recreate the old Soviet Union, is going to be agonizing one way or another, the outcome,

either for the West or for Russia at some point. You've got post-Brexit, I think that's all of a sudden. That's a rather different colour. That looks much warmer than it did before. You've got a United States that's sort of indecisive and where it is in the world at the moment. I mean, I didn't like Trump. Don't get me wrong.

I dislike Trump intensely. bad influence, but I'm not sure that Biden's a great leader either for all sorts of reasons. So, of course, we've got a huge number of problems, but they're not just British problems. They are a worldwide problem. Well, let's talk about one of them, which is the war in Ukraine. And one of the things that we saw during COVID, particularly, is the breakdown of trust in what we were being told that had been going on for some time. I think it probably really kicked off in 2015, 2016, and the way that it is.

going now. We've got to a point now where there's a lot of people, particularly people who are sort of anti-work or maybe lean right, who quite understandably, I think, really distrust what anyone is telling them from the mainstream media, politicians, et cetera. And we've got to a point with Ukraine where I'm sort of tearing what's left of my hair out in the sense that there are quite a lot of people who've sort of delved into all sorts of conspiracy theories. And in fact, we had a debate with Peter Hitchens only a few days ago and here talking. And there are people who think this is all NATO's fault and all of this. I actually disagree with you about the attempt to recreate the Soviet Union.

Putin wants to recreate the Russian Empire. That's why he hates Lenin so much because he gave away parts of the Soviet Union, of what the Russian Empire to create the Soviet Union. But... From SW1, they look quite similar. Yes, I can imagine. I can imagine. Well, the Russian Empire was bigger.

I know. You've got to remember. But in any case, we talked about Thatcher as well. How do you think she was? would have handled this for a stop. Very clinically. You mean the Ukraine episode? Very clinically, probably in a quite similar way to what's been done,

i.e. the supply of arms rather than direct intervention. She might have been a bit more aggressive in the first part. She wouldn't have allowed direct engagement, but she might have done something like, I no, provide a no-fly zone for the west of Ukraine, something like that, something designed to stay out of entanglement, but to provide some sort of safe spaces. She might have done that, but broadly speaking, should have done something similar to what we're doing now. She would probably have taken a more active international role, pushing around than any

current British Prime Minister really able to do. because bear in mind the structures in her day were far more entrenched in place. I remember vividly sitting in the tea room, not in the tea room, in the dining room, the House of Commons, and she came in and sat next to me. And I said, and it was at the time of the Reykiewick talks. And I said, what you've been doing, Margaret? She said, I've been straightening out Ronnie. And we forget, of course, that.

That duumvirate was very important. You know, it had some friction some time to time over Grenada and other things, but that duumvirate was very important and there's no real equivalent Juambra around today. So, but she would have been very, and she would have been an incredibly clinical exercise in how far can we go. Remember what I said before about controlling risk. You know, what's the strategic aim? Her strategic aim would have been, I'm quite sure, complete expulsion of Russia from Ukraine.

she might have had a different view about Crimea, because Crimea's got different histories, you know. But the, but she, broadly speak, I think she would have gone through, she would have had from the beginning the idea of complete expulsion, but she would have sliced it into very, very small pieces, and then each bit managed very carefully. And she would have taken, she would have paid close attention to herself. She would have appointed somebody like Ben Wallace,

who she trusted as, as, as MOD, but it would have been under daily review in number 10. And what would she, and what do you say to the people who say this is, West's intervention is unnecessary. In fact, by expanding eastwards NATO's cause this. We are leading to World War III and the potential for nuclear engagement between the world's two superpowers. Why don't we just let Russia have influence over what it has?

Ukraine is Russia's sphere of influence. Putin's talked about how it's, it's just Russian land. that's temporarily called Ukraine. What do you say to all those people? Well, I think the first of them, you know, go back to my original principles. The right of self-determination is individual self-determination and state self-determination, you know. And at the end of the day, what does Ukraine want to do, you know, the nation of Ukraine?

That's the first thing. Second thing is I don't pay a lot of attention to the conspiracy theories and so on. on. Why? Some of them might have some substance of truth. I don't know. I'm not in a position to know, to have a detailed intelligence brief on what EU's activities in, you know, pre-maiden and so on were in Ukraine. But wars are horrible, rough-edge things. You know, the things we did in the Second World War, you know, there were some nasty things we did, you know. Don't get talked about because we won. You know, quite.

Quite. You know, and so I'm afraid, you know, once you're at war, you've got to recognize that this is, I mean, there are still rules. But, you know, there's going to be lots of stories flying around and you won't know the truth for years and years and years. So we have to decide, you know, we are supporting one side as what we should do. I don't suppose that side is perfect. I don't suppose pre-invasion that the Ukrainian state was a perfect state any more than, well, less than we are, you know. but it doesn't matter, you know, there is a big symbolic thing here and it doesn't just affect Ukraine, because if we had stood back and let Ukraine fall,

what would happen to Taiwan? What would happen elsewhere? Well, the next time, I mean, bear in mind, this is what number seven in Putin's excursions, you know, you've got South Ossetia and Abkhazia and all these other, all these other, and all carefully calculated. I mean, well, you know, we should be, and Syria. You know, I'm one of the few MPs here who's been to Damascus since the Syrian War.

I went and I saw Assad and spoke to him, you know, about what was going on there. And just as an aside for you, I think I've ever said this publicly. I said to him what's going on because Russia was supposed to be pulling out. But when I crossed the border or coming across the Bekhar Valley,

there were clearly Russian, what looked like, Spetsnatsats at the border, In the hotel I was staying in Damascus. There were plainly at least two sets of Russian aircrew. I don't speak enough words of Russians, know what they were saying, but I knew it was Russian. And he said, oh, Putin has pulled back because he's been accused of undermining the peace process.

But I spoke to him about it, and Putin said to me, we will not let you lose. An astonishingly chilling thing, this is way back when, this is 2016, I think. it was. It's a slightly chilling thing, but you know, you can see the calculation going on and mostly as calculations have worked in its favour. You know, South Ossetia, why did they pick South Ossetia?

South Ossetia, part of Georgia, has, you know, got the highest number of gallantry medal wins per capita in the old Soviet Union, you know? an incredible high level of pro-Russian, pro-Soviet patriotism sort of thing. They picked it for a reason, you know, picking away. And if he keeps winning, then he'll keep going. And it has to come a point. This is the lesson of the 1930s. We didn't have nuclear weapons in the 1930s, people would say.

We didn't have nuclear weapons, but you can't allow nuclear weapons to then suddenly just give the advantage of the other side. A lot of people said, oh, early on there was lots of fear of this. And bear in mind, I grew up with nuclear weapons. As I said, part of my role in the reserve forces was that, was related to that. In the event of a nuclear exchange, one of the people who would be highly, greatly at risk, would be Putin himself. That's what would happen. Now, is this a man who is sort of, you know, such a heroic self-image is willing to give up his life?

This is a man who spent two years in a bunker avoiding COVID, all right? It's a man who has meetings who wouldn't have a meeting as close as we're having, you know, whose security meetings are, you know, in a room as big as this, but we'd fall people in it, you know. The man, is a man, an aging man with intimations of mortality, you know, so he's not going to rush into a nuclear change. You don't be stupid about it. You don't take unnecessary risks, but don't let yourself be frightened by your own weapon. Final question on this, David. Are we in Cold War II? Yeah, we are.

We've been in it for a longer time than we think, I think. All this happens is we haven't recognized it, you know, and we haven't calculated around it. What's happened is the war on terrorism is elided through Syria in particular into a sort of involuntary slippage into Cold War. And this Cold War actually includes China too, actually. We have, I mean, we've allowed the great benefit I talked about before, the 1995 transformation.

We have allowed the real benefits of that to blinders and handicappers in our responses to things like China's treatment of the Uyghurs, China's basically kleptocratic approach to state capitalism. And we should have been a bit more rigorous about that. But we aren't. I'm afraid that is the nature of Western politics. It is quite, I mean, democracies are quite weak a lot of the time. I mean, this struck me most starkly when, after the Litvinenko killings, a few years later, David Cameron was taking Putin to the judo at the Olympics.

What would we doing there? What simple we're giving it? For a trivial diplomatic advantage, we were telegraphing that we'd sort of forgiven them for murdering people in our territory. You know, we have to, you know, there are lessons we have to relearn in this world. And Cold War, Cold War 2 or 3, whatever it is, is not a bad description, I'm afraid. We've got to learn to manage relations with not necessarily actively hostile states, but potentially hostile states. In such a way, they know there's a price for breaking our rules.

David, we're going to move on to a subject very quickly. that's even more toxic than the Ukraine war, which is obviously Brexit. What's going on with Brexit at the moment? Just sum it up for people who aren't Ophai with Northern Ireland discussions, the protocol, etc. Well, we got to a problematic position after Theresa May, many years ago, when I was Brexit secretary, without talking to me, agreed with the European Union, full alignment between the north and south of Ireland. That created intrinsic problems for us.

Either a barrier within Britain or we'd all have to follow, you know, Brexit become useless because it wouldn't allow us to deviate from European standards and so on. And from that, there's been a cascade of problems, which has been handled not terribly well necessarily by successive governments. We got to a point really where we were heading towards a number of things. a barrier in the North Sea, which meant selling goods from Great Britain into Northern Ireland and vice versa, was just as bad as selling them across an international border. And also, not make it difficult for the North to deal with the South as well.

What's happened in the last week or so, effectively the last few months, but it's come to the surface the last week, that Rishi has found a way, Rishi Sunak, and I think it's him personally, has found a way of eradicating most of the problems. Not all of them, but if you are selling goods, most goods to and from, not all goods, most goods to and from Northern Ireland, you could do so without a barrier. So we're back to being a single nation, right? If you're selling them to Northern Ireland to go south, then it does go through a barrier.

That's not a big deal. We have got to the point where we've got a block on new laws being imposed on Northern Ireland, which, two blocks. One, they will only relate to its ability to trade. They've got to have a reference to that point, so quite a lot of being removed. And secondly, if new ones come along, we've got, or at least the Northern Ireland Assembly, 30 out of 90 of them, for more than one party, are able to trigger. a veto with the help with the support of the British government. Now, when people say,

oh, well, how will this work and so on? I'll tell you how it work. It'll act as a disincentive for the Europeans to pick a fight over it because we, you know, we have the veto. So there'll be a lot of talking or go on, which is fine. I've got nothing, I've got no problem with that. So we've got, at a long last, and it's several years later than it should have happened, and it took so long because we were too soft in the first instance in our negotiating. strategies. We didn't do a Thatcher, really. We've at long last got the point where Brexit is now looking like it's working as it broadly should. I mean, I would have preferred not to have to do the deals in Northern Ireland, but that pass was sold by, for a long time ago, which led to my

resignation. So I think we've got a good outcome. And most important of all, not most important of all, but an added benefit, is also we're on a good relationship with the Europeans. You know, and they're our biggest neighbour, and that's what we should be aiming for. You couldn't have it at the beginning because it was bound to be tension at the beginning, the resentment, all that. That was inevitable. But we're now at a position where we're talking to them. And the reasons for that, partly it's, I think, Rishi's skill, but part of it is they suddenly

realized, if they kept pressing the way they did, they would destroy the Good Friday. agree. And the world would not, history would not forgive them. And secondly, post-Ukraine, they realize that actually we're really still very important to them, you know. And even the people are most resent for Brexit, who I think the French, probably realize it most, because, you know, the major military power on the continent. So I think that the outcome is a good outcome in the final answer. It's not going to be perfect. I guarantee you the next week, going to be loads of little wrinkles. Oh, look, they didn't tell us about this.

Didn't tell us. There's always that in international deals. It's a pretty good outcome, which is why I gave it a stronger welcome than I normally give most government actions this week. And you don't think the DUP are going to try and scupper it? Well, I think at the end of the day, the DUP is divided amongst itself, I think. You know, there's a spectrum of views inside of the DUP. And I think there's a corollary which has got.

got almost nothing to do with Brexit, which is do they want to go back into government wish and fay? They don't like being a government wish in fey and I don't think, this is my surmise. I don't know this. I think history will tell us that. Like they said, I think history would tell us that. Yeah. And for whatever reason, they may not end up supporting this.

But, you know, they don't get their powers unless they go back into government. They don't get their veto power unless they go back into government. So I think there's a good incentive to restart the good Friday. agreement, the mechanisms of it. They may abstain, they may even vote against. The truth of matter is this is going to get carried in the House of Commons by over 400 votes, because Labor are going to support it, SMP are going to support it, liberals will end up supporting it. And it will be seen, broadly speaking, as a success. And you've got people like ranging from Steve Baker, Reese Mogg, me, you know, people who, you know, people who are not later rivals

to Brexit. You know, we've been fighting these battles for a long time. So, saying this is the right outcome, and I think it is. David, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a wonderful conversation. We always finish our interviews with the same question, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Science, technology.

The future of the country, the future of the world, but the future of this country in particular, because we are such a big science superpower, is going to be dictated by everything from... DNA manipulation, modern methods of healthcare, artificial intelligence, you name it. And the level of public discussion of technology today is, you're two, both of you're too young, I've got all these old analogies. It's sort of on a level of tomorrow's world. It's sort of pop science.

You know, it's a science comic. We don't have enough people in government or in public life generally who are scientists, who are, you know, who are happily sit down. So let me give you an example. During COVID, we treated models, the product of models as though there were facts. Remember all those imperial models and all that stuff? You know, I wrote along with Matt Ridley, an article in a telegraph way back at the beginning, He'd say, look, for heaven's, I'd stop treating this as a fact.

He's got every lasted prediction wrong in all the pandemic so far. Why should we think it's true now? So things like that, the use of mathematics, the use of scientific techniques and so on, are very, very poorly understood in public life. It's not so true in places like Singapore and Japan, but in this country, we've got to wake up that science, technology, engineering, mathematics are the future. And it's about time government's understanding it and talking about it properly and the public at large.

I want to, my throw away last policy for you, I want to do away with university loans for STEM subjects. I would like to put science, technology, engineering and maths on a grant basis, a full grant basis for anybody wants to do it. Why do it? One, because the reason I just told you. Two, because I think it would be a way of pulling really clever working class kids. into higher education because they'll look at it as risky at the moment and give them proper careers

which is not happening at the moment. So it's a very grand broad subject and I could sit and talk for hours on it but that for me is the big hole in modern politics. David, that's a great point. Of course, you're canceling

all the amazing media studies graduates we've produced over the last many decades in that process. It's been an absolute pleasure. We're going to ask you a couple of questions that are supportive, submitted that only they will get to see on locals. But for now, thank you so much for coming on the show. And thank you guys for watching and listening.

My pleasure. We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or a show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. This is a very good question from Clean Purple Bunny. What a name. Would you regret most about the British government's response to COVID and your fight against it?