Bronwen Maddox
Hello, everyone, very warm welcome. I’m so sorry to keep you waiting for a couple of minutes, that goes to everyone online as well. I’m delighted that you’re all here, and that Rory Stewart is here, for this conversation about populism, and global politics, and a bit of British politics as well, and a bit of what he is doing now.
This is a discussion lots of you have been telling us that you really want to come to. Rory’s book, I know a lot of you have read. I have the Chatham House copy at the moment and I know people will be competing with me for it. And a lot of you have been telling us just how enjoyable you found it, as I have as well, and we’re going to start with some points about that.
But I just want to give some of the details from Rory’s biography, which almost don’t need giving, except some of it is so relevant to what he is discussing at length in this. As you know, he’s a writer, and he’s now President of the organisation GiveDirectly, that’s for the past year, and was an independent candidate for the Mayor of London, and an MP for Penrith and The Border, the largest geographical constituency in England, from 2010 to 2019.
This is the bit that really struck me, both reading the book, and looking then at his biography. We have in May 2019, he was appointed Secretary of State for International Development, was previously Minister of State at the Ministry of Justice, Minister of State for Africa, and both in the FCO and the Department for International Development, and that was for a year. And then he was – in fact, it was for a short year – no, a year and a bit. Then he was Minister of State in DIFD, and before that Minister for the Environment and Rural Affairs at Defra, another year in there, and after the floods, appointed by the Prime Minister, and so on.
And there’s this – both this range of things, at the speed with which he is required to move through these jobs, is one of the absolutely fascinating, and, indeed, sometimes rather depressing facets of this book. And I was discussing with some of our team beforehand just what it says about British politics. And, as you know, before that he has had a long experience running NGOs and experience in Afghanistan extensively, and in Iraq. Well, we can range over lots of that, but may I just start by saying, Rory Stewart, thank you very much indeed for coming here.
Rory Stewart
Well, thank you for having me. I hope you can hear me. Can you hear me?
Bronwen Maddox
Yes, you should be double miced up.
Rory Stewart
Very good, okay.
Bronwen Maddox
Let’s start with this book, as I said, we are going indeed to come onto global politics and populism. But I was very struck, as you can see from the tags I’ve put in it, about your experience of being a Politician and being a Minister and wondered whether you thought it was worth being an MP without being a Minister?
Rory Stewart
Well, so, firstly, thank you very much for having me. I think that being a backbench MP is a very, very peculiar job in the modern age. You represent a constituency, but you don’t have any legal power over that constituency, you have no budget in relation to that constituency. So, the – there is this sort of element of bad faith from the very beginning, which is that you are campaigning by pretending to your constituents that you’re going to be able to sort out the potholes, deal with the planning, which, of course, is the job of the local council, or you’re claiming that you’re going to be able to dual the A66, which is the job of the Secretary of State for Transport and you may not actually – your party may not even be in government.
You then are sent off to do something that none of your constituents are very interested in, which is to vote on legislation in Parliament. But in voting on legislation in Parliament, of course, 98% of the time you are not exercising your own judgement, in any way at all. This is a party system that is run on a running, perpetual three-line whip. The – initially, this idea of a three-line whip suggested there were differences between one, two and three-line whips, we now operate almost entirely on three-line whips.
And great rebels, you know, the sort of people like Jacob Rees-Mogg will perhaps rebel two or three times a year. A significant rebel, like me, I blighted my career by rebelling once, and was then not promoted for the next four years, in punishment. People like Michael Gove, successful Secretaries of State, have never voted against a piece of government legislation, ever, in their careers since 2005. And there is a good constitutional argument why that should be the case. In other words, you vote for a party, you expect your party to carry through its manifesto, you’re not very amused, let’s say, you voted for the Labour Party and your local Labour Party MP started voting against Keir Starmer’s policy on education, you might well be a bit resentful. In fact, there’s an argument from Burke in the 18th Century, that if you allow people to rebel against their Party Whips it actually creates a form of corruption.
Regardless of the arguments one way or the other, the fact is that you are lobby-fodder. And you are lobby-fodder at an even more extreme level when you become a Minister, when it is actually a constitutional rule that if you ever vote once against the government you have to resign from your Ministerial position. So, by definition, any Minister in the government is never doing it. So, you’re powerless in your constituency, you have no autonomy really in Westminster, what are you then doing? And to get a sense of that, it’s worth seeing the valedictory speeches of Members of Parliament, people who’ve served 25, 30 years, giving speeches, and they’re quite interesting.
I sat through a group, as I was leaving myself, there was a Labour MP from Wales, whose greatest achievement she remembers, was going down a coalmine for three and a half days in solidarity with miners in the early 1980s, on the basis of which she felt she contributed in a small way to keeping the mine open for another ten years. But, of course, it was then closed in 1993, and she was stepping down in 2019.
Other people talked about getting a lift installed at their local railway station, this was the culmination of 25 years of career in the House of Commons. So, worth looking at. And others didn’t even attempt to point to particular achievements, if they’d been backbenchers all their lives, they instead paid tribute to the catering staff, to the staff that worked in their parliamentary office, and to their loyal constituency activists. So, it’s a very unusual job, yeah.
Bronwen Maddox
Thanks for that, and I’m going to take that as a version of no, you know, for all the work that constituency MPs do admirably, as you say, they don’t end up with a long list. I’m also taking this, in a way, as your valedictory speech. Let’s move onto your being a Minister. Because there – after you were released from the punishment that, I think it was George Osborne had threatened you with, and imposed, for voting against the government on a House of Lords reform, you then did become a Minister. You became all the kinds of Minister that I listed before, and a few others. And how did you find that, in terms of setting out to add to this list of things that when you walk away from Westminster, you can say that you’ve done?
Rory Stewart
Well – and the – so, a slightly cheeky question, how many people in this audience have been at some point in their career Civil Servants? And so…
Bronwen Maddox
What an interesting question, thank you.
Rory Stewart
…sbout 60% of the audience I suppose, yeah, or 50% maybe of the audience.
Bronwen Maddox
I don’t think that many.
Rory Stewart
No? 40%? What do you think?
Bronwen Maddox
Oh, I thought 30%.
Rory Stewart
30%, okay.
Bronwen Maddox
A large minority.
Rory Stewart
Okay, a large minority of the audience have been Civil Servants. It’s – I think it may have changed over time, but certainly in the governments that I experienced, which were David Cameron and Theresa May’s governments, a Minister was a very, very, very odd creature. I had been a Civil Servant, in my early life, I’d been in the Foreign Office, and I therefore imagined being a Minister was like being a Senior Civil Servant. And indeed, when I joined the Department for International Development, of the seven Civil Servants briefing me on my first day, five of them I knew very well, some of them I’d known for 30 years. I’d danced with them in Kabul, I’d shared containers with them in Iraq, I’d been at university with some of them, and I imagined that I would then be chairing a sort of seminar, in which we would discuss policy issues, I would come to some sort of conclusion, having listened to them, provide some direction, and things would happen. Nothing of the sort.
In essence, a Minister is regarded in a very, very odd way. And sometimes there were sort of flares of anger, where Civil Servants would express what they really thought. So, I remember on my first day in DFID, suggesting to the Director General that I would like to speak to the – I was the – then the DIFD Minister responsible for the Middle East and Asia, and we had, I think, ten country offices in the Middle East and Asia. I suggested I wanted to speak to the Heads of all of those country offices, speak to the Head of DFID in Katmandu, speak to the Head of DFID in Naypyidaw, etc., and – actually it was Yangon then.
And her response was to say, “Why on earth would you want to do that, Minister?” And I sort of looked at her, and she said, “Is it so that you can make – do press releases or make speeches in the House of Commons?” And she said this quite aggressively, and I said, “No, I – it’s because these people work for me, you know, I want to talk to my team and I want to talk to the people who are actually in the field.”
That was clearly not the way in which the Civil Servants viewed the situation. She, as the Director General, felt that she was managing those people, she did not feel that I, as the Minister, was in any way managing those people. And I discovered – I mean, just to – maybe, sort of, three quick examples. Afghanistan, I had spent the better part of ten years working on Afghanistan, living in Afghanistan, writing a couple of books about Afghanistan, teaching Afghanistan. I’d advised President Obama’s transition team in Afghanistan, and worked closely with Richard Holbrooke in Afghanistan, I spoke an Afghan language. And end of the first week, a little team from DFID came in to get my consent to sign off on £76 million for training the Afghan National Police. This was something I had thought a great deal about, I’d written papers on it. And I had concluded, this was 2016, that the Afghan Police was an irredeemably corrupt and hopeless organisation, on which the United States Government had already spent cumulatively on the Police and the Military, an unimaginable $12 billion and achieved almost nothing. The attrition rate in the Afghan Police was close to 30% a year.
So I said, “There is no way that I, as the Development Minister, am signing off on this. I don’t really mind what you do, I don’t want to micromanage you, but kindly, find some good educational health project that you can pursue in Afghanistan, do not put the money into the Police.” In the room of the people briefing me, not a single one of them – actually, sorry, one of them had served in Afghanistan, in a very junior position, for a year, none of the rest of them had ever visited Afghanistan. But it was quite clear to me that the relationship was not intended to be my telling them what to do. The idea was, I was supposed to take their advice, read their submission, sign off on the submission.
I pursued this all the way to Kabul, and with the Ambassador, and tried to explain to him why I had spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I did not think this money should happen. I picked up that there was some problem with the Ambassador and that something was going to go wrong, so I got in touch directly with the Foreign Secretary, Development Secretary and the Home Secretary, anticipating the Ambassador would try to go round my head, and had his attempt to reinstate this programme blocked. But three months later he got it through the National Security Council, got this money signed off.
Now, I still have no idea, really, what the story was. I presume the Ambassador had promised the money to the Afghan President, or promised it in some UN dealing, or there’d been some other thing. In other words, the submission to the Minister was a complete waste of time. The decision had already been made, I was intended to sign off on this, and when I didn’t want to sign off on this, the whole system played its way round it.
I’ll give you one final example to illustrate. This is designed to make Senior Civil Servants in the room steam from the ears. But anyway, I’m going to…
Bronwen Maddox
I wondered what it was you were saying to Civil Servants about this, and what you would like them to do.
Rory Stewart
So, again, about two months in, I noticed that I was being asked to sign off on over £100 million a year into Yemen. And, at that stage, we had nobody on the ground in Yemen, no Diplomats, no Development Workers, nor had we had anyone on the ground in Yemen, for at least two and a half years. So I said, “How do we know what’s happening to the money that we’re spending?” And the answer was, “We do remote monitoring.” And I said, “What does that mean?” And the answer was, “Minister, we can speak to Yemenis by Skype.” So I said, “Well, could I please see an example of you speaking to a Yemeni?” And there was a very, very odd reaction around the table, and I said, “Look, I don’t want to be a bully, take three weeks, take four weeks, but just bring me a short Skype conversation with a Yemeni. It can be two minutes long, I don’t mind, I just want to see roughly what’s happening when you’re doing this.”
Four weeks to the day, much more senior people, Deputy Directors and Directors, turned up at my office and said, “Minister, can we please ask, why are you so focused on this question of seeing a Skype conversation with a Yemeni?” And I said, “Look, I can produce seven pretentious reasons why I think it’s quite a good idea if you’re spending £100 million a year in a country to have some idea what’s going on, but more basically, I asked you to do it. Just do it. I don’t care, fake it for me, produce something.” Right? And sure enough, another two months passed, I went to the Permanent Secretary and said, “Look, I’m really beginning to become very troubled here, this is quite a simple request, and I’m not getting anything.” And ultimately, I was reshuffled on, to another Ministerial position, before anything was ever produced.
Now, I admit I’m talking in anecdotes, or parables, but I’m trying to illustrate some of the nature of Ministerial – I mean, ultimately, later, I became a more effective Minister. But what I worked out is, to actually get anything done as a Minister, you couldn’t have a reasonable conversation, unfortunately. Now, there are good reasons why Civil Servants behave like this. One of the good reasons is the Ministers don’t know anything about what they’re talking about. Another good reason is that Ministers are reshuffled unbelievably quickly. Grant Shapps has had five Cabinet positions in just over a year, so you can completely understand why the Civil Servants are extremely reluctant to take an instruction from a Minister.
However, it is quite problematic, and the only way I found to get anything done, actually, was to do what I didn’t want to do initially, which was to fall back on the three word slogans, reaching out to the public and take power essentially by addressing the public directly. So, as Prisons Minister, having struggled for four/five months to deal with the situation where violence in prisons had tripled over five years, where we’d gone from 10,000 assaults a year to 30,000 assaults in that period, I had to appear on the BBC and said I would re – “I will resign in 12 months unless violence is reduced in prisons.”
And then for the first time things came alive, an Ops Room emerged, I was able to go on the landings, I had a special team allocated, we could look at the data of the ten prisons, I was able to set up a standards coaching team, we were able to survey every week the progress on violence. And within nine months, we had got violence significantly down. But this was only achieved effectively by my reaching out.
Again, in DFID, I wanted to double the amount that we were spending on environment and climate change of our development budget. The only way I got it done was actually by going out on ITV Peston and saying, “I’m doing this,” and then responding to a parliamentary committee saying, “I’m doing this,” and then forcing into a strategic plan, “I’m doing this.” There was no sense that I could achieve anything through discussion, consultation or persuasion. It creates a very unfortunate situation, where essentially you simply have to assert.
Bronwen Maddox
That is one of the most devastating accounts I’ve heard, and I had a job specialising in this for six years, in why British Government doesn’t work well, and why it’s got so glued up at the moment with people working, bright people, dedicated people, working against each other, as you’ve described. Hard to get things done, hard to stop things being done, as you’ve described it. Do you think there’s an element of, it was ever thus, or is there something that has made it worse now?
Rory Stewart
Oh, I think it’s got much worse. I think there was some element of trust and respect between the Civil Servants and Ministers. I think, you know, whatever people thought of Harold Wilson’s Government in the late 60s, early 70s, they were very, very bright people. It was a much cosier world. I mean, this world was built – the 19th Century, late 19th Century, early 20th Century, the Senior Civil Servants and the Politicians had been to school together, were related to each other, went to dinner parties together, there was much more mutual recognition and respect.
The generation, right through to the early 1980s of Politicians, had served mostly in the Military, probably had a more practiced management style. And I think we operated in much more of the culture of a, sort of, Oxbridge seminar, in which a kind of dialectic between a bright Minister and a Civil Servant was possible. So, I think, probably Douglas Hurd was able to run his department, Michael Heseltine could run his department, Tom King could run his department, in the 1980s and early 90s, perfectly adequately. I think the problems have really emerged since the late 1990s, yeah.
Bronwen Maddox
We’re not in that patrician world, and there are good reasons, and reasons to be welcomed, in some ways, why we’re not. But I’m really interested in the way you talk about reaching over the heads of all of this machinery, to the public, and whether you felt that that, in a way, was the future of politics? Because this is one of the subjects we’re talking about here today, of the different forces that have pushed politics, not just in this country, but towards a kind of populism.
Rory Stewart
Well, I think that’s a really – I mean, I think that’s a really difficult, challenging question. I mean, I am, you know, ferociously anti-populist, and I would have liked to come today and largely spend most of my time attacking Suella Braverman, who I think is a terrible, terrible person. And I think an example [applause] – sorry, and I’m not trying to get cheap applause. But I do think there is something deeply, deeply worrying and troubling in Europe and the United States, indeed, around the world, which has happened since about 2014, which is the development of this populist politics.
And this populist politics is terrifying. It’s simplifying, it’s polarising, it creates this narrative of the people against the elite. In Germany, AFD is hovering between 20 and 25% in the polls, Marine Le Pen looks as though she is likely to be the next President of France, and that is a much bigger problem than Giorgia Meloni being the Prime Minister of Italy. We can see significant problems in Sweden, in the Nordic countries. And you can feel it in the Conservative Party Conference at the moment. It’s absolutely astonishing. These people, Priti Patel, Liz Truss, were brought in on the A-list by David Cameron. They were supposed to be the signs of the new liberal progressive, compassionate Conservative Party.
Suella Braverman was, you know, an Erasmus scholar, who spent two years studying in Europe, passed the New York Bar exam, set up with Cherie Blair, of all people, the Africa Justice Foundation in 2010, made, you know, grand speeches, you can see articles in The Times about, you know, the rule of law and the importance of parliamentary democracy in Africa. So, the fact that those people have gone from 2010 to where they are now, it’s not actually about them, it’s about the fact that these are political entrepreneurs, sensing a whole new range of possibilities.
Bronwen Maddox
And what are they sensing? This is what I would love your views – are they sensing a change in what the public wants? A new kind of public anxiety, you know, talks about public anger about the financial crisis, about the elites, is a response to an impossible job of politics, of a country that, in this case, doesn’t have enough money to complete a train line, and so on, and so they have to offer something. Where do you see it? I mean…
Rory Stewart
Well…
Bronwen Maddox
…‘cause I st – I find it ver – when people say, “Oh, it’s all social media,” or something, that feels to me not doing enough justice to the appetite of people to hear particular things, or the appetite of Politicians to say them.
Rory Stewart
Well, I think the honest answer is, we haven’t fully got a grip on what this thing is. Because once it takes on a life of its own, it has a sort of imponderable, unpredictability and momentum to it. I mean, I can provide a narrative, I – my view is that the period from 1989 to 2004, the sort of Fukuyama end of history notion, was based upon five assumptions, which were then broken from 2004 to 2014, and ushered in the age of populism. And those assumptions were, firstly, an idea that markets deregulation, globalisation, were going to create prosperity for all.
The second assumption was that that prosperity was going to lead to a spread of global democracy. The third assumption was that this corresponded with the emergence of a liberal global order. The firth assumption – fourth assumption was that our societies were inherently legitimate, Western societies were inherently legitimate, they had a form of moral strength. And the fifth assumption was that politics was a question of technocracy in the centre ground.
And this was destroyed, right, it was destroyed. The 2008 financial crisis destroyed our economic assumptions, the link between prosperity and democracy was destroyed effectively by the rise of China, you know, it became bigger than the British economy, and – as recently as 2005. You know, when Jeremy Greenstock and I were in Iraq, which doesn’t feel very long ago, the British economy was bigger than the Chinese economy. Today, the Chinese economy is nearly six times larger than the British economy. And, of course, it’s made that transition without becoming a liberal democracy.
The idea of the liberal global order were – was destroyed by the humiliations and messes of Iraq and Afghanistan above all. Social media, I think, tore us apart in terms of the idea of consensus, created that polarisation. And I think the legitimacy of our own system has been challenged, by a whole series of civil, social movements in the United States and Europe, which has begun to make us feel profoundly ashamed of our own history and our own identity in ways that were not true, in the 1990s.
Cumulatively, those things, you can then see play through. The number of democracies in the world ceases – having doubled. 1988 to 2004 the number of democracies in the world double, then flatlines, and it then begins to drop. From 2014 onwards, the world becomes, pretty much, more violent every year, there are more refugees every year, more civilians killed in conflict every year, we’ve had seven states in Africa go through military coups in just over a year now.
And this is the world that produces Modi in 2014, the Law and Justice Party in Poland in 2015, the Brexit Referendum in 2016, Bolsonaro in 2018, Trump in 2016. So, now, there are other things too though which are less comfortable, and clearly, one of those things is immigration, right? A lot of Suella Braverman’s speech is not just about work wars and following up on 15 minute cities and climate scepticism, and all this kind of stuff, although that’s part of the package. The main driver of that speech is, of course, immigration. The main driver of the far-right in Sweden is immigration, and the idea that the crime, amazing spike in crime in Sweden that we’ve seen over the last three years, is associated with immigrants. That is true almost everywhere, in fact, except, to some extent, Spain and Portugal, where the immigrant issue doesn’t seem to be felt in quite the same way.
So, that’s part of it. But I think another part of, which Bronwen’s pointing to, which is maybe a more fertile, interesting idea, is there’s also a sense of sclerosis, stagnation, lack of progress. I mean, I felt all the time as a Politician, one of the biggest problems was the surreal gap between the expectations of the public, fuelled by Politicians, who keep claiming they can do things that they can’t do, I mean, right the way down to what I began with, the constituency MP claiming they’re going to be able to fix their potholes, when they quite literally have no power over your potholes at all, and are therefore going to disappoint you, right, about your potholes. Right the way up to the Health Secretary who claims that he’s going to be able to sort out the NHS, when quite clearly, the system is far too big, far too complicated, far too creaking for any one individual to begin to pretend that they’re going to have any impact on, in a 24-month period.
Right, I mean, I could do things, but the things that I did in government are not of that scale. I introduced the plastic bag tax, you know, I reduced violence in prisons, I doubled the spend we spent on climate and environment. What I did not do is any of the things that really needed to be done, right? I did not succeed in rebalancing this country, in terms of addressing the inequality within London, or the inequality between London and the South East and the North of this country. We did not manage to change the way we make industrial investments, to take into account social justice or the environment. We did not succeed in increasing productivity in Britain, which is lamentable.
We did not manage to transform the education system, and we have handed over an education and health system into which more and more money is going, right? You wouldn’t believe it, because the assumption is that the problem is that the Tories are the austerity Tories. Since Boris Johnson, the Conservative Party – actually, since Theresa May, has been spending money like water, throwing money at these situations. You know, Theresa May’s first big thing was to deliver this notorious 300 million on the side of the bus, you know, she delivered the 300 million a day on the side of the bus to the NHS, made no difference at all.
Boris Johnson came in, put another five billion into the NHS, made no difference at all. Rishi Sunak has just announced an NHS transformation plan two months ago, which, within ten years, is going to cost – that alone, that plan alone, will cost 3% of the Gross Domestic Product of this country. That is 50% more than the entire defence budget of the United Kingdom. It’s unlikely to make any difference. Health inflation, because of demography and the cost of drugs, exceeds normal inflation by about 5% a year.
The country is much poorer than we want to acknowledge, and nobody is structurally addressing these problems. And the public sense it, and this is the problem, the populists are entirely right in their identification that there are deep, deep problems. That the economic model we promised in the 1990s didn’t deliver, the democratic model we promised didn’t deliver, the liberal global order we promised didn’t deliver, they are correct about all those things. What they’re wrong about is the solutions that they offer.
Bronwen Maddox
Listening to you, I’m wondering whether you think democracies can still solve their own problems? Something we talk quite a bit about at Chatham House. And what you’ve described is extraordinarily hard for any government, any Politician, to get out of. Not enough money for the country to do all the things that voters tell Politicians they want their leaders to do, impossible bargains and desires on every side, impossible forces. I was wondering, listening to you, what you would have any Home Secretary stand up and say, given the pressures for immigration? And so, I wondered, I mean, listening to you, do you think this is a Conservative problem, a British problem, or just a problem of democracy in a world that is changing very fast?
Rory Stewart
I think it is a problem of democracy in a world that’s changing very fast, but I – but it’s not a – it’s not hopeless. These…
Bronwen Maddox
Perhaps just develop that a bit.
Rory Stewart
Okay. So, these far right parties, although a threat, are, at most, 20, 25% of the vote, in most of these countries. Exceptions may be in places like Hungary and Poland, where the populists have really taken grip. But broadly speaking, in most of the core countries of Western Europe, these remain about a quarter of the vote. It is a problem of the mobilisation of the progressive centre. And that is eminently possible, and it’s been done, it’s not just a theory, Biden beat Trump, he outperformed in the midterms. The Teal Independents performed very well in Australia. Slovenia, centrists won. Macron defeated Le Pen. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss went. Like ‘em or loath them, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are less ghastly than the previous iterations that their parties produced, they’re less populist than Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson.
So this is not an inevitable path. However, to do it well, we need a progressive centre that is able to communicate, right, one of the problems with a progressive centre is they’re unbelievably boring, right? It talks in technocratic, actuarial language. It lectures people, it belittles people, it fails to empathise, it fails to have emotion, it fails to have a sense of humour, right? For some reason, centrists are not funny.
I mean, in a ghastly sense, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are, at least for their support base, funny. People go to Trump rallies, they have a really, really good time. It’s a horrible thing to say, but if you turn up at a Trump rally, there are all these guys in MAGA hats having the time of their lives. It’s really jolly for them. That is not true if you go and hear Keir Starmer speak at the Labour Party Conference.
We also need a sense of moral purpose. I mean, fundamentally, these are moral arguments. We need to be able to speak fluently and convincingly about things which are difficult to talk about. Truth and equality and freedom are entirely discredited as concepts, and yet they are the foundational concepts of human dignity. They are entirely discredited because, of course, truth in politics is elusive, it’s complicated, we compromise all the time, there are half-truths everywhere, and yet, it is absolutely essential. There is no democracy without truth, because the voter has nothing to vote on, right? Unless you have some idea about what that Politician is going to do, some belief that what they say and what they do is connected, you quite literally have no basis on which to put an X in a box.
Again, equality feels like a complete joke, right? We live in profoundly unequal societies. And yet, the idea that humans are fundamentally equal, in dignity and deserving of equal respect, is the foundation of our democratic system, that’s why we all have exactly the same vote. And ideas of freedom are absolutely vital, and again, they seem ludicrous. And it’s very easy for the populists to portray it as some sort of elite conspiracy, and you saw Priti Patel making a speech to GB News saying, you know, “The freedom hating BBC,” and this kind of stuff, right? It’s disgusting, right? We need to be able to make arguments for these things which are mature, which are grownup, which acknowledge that, yes, I’m a Politician, and yes, I’m privileged, and yes, I’m a bullshitter, and yes, there’s a lot of hypocrisy around. And yet, there is still something better than Boris Johnson, morally better, right? We live in such a cynical culture.
Look, the fundamental things I have discovered, but this book is a – is obviously a massive project in vanity, I’ve written 450 pages, burnishing my own career. So, quite understandably, people will read the book and say, “This man, you know, is a narcissist and he’s just bitter about the fact that he was defeated by Boris Johnson, and he’s obviously no good as a Politician, ‘cause Boris won and he lost,” right? Fine. But I would like somebody to take seriously the possibility that Boris was a terrible human being and a terrible Prime Minister, right [applause]? And unless we take that seriously, we are never, ever going to be able to rebuild our democratic politics. We cannot allow the cynicism to emerge, where all that matters is whether or not Suella Braverman becomes the next leader of the Conservative Party, we have to separate from that.
And then, finally, and, you know, this is where the rant gets even more boring, we need ideas, right? We need – the progressive centre needs to actually have an economic policy that addresses the problems of this country. It needs a democratic policy that actually resonates with voters. It needs a foreign policy that is able to engage with the problems of this world, that is an alternative to populist isolation in foreign policy, to constitutional sabotage in democracy, which is what the populists do, and an economic policy, completely corrupt, irresponsible spending. But the liberal centre has failed to provide that.
Keir Starmer, who is, I think, you know, the standard bearer now of the progressive centre in British politics, is going to be the next Prime Minister. How many people in this room can tell me what Keir Starmer’s economic policy is? It’s not good enough, it’s just not good enough.
Bronwen Maddox
There were no hands shot up. I say – I’m going to come in a second to questions, so please get them ready, and I’m sure there are going to be lots. But let me just say, your book is indeed very funny, in many places you describe Jeremy Corbyn as having, “beautiful big ears,” I’ll never look at him the same again. And I just wanted to read, for people’s enjoyment, your description of Boris Johnson at one point. You don’t name many people in this book, but if you’re in the trade you could uncover who was who, but it’s light on names, but one or two surface, and indeed Boris Johnson is one of those.
And you say, “His hair seemed to become less tidy,” this is walking into the Foreign Office, where he is Foreign Secretary, “and his cheeks reddy – redder since I had first met him in Iraq, as though he were turning into an 18th Century Squire. This air of roguish solidity, however, was undermined by the furtive cunning of his eyes, which made it seem as though an alien creature has possessed his reassuring body and was squinting out of the sockets.” You say you – in terms of offcuts for the book, you got this – you cut three quarters and ended up with this. Have you got any plans for using the rest?
Rory Stewart
No. No, no, I think the one thing I learnt as a writer is that my offcuts are rubbish. And my mother, who’s a great optimist, keeps saying to me when – ‘cause she’s horrified at the fact that I’ve written, you know, 300,000 words and cut it down to 100,000. “Surely, darling, you can recycle this and use it.” But the truth is, there’s a reason it’s on the cutting room floor, so…
Bronwen Maddox
There are not many people who are their own Editor, and a good one. On that, let’s go to questions. Alright, there’s one – alright, right, there’s two there. I’m going to take them in pairs.
Olivia O’Sullivan
Hi, my name’s Olivia O’Sullivan, and I direct our UK in the World programme, here at Chatham House. You describe not feeling very powerful, as a backbench MP, and I’m afraid I am one of the large minority who’s a former Civil Servant, and many Civil Servants, I think, don’t particularly feel very powerful. And you also describe your time as a Minister, not particularly feeling that you have much power. Who do you think is powerful in this country, or feels that they have power, or is this in fact not a very powerful country?
Rory Stewart
So, I think the – broadly speaking, the secret of modern Britain is that there isn’t any power anywhere, right? Everybody thinks somebody else has the power. You know, maybe the Journalists think the Politicians have the power, I don’t know, the Politicians think business has power, business thinks the Journalists have the power, and so on and so forth, right? I haven’t come across anybody in the system who really feels they have much power. It’s a – getting things done, I mean, things can get done, but they get done in a much, much slower, more ambiguous, more roundabout and peculiar fashion than you could ever imagine.
You know, I was walking down Regent Street and three and a half years ago I sent out a little Tweet complaining about the fact there were no trees on Regent Street, when I was running to be Mayor of London. And now, suddenly, some trees have appeared. I mean, admittedly, they’re temporary trees in a box, which are going to die in about six months, but a tree has appeared. So, I thought, oh, maybe, you know, maybe I’ve achieved it.
But, of course, it’s a lovely parable, because I’ve absolutely no idea where – to what extent my Tweet had any influence on Sadiq Khan’s decision, and how the Planning Council and Westminster Council and the funders and all these people eventually ended up with some trees in Regent Street, or didn’t. I do think that this is problematic though.
And I think the saga of HS2 is a really interesting, sort of, parable for the country. I mean, you know, this is a project which was first discussed back in the late 90s. I mean, Alastair Campbell remembers discussing it in 1998, and that’s 25 years ago. And until this morning, on the ongoing plan, parts of it were not going to open until the 2040s. And it went from 20 billion, under Gordon Brown, and then it jumped to 35 billion, under Justine Greening, why?
Well, because, actually, the backbench MPs protested about it going through the Chilterns and they wanted tunnels built, and they wanted bypass and this, that and the other, and the costs built up, and nobody was able to say, “Listen, this pro – project only makes sense if we build it for 20 million, and if we start putting all these things in it,” and gradually it got over 104 billion for the existing programme. The cost/benefit analysis announced at 20 billion was that the benefits were 100 billion. By the time it crossed 104 billion, the cost/benefits were beginning to look a bit peculiar, right?
I do think that understanding these things deeply, really understanding how these things go wrong, and, in a way, this is what the book is about, I’m trying to take you slowly through individual examples. To understand the texture of why things don’t get done, is very important, because I think it explains, you know, part of the reason why populism takes off, yeah, why it becomes more attractive to rant and scream and promise than it is to act, yeah.
Bronwen Maddox
Seriously, just developing – I was going to ask you about Andy Burnham, but whether the Mayors that have been created, obviously you ran for Mayor of London, whether that is a bit of answer to the populism you’ve been discussing?
Rory Stewart
Yeah, so my essential answer…
Bronwen Maddox
And that’s a better job in politics.
Rory Stewart
Yeah, my essential answer, to all these problems, if I was looking for a common theme and launching a new political movement, is decentralisation. Decentralisation economically, in other words, getting away from the idea that a few clever Central Planners in London are going to be able to work out the industrial strategy of the country, give that to Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, let him determine what the industrial strategy for Manchester should be. Politically decentralise.
Now, to decentralise, you need much better councils than we currently have, they need to be able to raise their own revenue. There’s going to be a very painful transition, ‘cause at the moment they’re pretty hopeless, right, and they’re essentially like teenagers maxing out the credit cards with Westminster acting as the parent, bailing them out when Birmingham City Council goes bankrupt.
But having proper functioning local democracy, getting power closer to people, harnessing the fact that local people know more, care more, can do more than distant officials, is the key to almost all the problems that we face, I think, domestically, economically, and politically. But I can actually make a similar argument for international development.
Bronwen Maddox
Okay, there’s another one.
Shreya Kirpalani
Hi, my name is Shreya Kirpalani. I work for public opinion research group, More in Common. So, my question is slightly around this idea of truth, which I found really interesting, and this idea that we have to make sure that truth is at the forefront of our politics, and that’s something which is going to be really important in the upcoming year. I guess, a couple of forces outside of the individuals who are speaking and putting information out there, I guess, I see as traditional media, and slightly more futuristically bots, deep fakes, all of that. Both of which have proven to be quite polarising. Who do you think is accountable for having truth in the next year and in the runup to the election?
Rory Stewart
Well, it’s very, very depressing. And I think what one of the sad realities is that, you know, we feel an immense obligation to be optimistic, but, of course, I’m not a Member of Parliament anymore. And you can see this with President Obama, I mean, that’s one of the saddest things, is that I feel that he seems to have almost given up. It’s very difficult to work out what his political project is without his re-engaging, and this is partly about the media landscape. You know, that very speech that, you know, chilled me, that Suella Braverman was making, you know, her bet that she can win an election by turning the Conservative Party into the kind of populist party we have in Europe, of course, was the entire front page of the Daily Mail. You know, congratulating her on whatever the phrase was, you know, “a wig lifting, barn storming, the greatest speech we’ve ever heard in conference,” right?
And AI is going to make it much, much worse. You know, whatever problems of polarisation, whatever amplification of human – the worst bits of human nature have been produced by Twitter and Facebook, it is as nothing compared to the way that bad actors will be amplified by AI, before the next election. Now, this will be even more true in the United States, where $1 billion is going to be spent on this and where Trump is really going to go for this. But that US election will be determined by AI, but it will be true in all the elections around Europe, very, very quickly, within a few months. People who don’t think this are not spending enough time with the advanced models of AI.
So, what’s the answer? Well, we need algorithms in social media, Twitter and Facebook, that actually do not reward extremism, you know, will reward people attempting to make more interesting arguments than centre ground. We need newspapers who do not behave in this kind of reckless fashion, and we need AI to be very, very thoughtfully regulated almost immediately.
Bronwen Maddox
We’re just stirring at this point, one question from Michael Dunne, that’s come in online, and thank you for that, saying, “Is populism a pejorative term for policies which are popular?” Ten out of ten for alliteration.
Rory Stewart
Well, I used to think so. I remember going to – I was a member of a – an organisation called the Trilateral Commission. The Trilateral Commission was the sort of quintessential conspiracy theory idea of a global government trying to micromanage the world. And I remember sitting in an audience in Rome, and there was a speech about Brexit. And sitting up on the stage were the sort of High Priests of the European project, Jean-Claude Trichet, Herman Van Rompuy, Mario Monti, all these, sort of, exquisitely dressed eurocrats, who were talking about, you know – this was before the Brexit vote, you know, populism in the United Kingdom.
And I thought, I was really offended, as a sort of constituency MP, I thought, what you are describing as populist was basically what my Cumbrian voters want, right? It’s democracy, it’s not populism, and you are extremely unsympathetic towards ordinary people, and you’re not paying enough attention or showing enough respect for the way that ordinary people view the world, right?
But, I think the last seven years have helped me to see what I think perhaps was clearer to Europeans who went through the experience in the 1930s and 40s in a way that we did not. That it is not a very – simply a very simple naïve idea that the great wisdom of the public can always be respected and deferred to, and that the majority of people will always find their way to a commonsensical wisdom.
Of course, public opinion can be manipulated, can be whipped up in an inden – intensely cynical fashion. And the heart of populism is not listening to voters, it’s not engaging in a respectful dialogue with voters, it’s not attempting to persuade through reason. The heart of populism is the invention of a fantasy that there is a people and an elite. And that the real people, who are often not the majority of the population, but simply the people who agree with the populist Politician, represent the real core of the country, and that in their name everything else constitutional can be swept aside. It is essentially the idea of power being given to a group that calls itself the people at the expense of minority rights, and it’s therefore profoundly undemocratic.
Bronwen Maddox
Thank you. I’ll just come over here. The microphone is coming.
Jeremy Greenstock
Jeremy Greenstock, a former Civil Servant, and you’d expect a little bit of a pushback, Rory, ‘cause I don’t actually recognise, in my own experience, the kind of pushback you got from your DFID Civil Service colleagues. And I think things have changed, and I haven’t been in the Civil Service for 20 years, so I think things have changed, in the growing gap between the professions of the Politician and the profession of the Civil Service.
They’ve grown apart because power has become more difficult and more competitive to reach, so it has to be more focused on the activity of the party head office and all the rest of it. And the methods of each group have grown apart, and Special Advisors, who you haven’t mentioned, in this talk at least, have come in between them to a great extent. But that’s probably the subject for another seminar with Chatham House or somewhere else, as…
Bronwen Maddox
Is it turning into a…
Jeremy Greenstock
…to how the institute of government might…
Bronwen Maddox
Will you forgive me, Jeremy, is it…
Jeremy Greenstock
Yeah.
Bronwen Maddox
…have you got a question?
Jeremy Greenstock
I want to ask how you think, because you make us think, we can improve the quality of people coming into politics in this country, and the quality of decision-making in that profession? You tell the anecdote in your book of David Cameron making it quite clear when you went to him to seek a constituency, that he didn’t think that you should be a Politician or a Minister. And yet, you think, and you’re passionate about things, you think about these things, you’re intelligent about things, I would like to have seen you stay longer as a Politician. How do we improve the quality of Politicians?
Rory Stewart
Thank you. I think it’s – I think the first thing to understand is that the – we get the MPs that we currently have because of our party system. It’s not really a process of popular selection, it’s party selection, and the parties are increasingly tiny. When my mother was a member of the Conservative Party, there were 2.4 million members of the Conservative Party, when she was a young woman, today there are about 150,000. And in each safe seat in the country, essentially 30 or 40 activists control what happens, largely control the selection of the MP, and they will be much older, much more right-wing, than the general population. Labour is even more bizarre, I mean, the way in which Labour selects its MPs, and the way in which Keir Starmer does and does not exert his power, is even more bizarre.
So there are solutions to this. I mean, we could go to an open primary system. The only reason I got in was that actually Cameron briefly experimented with a system where everybody, regardless of party, could vote for their candidate. I think we certainly should have a situation, I think, where our Ministers are expected to serve a minimum of two years in office, unless there’s been some astonishing scandal. And there should be proper training and handovers, they should have at least three weeks of training before they take over their jobs. It’s an extraordinary, sort of, Victorian amateur conception, that I could literally – and this was true, I would turn up in a Ministerial job and I would be at the dispatch box within a day of turning over a new portfolio. Standing up and people saying to me, you know, “Will the Minister, you know, commit to the British Government to resolve the civil war in Barundi?”
And I was having to say, you know, “I call on all sides to respect the Arusha Accords and work with the former Prime Minister of Tanzania.” What I’m not saying is, “I’ve been in this job for six weeks and – or, six – sorry, six hours, and I couldn’t tell you which countries have a land border with Barundi.” I’m probably not even aware that we don’t even have an Embassy in Barundi, and I’m providing this story about the Arusha Accords because somebody stuck it in my folder, right?
So, I think we could do that. I think we could change our electoral system, which would get new parties coming in, and I think the sclerotic grip of these old parties needs to be removed. I would go further. I’d also like half the Cabinet actually to be people who knew what they were talking about, though that’s a different – that’s a more radical constitutional suggestion, yeah.
Bronwen Maddox
Thanks.
Petra
Thank you. My name is Petra. I come from Slovenian Embassy here in London. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and your insights with us today. So, we’ve talked about national populism and – several of them, and in the globalised world, of course, they’re interconnected. But my question is, how do you see how populism influences work of international organisations? Where, let’s say, we strive to find consensus on big, global issues, but with populism we know our beliefs and opinions are more and more extreme. And then maybe a short sub question to this…
Bronwen Maddox
But your question is…
Rory Stewart
I’ve got it.
Bronwen Maddox
You’ve got it, fine, yeah, okay.
Petra
On the minilateralism, whether do you think it’s a positive or a negative, where we have more and more smaller groups of countries co-operating to pursue a certain goal? But these countries or these coalitions are very flexible, and, of course, because they are limited, a lot of countries would feel excluded in finding solution of the goals. Thank you.
Rory Stewart
Thank you. I mean, I think it’s an incredibly dangerous situation that we are in. I mean, I think the liberal global order is in a very, very difficult state. I think that the connection between populism and the global order is that populism is essentially isolationism. And it’s a very, very attractive form of isolationism, which begins to influence not just the right, but begins to influence the left. Let’s take an example in the United States. Of course, it’s Donald Trump who begins to emphasise the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but it is, of course, Joe Biden who actually, in the end, removes the troops from Afghanistan.
It is in the United Kingdom, of course, Boris Johnson who – when I was the DFID Minister, our bilateral aid budget for Africa, so 2019, was $4.5 billion a year, bilateral, $4.5 billion a year additional multilateral into Sub-Saharan Africa. Last year, as far as we can tell from the figures, the British Government spent 500 million in Africa, right? That is a very, very significant reduction. But, of course, Keir Starmer is not committing to changing that. So, the problem is that the populist right begins these movements, and the progressive centre and the left simply continues them, because they sense that the public simply don’t want to spend money on international development.
We can see that Keir Starmer is very reluctant to come out publicly and challenge what Rishi Sunak has just done on the targets on climate change. It’s catastrophic, right? That 2030 target was unbelievably important for investors in this country, for electric vehicle manufacturers, for – as a signal to companies who’ve been on an ESG journey, for almost everything, right? It’s been dropped, and Keir Starmer’s not prepared to reinstate it.
So, why is this a problem? It’s a problem because this world is now a world in which the G7 in 1970s were 70% of the world economy. Today, in purchasing power parity terms, the economies of the G7 are the same size as the economies to the BRICS. And boy oh boy, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are not playing ball. This is no longer a world in which the US can assume that it has a coalition of allies, and we are facing now challenges in climate, in artificial intelligence, and above all, in global security, which require a level of multilateral co-operation that is crumbling around us.
Bronwen Maddox
Thank you for that. We’re going to have to draw to a close now, though everyone is very welcome to join us and Rory Stewart upstairs for a glass of wine. I was talking at the Conservative Party Conference yesterday to Robert Peston, who you mentioned as a useful political tool, as you’ve heard of him, and he said, “Oh,” in fact, it will be on our podcast at the end of the week, “Rory Stewart was a loss to Parliament, he did actually try and answer the questions, which most Politicians don’t.” I think we can agree that you have, thank you very much indeed [applause].
