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

00:00:00.000 Did you skip the SAS bit in this?

00:00:04.000 I did, yes.

00:00:05.000 How can you skip the SAS bit?

00:00:08.000 That's what the people want to hear about.

00:00:11.000 Back when I was 18, we've at long last got to the point where Brexit is now looking like it's working, as it broadly should.

00:00:20.000 Do you think that this Conservative Party values freedom?

00:00:23.000 No, no, not enough.

00:00:25.000 Well, I've already characterised, but the single most important things relate to freedom, right?

00:00:32.000 An assumption the state doesn't know best.

00:00:35.000 I don't want Whitehall managing my identity.

00:00:38.000 I own my identity.

00:00:39.000 If I'm going to have an identifier, I want it under my control.

00:00:44.000 You may remember early on, some of us said, this looks like a virus that's come from a laboratory.

00:00:52.000 And God, did you get pilloried for saying that online.

00:00:56.000 Banned, not just pilloried.

00:00:57.000 Banned.

00:00:58.000 You get banned off places like Twitter.

00:01:00.000 And indeed, a Nobel Prize winner.

00:01:01.000 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?

00:01:10.000 And I thought, you know, this is wrong.

00:01:12.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:24.000 I'm Francis Foster.

00:01:25.000 I'm Constantine Kishin.

00:01:26.000 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:01:31.000 Our brilliant guest today is one of the few MPs in this country left who actually cares about civil liberties.

00:01:36.000 David Davis, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:38.000 Thank you.

00:01:39.000 It's great to have you on the show.

00:01:40.000 We don't normally talk to politicians because it's hard to get a straight answer out of you guys.

00:01:44.000 But I get the sense that, A, you've kind of, you've been there.

00:01:48.000 You've done it.

00:01:49.000 You've spoken up quite a lot about the things that you care about.

00:01:52.000 And also, unlike many MPs, you actually had a life before politics and an interesting one.

00:01:57.000 So I thought it would be a great place to start, actually.

00:02:00.000 Tell us about your life and how you are where you are.

00:02:03.000 Okay.

00:02:04.000 A quick, sort of quick-fire summary.

00:02:07.000 Born son of a single mum, 1948, when it was unfashionable.

00:02:11.000 Controversial right off the bat.

00:02:16.000 Excellent.

00:02:17.000 Brought up by my grandparents.

00:02:19.000 I mean, because in those days, you know, you just didn't raise your own child.

00:02:23.000 So she went off to do work, to do a job.

00:02:26.000 It raised me in a prefab.

00:02:27.000 You know what that is?

00:02:28.000 No.

00:02:29.000 Asbestos box.

00:02:30.000 In the Second World War, when a stick of bombs went down the street, they would bulldoze the

00:02:36.000 street and put little asbestos boxes, ready-made houses made in a factory, prefab.

00:02:41.000 And they're quite famous.

00:02:44.000 And so I grew up in one of those.

00:02:46.000 Everybody thinks it's terrible, you know, awful.

00:02:48.000 Sounds like a Monty Python sketch, straight off.

00:02:51.000 Actually, it was fantastic because they were well-designed, had nice central heating and

00:02:56.000 so on, albeit rather cramped.

00:02:59.000 And so I lived just inside the walls of York.

00:03:03.000 Other kids had bouncy castles.

00:03:04.000 I had a real one.

00:03:06.000 So that was early life.

00:03:08.000 But then my mother got married.

00:03:10.000 My stepfather, working-class shop steward, actually, and we lived in a slum in South London,

00:03:16.000 just south of the river from here.

00:03:18.000 Literally, two up, two down, no electricity, gas, no indoor loo, no bathroom, tin, tin,

00:03:27.000 tin tub and all that sort of stuff.

00:03:30.000 Nothing unusual.

00:03:31.000 I mean, that, frankly, it sounds terrible, but actually it was not that unusual, post-war.

00:03:36.000 Then, past my 11 plus, most important, probably most important event of my life.

00:03:42.000 When I passed my 11 plus, I went to grammar school.

00:03:47.000 Did well at grammar school.

00:03:49.000 Enjoyed sports.

00:03:50.000 Broke my nose lots of times.

00:03:52.000 Playing rugby.

00:03:54.000 Ended up, I'll foreshorten this, I left home, you know, rather violent, disagree with my stepfather.

00:04:02.000 Ended up going to Warwick University.

00:04:04.000 I studied science, molecular sciences, and computer science.

00:04:08.000 Pretty much the first computer science degree in the country.

00:04:12.000 While I was there, Margaret Thatcher was the education secretary.

00:04:17.000 And I became the national leader of the Conservative students,

00:04:22.000 sort of thing called the Federation of Conservative students,

00:04:24.000 about 15,000 strong organization.

00:04:26.000 I get to see her about 10 times a year.

00:04:29.000 I get to see Ted Heath, the prime minister, about four times a year.

00:04:32.000 In a funny way, a rather privileged access.

00:04:36.000 Then we lost power in the 70s.

00:04:40.000 I then went to business school, London Business School.

00:04:45.000 Took an MBA.

00:04:46.000 Became a businessman.

00:04:49.000 Spent my time working for Tate & Lyle as their troubleshooter, principally.

00:04:54.000 Putting right companies losing money gone wrong.

00:04:59.000 And did that until the early 80s.

00:05:05.000 Then became an MP in 1987.

00:05:08.000 Did you skip the SAS bit in this?

00:05:12.000 I did, yes.

00:05:13.000 How can you skip the SAS bit?

00:05:15.000 I was like, where's the SAS bit?

00:05:16.000 That's what the people want to hear about.

00:05:18.000 Back when I was 18.

00:05:22.000 Now, people don't understand this.

00:05:25.000 Because they all think it's terribly glamorous.

00:05:27.000 And it's not.

00:05:28.000 I needed to earn money.

00:05:30.000 Basically, I'd left home.

00:05:32.000 I was supporting myself.

00:05:34.000 I had to get a job.

00:05:35.000 I had to earn money to go to university.

00:05:37.000 And those days were grants.

00:05:38.000 And my parents weren't going to support my grant.

00:05:40.000 They weren't even going to fill in the form.

00:05:41.000 So I couldn't get a grant.

00:05:42.000 I had to pay away from the university.

00:05:44.000 So one way of doing it was to join the reserve SAS, which was arduous.

00:05:54.000 The pass rate in this election was 8%.

00:05:57.000 You know, mostly people...

00:05:58.000 This is like the Navy SEALs for an American audience, right?

00:06:01.000 Harder.

00:06:02.000 Harder.

00:06:03.000 Yeah, harder.

00:06:04.000 There's a lot of angry Americans now.

00:06:06.000 That's fine.

00:06:07.000 That's fine.

00:06:08.000 Well, if you just take it in objective pass rate terms, the pass rate for the SAS is a

00:06:15.000 little lower.

00:06:16.000 And, of course, the SAS in the first instance was probably the first of the modern special

00:06:24.000 forces.

00:06:25.000 It started in the Second World War.

00:06:26.000 David Sterling and all that.

00:06:28.000 I mean, I knew Sterling.

00:06:29.000 He was still alive when I was around.

00:06:32.000 And we had a very...

00:06:37.000 The reserve SAS, not the regulars, had a rather dramatic...

00:06:42.000 One level mundane, one level dramatic job.

00:06:45.000 Our primary role in warfare, in the event of a conflict in Europe, was to jump in behind

00:06:52.000 enemy lines, up to 300 kilometers behind enemy lines, find the targets, maybe create the

00:06:59.000 targets by causing the odd traffic jam.

00:07:03.000 Tank traffic jam.

00:07:05.000 Well, as you've seen in North of Kyiv in the last year, in truth, our job was to sort

00:07:12.000 of create that, find it, target it, by Morse code, send in the locations, and call in missile

00:07:20.000 strikes, probably nuclear missile strikes in a conventional war in Europe.

00:07:25.000 So survival expectation wasn't very high.

00:07:28.000 In fact, when I was doing parachute school at Abingdon, just north of Oxford, RAF Abingdon

00:07:37.000 used to be there.

00:07:39.000 We'd had this incredibly dramatic screw-up on the jump, whereby my parachute tangled with

00:07:48.000 somebody else.

00:07:49.000 So somebody else flew his chute over mine, dropped, because of the low pressure zone

00:07:53.000 above chute...

00:07:54.000 That is super dangerous.

00:07:55.000 ...dropped into it.

00:07:56.000 His feet came through.

00:07:57.000 I looked up, saw his feet, about 150 foot above the ground, thought, this chute can't

00:08:01.000 carry two.

00:08:02.000 So I pulled down one side of my chute to get him off.

00:08:05.000 Instead of sliding off, he slid through the chute.

00:08:07.000 So the two chutes just collapsed into one another.

00:08:10.000 And he was hanging about as far away as you are, screaming, mother, mother, not again.

00:08:15.000 I won't tell you what I said back.

00:08:18.000 And we just fell towards the ground.

00:08:21.000 And I was lucky.

00:08:23.000 I walked away from it.

00:08:25.000 He shortened his leg, broke all his leg bones, and broke his back.

00:08:30.000 It was in a body cast for six months.

00:08:33.000 Anyway, the point about the story is not that.

00:08:35.000 As we came back into the barracks on the little black and white tube television that

00:08:42.000 they used to have in those days, about this big, you know, deep, there was a picture of

00:08:46.000 Soviet T-62s invading Prague, August 1968.

00:08:51.000 I thought, I thought, expletive deleted, I'm only going to live three months.

00:08:57.000 So that was the backdrop there.

00:08:59.000 And we did lots of other things, but those I can't talk about, but that bit's public domain.

00:09:04.000 So before you jump in, David, you mentioned a whole bunch of things that I want to dig

00:09:08.000 into first.

00:09:09.000 But here you are, you're growing up, son of a single mother.

00:09:13.000 Yeah.

00:09:14.000 I mean, you say, you know, it was pretty common, but you're not living in the lap of luxury.

00:09:18.000 No.

00:09:19.000 And you become conservative.

00:09:22.000 How did that happen?

00:09:23.000 Well, I wasn't initially, because my grandfather was a communist.

00:09:26.000 In fact, my grandfather had been in prison on a couple of occasions for supposedly leading

00:09:31.000 a riot, actually leading a demonstration.

00:09:33.000 In those days, they didn't distinguish much.

00:09:35.000 That's how Liberty, the organization, came to be formed.

00:09:38.000 It was the National Council of Civil Liberties because of the treatment of demonstrators

00:09:42.000 by the police.

00:09:43.000 And so I grew up in a Marxist background.

00:09:46.000 And I thought of myself as very left wing until I went to university.

00:09:53.000 And a series of different things came together.

00:09:57.000 You know, for example, when we had a mock election at my school, I stood as a communist

00:10:01.000 candidate, you know, got one vote.

00:10:04.000 It wasn't mine.

00:10:05.000 It wasn't mine.

00:10:07.000 Just take power anyway, David.

00:10:09.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:10:10.000 Just take it.

00:10:11.000 Take it by other methods.

00:10:12.000 But anyway, so very left to center.

00:10:18.000 I was left to center liberal, not left to center Marxist, really.

00:10:24.000 So for example, I was in favor of homosexual law reform.

00:10:28.000 I've always said, when people say to me, who was the greatest home secretary of your

00:10:33.000 lifetime?

00:10:34.000 I say, Roy Jenkins, which surprises conservatives because, you know, he introduced censorship

00:10:40.000 reform, abolish the death penalty, homosexual law reform. 0.75

00:10:46.000 All those things came in under that government.

00:10:48.000 And I was entirely on side with those.

00:10:50.000 And I still am.

00:10:53.000 I have slightly nuanced views on death penalty, but not important ones.

00:11:02.000 But then I went out to work to earn a living.

00:11:05.000 I was in the army.

00:11:07.000 And so I had to look quite hard at what the Soviet threat really was in a way that other

00:11:11.000 people didn't.

00:11:12.000 I mean, we had all the classified briefings and looking at what their war plans were and

00:11:17.000 so on.

00:11:18.000 And I went to university during 1968, which was an extraordinarily pivotal year in all sorts

00:11:28.000 of ways, social ways, modern ways in terms of modern society.

00:11:32.000 And all of that led me quite quickly, within a course of about 12 months, to come to a view

00:11:37.000 a view which is really that the most important thing in a good society, in a civilized society,

00:11:47.000 are individual freedoms, rights under the law, robust democratic systems, by which I mean

00:11:55.000 ones that don't collapse.

00:11:56.000 And I'm going to annoy your American audience again in the way that the American one has sort

00:12:01.000 of got bent out of shape by Obama, Trump, Biden, and so on.

00:12:08.000 All those things became very important to me.

00:12:10.000 And it seemed to me the best institutional representation of that was the Conservative Party.

00:12:15.000 Right?

00:12:16.000 Didn't mean I agreed with everything they did or believed in.

00:12:18.000 In fact, I actually signed up my entire Federation of Conservative Students to Amnesty International,

00:12:25.000 which, of course, knows some heartburn.

00:12:30.000 Because, you know, at the same time as believing in a capitalist economy, which is the best way

00:12:35.000 to deliver on the things I've talked about, and an economy where the rule of law is predominant,

00:12:41.000 again, the best way, I also believed in things like not torturing people, not imprisoning

00:12:46.000 people with things that have actually lasted through my life, really.

00:12:49.000 So that's really where it came from.

00:12:51.000 It was the first time, frankly, I thought properly about it, rather than just inherited views.

00:12:58.000 You see, because my grandfather was a communist, and my stepfather was an ex-communist, Labour

00:13:04.000 voter, and we had row after row after row. 0.54

00:13:07.000 He was a shop steward, and so we'd argue all the time about trade union.

00:13:12.000 Although I'm very pro-union, we argue all the time.

00:13:15.000 So up until, as it were, I acquired my independence, I didn't really exercise my brain.

00:13:22.000 Once I did, it was a very quick decision, within a year.

00:13:26.000 And what does it mean to you to be a Conservative?

00:13:29.000 Well, it means the single, well, I've already characterised it, but the single most important

00:13:34.000 things relate to freedom, right?

00:13:37.000 An assumption the state doesn't know best, all right?

00:13:41.000 And this has resurfaced in the last decade or two, post all the counter-terrorism stuff,

00:13:48.000 and now the woke stuff, where somehow there's a view that the collective approach to things

00:13:55.000 is more important than the individual.

00:13:57.000 And that's almost invariably wrong.

00:13:59.000 And the trouble is, it's also written into the mindsets of even some of our more talented Conservative politicians.

00:14:07.000 I mean, let me give you an example.

00:14:09.000 Again, I'll annoy somebody else.

00:14:11.000 I'm going to annoy lots of people.

00:14:12.000 Excellent.

00:14:13.000 The views are going to be through the roof.

00:14:15.000 Michael Gove, clever man.

00:14:16.000 I was his referee and so on and all that.

00:14:18.000 But he talks about Florence.

00:14:20.000 When we're talking about what Britain's going to be like post-Brexit, he talks about Florence

00:14:23.000 and how he attributes to the Medicis all the successes of Florence.

00:14:27.000 And bugger all to do with the Medicis.

00:14:29.000 It was all to do with the chaos of Florence. 0.75

00:14:32.000 Florence is a city full of alchemists and weird religious sects and so on. 1.00

00:14:39.000 And because it allowed the freedom of all that chaos and bad ideas, out of a thousand bad

00:14:48.000 ideas, a half a dozen really good ones and half a dozen geniuses, you know, the Michelangelo's

00:14:53.000 and so on, emerged.

00:14:56.000 And I think human nature is such and well-designed institutions are such that if you allow a lot

00:15:03.000 more freedom than you're quite comfortable with, you get a really good outcome.

00:15:07.000 Because eventually the best emerges.

00:15:10.000 It's a sort of intrinsic meritocracy of chaotic societies.

00:15:14.000 How's that for a new theory?

00:15:16.000 I completely agree with you, David, and I think that freedom is one of the things that

00:15:21.000 I value most highly.

00:15:23.000 Do you think that this Conservative Party values freedom?

00:15:26.000 No, no, not enough.

00:15:28.000 One of the difficulties of freedom, when states, particularly in a democratic state like ours,

00:15:41.000 address a new threat, I'll use the word mildly, invariably that impinges on freedom.

00:15:50.000 All right.

00:15:51.000 And all the sort of the disciples of freedom, the intellectual disciples of freedom, privacy

00:16:00.000 and things like that, right?

00:16:01.000 So let me give you an example.

00:16:03.000 During the Blair years, Blair was absolutely obsessed with the idea of identity cards.

00:16:10.000 He's just come up with it again last week, you notice.

00:16:12.000 Him and Hague.

00:16:13.000 Yes, he does.

00:16:14.000 And at the time, because this was being presented as a way of protecting people, you know,

00:16:21.000 we can find terrorists more easily.

00:16:23.000 I don't know.

00:16:24.000 You think they write terrorists down as their occupation.

00:16:29.000 But they had this idea, right?

00:16:31.000 And 80% of the public agreed with it.

00:16:34.000 80%.

00:16:35.000 I've forgotten that part of it.

00:16:36.000 What the polling said.

00:16:37.000 All right.

00:16:38.000 And I was the Shadow Home Secretary at the time, and I'd love to be able to tell you,

00:16:40.000 well, you know, my persuasive powers switched.

00:16:42.000 Nah.

00:16:43.000 What actually changed the public's mind was that the state lost two CDs, tax records,

00:16:50.000 of 26 million people.

00:16:53.000 All the home addresses, the bank accounts, they just disappeared.

00:16:56.000 You know, the two CDs.

00:16:57.000 And within a month, it was 70% against, rather than 80% in favor.

00:17:02.000 Because people saw the dangers of centralized data on people.

00:17:09.000 And this resurrects every time.

00:17:11.000 I mean, Whitehall, just down the road from here, believes in something called identity

00:17:17.000 management.

00:17:18.000 I don't want Whitehall managing my identity.

00:17:20.000 I own my identity.

00:17:22.000 If I'm going to have an identifier, I want it under my control.

00:17:26.000 I want it my solicitor, or my lawyer, or my bank, or whatever.

00:17:30.000 I don't want the state controlling my identity.

00:17:32.000 But they think it's the answer to everything.

00:17:34.000 Of course, when you give them the data, they mess it up anyway.

00:17:37.000 They get it wrong.

00:17:38.000 They lose it.

00:17:39.000 They give it to the wrong people.

00:17:40.000 But I think, you know, identity cards are quite a good demonstrator of what looks like

00:17:47.000 a very sensible, plausible, managerial idea.

00:17:50.000 Actually, when you do it, it makes a real unholy mess of it.

00:17:54.000 David, can you explain something to me?

00:17:56.000 I'm not from this country.

00:17:57.000 I was born in the Soviet Union.

00:17:58.000 And when I came here in the mid-90s, I was like, oh, this is a country that believes

00:18:02.000 in freedom.

00:18:03.000 That's what I thought.

00:18:04.000 And I cannot tell you how shocked I was in the last few years, particularly with COVID.

00:18:09.000 Now, I remember the ID card debate.

00:18:11.000 I bet I remember opposing it at the time.

00:18:13.000 I didn't remember 80% of people supported it, which is kind of relevant to my question,

00:18:16.000 because, look, in a crisis when there's danger and fear, of course, the government is going

00:18:21.000 to use that as an opportunity to seize more power, to accumulate more data, to do all that.

00:18:26.000 That's understandable.

00:18:27.000 We've seen it all around the world.

00:18:29.000 But the polling from people that we saw, you know, 20% of people want nightclubs closed

00:18:34.000 down, irrespective of COVID, you know, all of this stuff.

00:18:38.000 I was going, what the hell is going on here, right?

00:18:42.000 Now, what I'm hearing out of you is people perhaps are less well-informed.

00:18:47.000 People are terrified, and they were terrified by the government, by the media and so on.

00:18:52.000 But, I mean, what happened during COVID?

00:18:55.000 Well, look, I mean, two things, to get straight first.

00:19:00.000 I mean, number one is, most of the time, most people don't think about politics, right?

00:19:07.000 I mean, it was true.

00:19:09.000 Because they're sane.

00:19:11.000 Because they're sane.

00:19:13.000 They delegate it to people like me, right?

00:19:16.000 And it's my job to have these fights on their behalf.

00:19:21.000 And they don't think about it very much.

00:19:23.000 So that's the first thing to understand.

00:19:28.000 Second thing is, when they do first think about it, not the eventual conclusion,

00:19:33.000 but when they do first think about it, the first template, the first test, quite properly,

00:19:37.000 is how will it affect me or my family or whatever?

00:19:40.000 And if I'm frightened that my granny or my mum, or me, will catch COVID, you know, and they're in a risk category,

00:19:50.000 then I'll forget everything else.

00:19:52.000 I'll say, yeah, right, okay, do what's necessary, lock your mum, whatever.

00:19:56.000 And that's perfectly natural.

00:20:00.000 You know, that is, you know, as human beings, we're built to defend our families.

00:20:04.000 You know, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution of programmed us that way.

00:20:11.000 But then people think.

00:20:13.000 They start to think about it carefully.

00:20:17.000 And then they balance things up, you know.

00:20:19.000 And there's that sequence.

00:20:20.000 First, not paying any attention.

00:20:22.000 Then the first attention, what's my own?

00:20:25.000 There's a sort of hierarchy of needs type argument.

00:20:28.000 And then there's a more thoughtful thing.

00:20:30.000 I mean, you saw this.

00:20:31.000 I mean, in 2008, I had a by-election.

00:20:34.000 Because we'd lost a vote in the Commons over 42 days detention without charge,

00:20:40.000 and because I didn't believe that when it came down to it,

00:20:44.000 when the government brought it back, as they would just before an election,

00:20:47.000 that David Cameron would resist it.

00:20:49.000 I didn't want to be the Home Secretary who was going to impose that.

00:20:54.000 So I forced a by-election.

00:20:56.000 Now, again, at the time, 70% of people thought 42 days detention without charge

00:21:01.000 for terrorism suspects was a good idea.

00:21:05.000 Indeed, some people said, what's wrong with 42 years, you know?

00:21:08.000 But they heard the terrorism.

00:21:11.000 They didn't hear the suspects, right?

00:21:13.000 And it was in the aftermath of the seven bombings and all that.

00:21:18.000 So you can understand.

00:21:19.000 People, you know, they imagine this terrible event.

00:21:23.000 We should do everything possible.

00:21:25.000 Of course, later on, they start thinking through the details.

00:21:28.000 Who are the people that actually get held for six weeks, what it is, without charge?

00:21:33.000 Well, it's people against whom you have no evidence.

00:21:36.000 It's people who live in the same house as the person who did it,

00:21:38.000 not the person themselves.

00:21:40.000 People who themselves get charged in five, six days.

00:21:43.000 So what happened over the course of, I don't know, about five weeks of a local,

00:21:48.000 localized by-election was that people started to think about it.

00:21:54.000 And again, that one went from 70-30 one way to 70-30 the other way over the course

00:22:00.000 because I made people think terrorist suspect, right?

00:22:04.000 So, again, it's just that people, they ration their time, they ration their thought process,

00:22:09.000 they ration the effort, the interest they waste on things.

00:22:12.000 You know, they want to raise their children, they want to do their job,

00:22:15.000 they want to save for their pension, whatever.

00:22:18.000 They don't want to spend their time thinking about things that the state should do properly first time.

00:22:22.000 But David, is that what happened during COVID?

00:22:24.000 Because I don't remember it like that at all.

00:22:25.000 Well, it hasn't.

00:22:26.000 No, it hasn't.

00:22:27.000 It seemed to me that the level of authoritarianism both in the government

00:22:29.000 and the public increased over time.

00:22:31.000 Has gone.

00:22:32.000 And it hasn't yet reversed, you see.

00:22:33.000 No, no.

00:22:34.000 And I think that process is a slower process going on at the moment.

00:22:38.000 And part of the problem is the sort of public censorship that's going on.

00:22:44.000 You know, it was very difficult to get a proper hearing.

00:22:47.000 I mean, in the Conservative Party, for example, I wasn't a member of it,

00:22:51.000 but the thing called the Coronavirus Research Group, I think it was.

00:22:54.000 I mean, its chairman is now a cabinet member.

00:22:57.000 So, you know, there is at least some thought.

00:23:02.000 But I think what's going to happen is slowly, over time,

00:23:08.000 the weaknesses in the state argument will become apparent.

00:23:13.000 You're seeing it today.

00:23:14.000 You're seeing it with, as we sit here, the front page of Daily Telegraph

00:23:18.000 is a story taken from Matt Hancock's WhatsApp exchanges,

00:23:24.000 suggesting that he wasn't actually going from science at all.

00:23:28.000 He was going from other, whatever, other convenient,

00:23:31.000 politically convenient reasons he had for making those decisions.

00:23:35.000 We'll see the outcome of that.

00:23:38.000 But what's happening, we saw somewhere else.

00:23:41.000 We saw, you may remember early on, some of us said,

00:23:46.000 this looks like a virus that's come from a laboratory.

00:23:50.000 And God, did you get pilloried for saying that online.

00:23:54.000 Banned, not just pilloried.

00:23:56.000 Banned.

00:23:57.000 You'd get banned off places like Twitter.

00:23:58.000 And indeed, a Nobel Prize winner.

00:24:00.000 That was the first point, by the way, in this whole process,

00:24:02.000 where I saw a French Nobel Prize winner effectively banned

00:24:06.000 from talking about his expert subjects, you know.

00:24:09.000 And I thought, you know, this is wrong.

00:24:10.000 We need to deal with misinformation at the source, David.

00:24:13.000 Nobel Prize winners.

00:24:15.000 Well, your old country knew how to deal with misinformation at the source,

00:24:19.000 which they did for 70 years.

00:24:20.000 Yes, exactly.

00:24:21.000 But the, so, so the, that's beginning to break up.

00:24:27.000 That's beginning to come apart.

00:24:28.000 And, and one of the, one of the things I am going to be focusing on

00:24:34.000 in the next year or two is trying to make sure that the inquiry

00:24:38.000 actually looks at all the facts and takes them all on board.

00:24:46.000 And why is that important?

00:24:47.000 Why does that matter?

00:24:48.000 Well, it matters because there is a unique characteristic to this.

00:24:51.000 And the unique characteristic, which I've never seen before in my lifetime anyway,

00:24:55.000 is that every single ruling establishment in the world,

00:25:01.000 possibly accepting Sweden, made the same mistake.

00:25:05.000 And ruling establishments are very bad at admitting mistakes.

00:25:09.000 And when they're defending each other, you know,

00:25:12.000 you've got the World Health Organization, you've got, you've got America,

00:25:15.000 the American government, the British government, all of these,

00:25:18.000 all the European governments, they all essentially made the same mistake.

00:25:22.000 And so it's going to be quite hard to tease it apart.

00:25:25.000 But I think it's going to be one of the big jobs in the next couple of years,

00:25:28.000 two or three years, to get it right.

00:25:30.000 Because, but partly protect freedoms from unnecessary incursions,

00:25:35.000 but also partly to make sure the next time we have a pandemic,

00:25:38.000 we respond in a way which actually deals with it,

00:25:41.000 rather than sort of behaves in a sort of politically defensive way,

00:25:46.000 which is really what we're looking at,

00:25:48.000 the political defensiveness by every establishment in the world.

00:25:51.000 So, you know, it's, the last time something like this happened probably

00:25:56.000 was when the Catholic Church was the dominant force in the sort of,

00:25:58.000 I know, 10th century onwards sort of thing.

00:26:01.000 You know, when you only have one, one allowed mindset.

00:26:04.000 And so, you know, it's, it's, it's going to be a, the next five years,

00:26:13.000 not the next year, the next five years,

00:26:15.000 I think it's going to be a long, long battle to get the facts straight.

00:26:18.000 And are you going to be covering misappropriation of funds as well

00:26:22.000 when it comes to PPE and...

00:26:24.000 Oh yeah. I mean, look, I, I used to be, we skim past all sorts of things,

00:26:28.000 but I used to be the Public Accounts Committee chairman.

00:26:31.000 Um, and, uh, I take the view that proper operation of the state,

00:26:38.000 uh, in terms of looking after people's money

00:26:41.000 is one of the first responsibilities.

00:26:43.000 You know, it's the first duty of the state,

00:26:45.000 not to, not to take your money and waste it or throw it away,

00:26:48.000 or worst, worst of all, hand it over in a corrupt process

00:26:51.000 to, to your favourite supporters, whatever it might be.

00:26:55.000 Um, and if that's what's happened, I'm not, I'm not going to prejudge these things,

00:26:59.000 but if that's what's happened, then the judicial system should come down on it 0.58

00:27:03.000 like a ton of bricks.

00:27:05.000 Absolutely. David, uh, a real criticism that people have of the Conservative Party,

00:27:09.000 and I think is a very valid one, is that the Conservative Party isn't conservative.

00:27:14.000 It no longer represents conservative people.

00:27:16.000 It got elected to implement Brexit, which they've done.

00:27:21.000 But you look at what the, some of the policies that they brought in,

00:27:25.000 and I'm not a conservative, but I'm looking at that going,

00:27:28.000 that is almost more centre left or left than it is conservative.

00:27:32.000 Well, first thing to say about the Conservative Party is,

00:27:35.000 it's, it's pretty bloody difficult to define what conservative means, right?

00:27:39.000 If you, if you, if you looked at my philosophy,

00:27:42.000 and this hasn't changed since I entered Parliament,

00:27:45.000 uh, you could probably more accurately describe me as a Gladstonian liberal.

00:27:49.000 You know, uh, low taxes, free trade, uh, free movement, rule of law,

00:27:55.000 all the things we've talked about already.

00:27:57.000 Um, and the Conservative Party is a, um, an alliance.

00:28:02.000 It's, it's not a single entity, you know.

00:28:05.000 It's always had a range of, a range, a spectrum.

00:28:10.000 Okay, let me put it in a more specific way.

00:28:12.000 Yeah.

00:28:13.000 People, if I'm a red wall voter, I don't think I voted to have, 1.00

00:28:17.000 for example, this is just one example picked at random,

00:28:20.000 I don't think I voted to have 40,000 people come into this country

00:28:23.000 illegally in small boats.

00:28:24.000 Hmm.

00:28:25.000 I don't think I voted.

00:28:26.000 Look, I, I'm allowed to say this as an immigrant myself.

00:28:29.000 I don't think I, when, when I, when you told me tens of thousands,

00:28:32.000 I don't think I voted for hundreds of thousands.

00:28:35.000 Right?

00:28:36.000 So irrespective of whether that's a Conservative policy or not,

00:28:39.000 I think France's point is,

00:28:40.000 it's not a government that's delivering on his commitments.

00:28:43.000 Not yet.

00:28:44.000 No, it isn't.

00:28:45.000 I mean, the, I mean, part of the problem, I mean,

00:28:46.000 we're talking at a difficult time in terms of answering this question,

00:28:50.000 because you've had obviously Brexit.

00:28:52.000 You've had more importantly, in many ways, COVID.

00:28:54.000 Mm-hmm.

00:28:55.000 You've got Ukraine.

00:28:56.000 You've got the fracturing of the world trading system.

00:29:00.000 Mm-hmm.

00:29:01.000 Which is, in many ways, may be the most important.

00:29:03.000 Yes.

00:29:04.000 All of these really, really important structures have been buggered up.

00:29:09.000 Am I allowed to say that one?

00:29:10.000 Yeah.

00:29:11.000 We swear all the time on this thing.

00:29:13.000 Say whatever you want.

00:29:14.000 And, and, and of course we've had, what, three changes as a leader, really.

00:29:18.000 I mean, since, since Cameron, I mean, through, through all this.

00:29:22.000 And so, in terms of political distraction, it's been quite the normal focus,

00:29:30.000 you know, the, as I say, the low taxes, control of our borders,

00:29:35.000 all those standard Tory, actually standard good management things, really.

00:29:41.000 Right.

00:29:42.000 Have, have, have slipped.

00:29:43.000 No doubt about it.

00:29:44.000 Well, that's a very gentle word to use to describe what's happened.

00:29:47.000 I'm a kind, I'm a kindly person.

00:29:48.000 Come on.

00:29:49.000 We've got, we, the corporation taxes, every tax that I can see is going up.

00:29:53.000 Right.

00:29:54.000 Right.

00:29:55.000 No control of our borders whatsoever.

00:29:56.000 Like, I, I think it's, I think, look, this isn't an attempt to attack you or the Conservative

00:30:01.000 Party.

00:30:02.000 I mean, as Francis says, neither of us is Conservative.

00:30:04.000 It's, it's not good.

00:30:07.000 Like, it's not, yeah, and it's not delivering for the people who voted for the Conservative

00:30:11.000 Party.

00:30:12.000 Well, one of, one of the, one of the difficulties is that, and this is, this is, this applies

00:30:16.000 to all parties and not just the Conservative Party.

00:30:18.000 It's a general, there's a tendency in this day and age, and it, and it really mostly started,

00:30:25.000 not uniquely, but mostly started under Blair and has got worse ever since, is there's a tendency

00:30:30.000 to replace actual answers with populist answers.

00:30:33.000 Mm-hmm.

00:30:34.000 So let me give you an example on migration.

00:30:37.000 Okay.

00:30:38.000 Um, I have opposed the Rwanda policy.

00:30:42.000 Mm-hmm.

00:30:43.000 Um, partly because I think it's sort of uncivilized, but also partly because I don't think it'll work.

00:30:47.000 Right?

00:30:48.000 Yeah.

00:30:49.000 But if you go out in the, if you went out in the street and you stopped a hundred people,

00:30:53.000 80 would think it's a great idea.

00:30:54.000 Mm-hmm.

00:30:55.000 Right?

00:30:56.000 Which is why, in my view, it's, it's the policy.

00:30:59.000 And we've seen this as they say since Blair.

00:31:01.000 Blair used to talk in, in, in big terms, you know, about cracking down and migration on,

00:31:07.000 you know, and all the various anti-crime things.

00:31:10.000 Crime got worse under Blair, but, but yeah, you know, we had all sorts of, um, uh, things

00:31:15.000 he was talking about and, and, and on, and on terrorism, of course, as well.

00:31:19.000 And the trouble is that people hear the policy.

00:31:22.000 If it sounds tough, great.

00:31:24.000 That's wonderful.

00:31:25.000 Truth is what we need to do on something like, um, the, the, the boats across the channel

00:31:31.000 is some of it's down to, uh, some really simple, sensible things.

00:31:36.000 I wrote to the prime minister before Christmas, you wouldn't necessarily remember, um, with

00:31:42.000 initially 50 other MPs on the letter, but it turned out to be a hundred after I got a

00:31:46.000 bit of coverage, um, saying, look, just define Albania as a safe country, because it is.

00:31:54.000 Albania has had fewer references to the European court in the last 10 years than we have.

00:31:58.000 We should all be fleeing to Albania. 1.00

00:32:00.000 Exactly.

00:32:01.000 I have a better, I have a better case to go to Tirana than they do to come here, right?

00:32:04.000 Um, and, uh, let's first do that.

00:32:07.000 That doesn't solve the problem, but, but golly, it knocks about 15,000 or 12,000 people out

00:32:13.000 of it straight away, you know, it's a third of the, uh, of the overall total.

00:32:18.000 Um, let's do that, get that under control.

00:32:20.000 Um, uh, I've also said, not in the letter, but I've said to the, the various people involved

00:32:25.000 in this, you know, you've got to improve the, the cross channel surveillance.

00:32:29.000 You know, a British company provides Frontex, which is the European, um, uh, border agency

00:32:38.000 with the surveillance for the, uh, for the Mediterranean light aircraft, twin engine light

00:32:44.000 aircraft, a DA62 for your, for your techie, uh, viewers, uh, complete with, uh, with synthetic

00:32:50.000 aperture radar, with infrared, with long range cameras, with, um, uh, devices that detect,

00:32:57.000 um, uh, mobile phones, uh, and, you know, the combination of all of them, they can spot

00:33:02.000 people arriving at the beach in Libya.

00:33:04.000 They can spot people arriving at the beach in Libya, uh, from international airspace.

00:33:09.000 They can spot people arriving at the beach in France from British airspace.

00:33:13.000 The French tell us they can't do it because of privacy concerns.

00:33:15.000 Well, I'm a privacy enthusiast and I don't see that, but never mind.

00:33:18.000 That's their view.

00:33:19.000 Uh, but we could do that and we could, we should have been telling them every time somebody,

00:33:23.000 they're there, every single one.

00:33:26.000 So why don't we?

00:33:27.000 I think it's a, I think it's a, I think it's a competent, I think it's a government competent

00:33:31.000 thing.

00:33:32.000 I think the home office throughout really since, remember I made my reference to, um,

00:33:37.000 Roy Jenkins, really since those days, I don't think the home office has been functional

00:33:40.000 and there've been desperate attempts to make it work.

00:33:43.000 Prisons have been taken out and justice has been taken out and they still quite haven't

00:33:48.000 got the, the department probably functional.

00:33:50.000 I think there is a, there is a serious problem of competence in Whitehall generally, decline

00:33:55.000 of competence over the last 20, 30 years.

00:33:58.000 Um, but I can see why you're not administering.

00:34:01.000 Well, I mean, it's, it's, I mean, I had, I had this conversation once, I probably shouldn't

00:34:08.000 tell you with whom, but let's say somebody who was at the top of the Whitehall regime.

00:34:15.000 Uh, and I said, you served in the, um, the Lawson treasury, you know, tell me, is today's

00:34:22.000 Whitehall as competent as it was in Thatcher's time?

00:34:27.000 And he, and he thought for a second, he said, no.

00:34:30.000 I said, why not?

00:34:31.000 He said, well, in the treasury case, you know, you've got the, the, the very clever youngsters

00:34:35.000 who used to go to, to become treasury policy principals, you know, uh, and now making a million

00:34:41.000 million a year in a city, you know, post big bang.

00:34:44.000 Um, post, uh, Blair, Blair, Blair gave a lot of extra power to special advisors, the, the

00:34:52.000 Alistair Campbells of the world and so on, which of course he took that power away from

00:34:55.000 the policy advisors in the foreign office and in, and in the cabinet office and so on.

00:35:00.000 So what happened was that, uh, we, uh, we basically aren't doing as good a job.

00:35:06.000 We also rotate people too often and lots and lots of tiny techie things like, like Blair

00:35:11.000 made it the case.

00:35:12.000 Used to be in order to become perm secretary, you had to serve in the minister's private

00:35:16.000 office.

00:35:17.000 Now serving the minister's private office is a nightmare.

00:35:20.000 You know, you work in seven days a week, you know, long hours, minister can call you

00:35:24.000 up at midnight and, and all that.

00:35:26.000 And I used to and say, let's just come on the news.

00:35:29.000 What's going on?

00:35:30.000 Sort of thing, you know?

00:35:31.000 Um, and, but, but, you know, if you want to get to top, that's what you did.

00:35:35.000 Well, you know, think changes rules, lots and lots of changes rules like that and other

00:35:39.000 ones as well has, has reduced the effectiveness of Whitehall, I think.

00:35:43.000 And we, over COVID, you know, you, you also saw another decline in the effectiveness.

00:35:48.000 You saw it with, um, the, uh, the case officers, the rate of the case officers cleared or dealt

00:35:54.000 with asylum cases down to 1.4 a week.

00:35:58.000 Well, that's sort of madness.

00:36:00.000 You know, it should be about five times that a day, you know, it should be four or five a

00:36:04.000 day.

00:36:05.000 Um, and, uh, and those sorts of things, you know, you've got a real, you've got real serious

00:36:10.000 competence issues, I think, given the size of the problems.

00:36:13.000 And that, I'm sorry, it's a long one you'd answered your question.

00:36:16.000 Why are we not doing the surveillance?

00:36:17.000 And I think that's part of the reason.

00:36:19.000 Um, we also got, we also got young, you've got young politicians too.

00:36:23.000 You know, before I came into the house, I've been working in business.

00:36:26.000 I was a main board director of a FTSE 100 company before I became an MP.

00:36:30.000 Um, uh, and that's not that common anymore.

00:36:35.000 So it's, there's some, it's true for some, but most people, most is probably putting it

00:36:39.000 too strongly, but a very large proportion of MPs coming in now are ex-spads.

00:36:45.000 They've done nothing but work in Whitehall and so on.

00:36:48.000 And actually, you know, if you're representing people, you want to have done something in

00:36:53.000 the outside world, not just something in government.

00:36:55.000 You know, I think it, I think it's really, really important that, uh, and that's, that's

00:36:59.000 declined.

00:37:00.000 It's no, it's no individual's fault.

00:37:01.000 It's a, it's a social trend that's happened.

00:37:03.000 David, you spoke in an interview about how there's only been two transformational prime

00:37:07.000 ministers, one of which was Margaret Thatcher.

00:37:09.000 And I look at the current political cohort that we have, and it seems that they lack

00:37:15.000 one fundamental quality necessary to be a good leader.

00:37:19.000 And that is the willingness to be unpopular and to be hated.

00:37:24.000 And I look at all our leaders and they don't seem to want to be disliked.

00:37:29.000 They don't seem to want to annoy people, which if you want to transform things, if you want

00:37:37.000 to make things better, you've got to make unpleasant and difficult and unpopular decisions.

00:37:42.000 Well, let's be clear about one thing.

00:37:44.000 Margaret didn't want, want, she had to get used to it.

00:37:48.000 Yeah.

00:37:49.000 Oh, right.

00:37:50.000 Okay.

00:37:51.000 But she was prepared.

00:37:52.000 But she was prepared.

00:37:53.000 The lady's not for turning. 1.00

00:37:54.000 But when I first knew her, you know, she had, she was Margaret Thatcher milk snatcher. 0.56

00:37:58.000 Yeah.

00:37:59.000 You're too, both of you too young to remember the scandal, but she, uh, scandal.

00:38:03.000 She, she had canceled free school milk for, uh, for certain categories of youngsters. 0.89

00:38:08.000 And, um, and she got used to it.

00:38:10.000 But the thing you have to understand is that Margaret was very calculating.

00:38:19.000 It's probably the right word about that.

00:38:22.000 Um, she, when she took on a big problem, let us say she took on the issue of over mighty

00:38:29.000 unions or took on the issue of the, uh, of the miners strike or whatever.

00:38:34.000 Right.

00:38:35.000 She would take this big strategic aim.

00:38:37.000 She'd set out the big strategic aim, but then she'd salami slice it into small pieces 1.00

00:38:42.000 and do it one piece at a time.

00:38:44.000 Ideally only one enemy at a time, you know, not a thousand enemies.

00:38:48.000 Well, you see, in 1974, Ted Heath lost the election because he basically made an enemy

00:38:52.000 of about 300 different groups over industrial relations and then got thrown out by, by the

00:38:57.000 unions really.

00:38:58.000 Um, she would cut it into little bits.

00:39:01.000 Um, so give you an example, uh, with the miners strike.

00:39:05.000 Um, number one, when Derek Ezra tried to precipitate it before she was ready, she sacked him. 0.65

00:39:10.000 You know, she didn't sack anybody else.

00:39:12.000 She sacked the head of the coal board.

00:39:14.000 Um, during it, she, she won that conflict, um, albeit at great social cost.

00:39:20.000 But, um, uh, during it, she was scared by the Dockers coming out on a wildcat strike,

00:39:29.000 which she had not prepared for.

00:39:31.000 And so ever, ever thereafter, until I changed her mind, she avoided having a conflict with

00:39:38.000 the Dockers, you know?

00:39:39.000 And then I said, we've got to reform the scheme, the Dock labor scheme.

00:39:41.000 And so we did all that, but it took a long time because she was very, very careful.

00:39:47.000 She was, she was much more a woman than a man on this.

00:39:50.000 I think women are much better sometimes at dealing objectively with risk than we are. 0.61

00:39:56.000 We're sort of sometimes brought up to sort of rush head first into risks, not clever in politics.

00:40:02.000 She understood what needed to be done, and she did it.

00:40:06.000 And notably, she always did the unpopular things in the first year or two. 0.98

00:40:11.000 So, sort of unfair to apply this to Sunak, because he hasn't got spare time to do this.

00:40:17.000 But generally speaking, I think you're right that the people, modern politicians haven't

00:40:25.000 got in the habit of thinking through, right, okay, what am I going to do in year one, year

00:40:28.000 two, year three?

00:40:29.000 Because by year four, she always had the results to show, you see?

00:40:34.000 And she always went to year four, you know?

00:40:36.000 And in a very calculated way, you know, so this wasn't sort of, you know, the political

00:40:43.000 equivalent of winning a Victoria Cross.

00:40:45.000 You know, Margaret was about winning the battle. 0.94

00:40:47.000 And all right, there was some pain to take early on, but she knew, she calculated it out.

00:40:51.000 And I think people, very few people in the House of Commons have a real memory of Margaret.

00:41:00.000 All right.

00:41:01.000 So, for example, when Liz Truss was presenting herself as a modern marketer, nothing like it.

00:41:07.000 Margaret would never have done what Liz and Quasi did with that budget, you know, frankly,

00:41:14.000 in my view, a mad budget, because, you know, it lost the markets, it lost everything.

00:41:19.000 She would have, she would have done that calculation properly.

00:41:21.000 She would have got Lawson or Howe or whoever, whoever's the chance of the sit down and work

00:41:26.000 out what you could do and what would maximize the effects and so on and minimize the risks.

00:41:33.000 So, yeah, she was willing to be unpopular.

00:41:38.000 Really, really, that post-war generation was much more tough-minded, I think, in many ways,

00:41:47.000 no matter what the politics, you know, Tory or Labour, or Liberal for that matter, less liberal,

00:41:53.000 less liberal, because they weren't really in play, but Tory or Labour were willing sometimes just to add up.

00:41:57.000 I mean, Barbara Castle, if you read your history books, Barbara Castle and the Place of Strife,

00:42:01.000 trying to sort out the trade unions.

00:42:03.000 Harold Wilson ran away from it, but they at least started down the road.

00:42:07.000 So, that's to some extent a generational thing, you know.

00:42:10.000 When I came into the House of Commons, my two predecessors, the members for Howden and Halton Price,

00:42:16.000 were the last two double-decorated members of the House.

00:42:19.000 They both had a military cross and a distinguished service order, and that's always preyed on my mind.

00:42:24.000 You know, these are people who, you know, were patriotic in the sense of,

00:42:29.000 putting themselves in harm's way for their country,

00:42:31.000 but also looked after their regiment in North Africa for two or three years.

00:42:35.000 So, what I've got to do with a constituency issue of somebody's planning problem or somebody's

00:42:40.000 can't make ends meet or whatever, you know, they've got Jimmy whose wife has left him,

00:42:44.000 they've got Johnny who can't pay his debts, they've got Frankie who's an alcoholic, and so on,

00:42:49.000 and they have to deal with all that.

00:42:51.000 So, they, from the beginning, had a far closer grasp, I think, of ordinary people's concerns

00:42:58.000 than subsequent generations have had.

00:43:01.000 I was going to say, but this is a very real problem, David,

00:43:04.000 because if you don't understand the concerns or the lives of ordinary people,

00:43:09.000 with the best will in the world, how are you then going to enact policies that are going to help these people?

00:43:13.000 Well, I agree, I agree, but I think it's a systemic problem.

00:43:16.000 Now, against that, you've got a circumstance where the caseload of MPs is much bigger than it used to be,

00:43:24.000 so the counter-argument to me would be, well, that brings them closer to the people.

00:43:31.000 But I think, I just think that British society has become more stratified,

00:43:36.000 got more layers in it now than actually it had when I was growing up.

00:43:42.000 I think, I mean, nobody wants to wish a war on a country, but the, the, one of the effects of the second,

00:43:50.000 well, actually one of the effects of the 1930s and the 1940s together was to make us feel more of a nation.

00:43:56.000 Yeah, you know, didn't always help the Tories.

00:43:59.000 I mean, after we got wiped out in 1945, you know, but I think there was,

00:44:04.000 and indeed the Tories had more working class votes in those days as well, even than now.

00:44:09.000 But, you know, it, that sense of nationhood was very important.

00:44:16.000 Nationhood, society, call it what you want.

00:44:19.000 It's a commonality.

00:44:21.000 And, you know, that we've lost a bit of that.

00:44:24.000 And I think, I think, although we all know what everybody's thinking because of social media these days,

00:44:31.000 it's an incredibly fragmented society it reflects.

00:44:36.000 You know, you, you, you look at strands of social media and it's so intolerant of other viewpoints,

00:44:45.000 that instead of having a debate where if you sort of did a distribution diagram of people's opinions along a spectrum,

00:44:56.000 it would tend to be that shape, you know, be a normal distribution.

00:44:58.000 Sometimes it was like a dromedary, you know, two humps, you know, slightly different.

00:45:03.000 But there was always something in the middle.

00:45:05.000 I sometimes easily, I'm talking about, I don't know, Brexit or COVID or, or woke issues or whatever.

00:45:12.000 I sometimes feel it's just two competing echo chambers.

00:45:15.000 And there's nowhere in the middle.

00:45:17.000 In fact, if you stand in the middle, you get shot at by everybody.

00:45:19.000 That's right.

00:45:20.000 Well, that's what we do.

00:45:21.000 It's a lot of fun.

00:45:22.000 But David, I want to move on from the party politics.

00:45:25.000 But first, I want to ask you a final question on that.

00:45:28.000 Is your party going to lose the next election?

00:45:30.000 No, not necessarily.

00:45:31.000 I think, I think if you'd asked me that six months ago, I would have said we had a one in 10 chance at best, if not zero.

00:45:41.000 I think it's improved to one in five.

00:45:46.000 I mean, literally.

00:45:48.000 That is 20%.

00:45:49.000 20%.

00:45:50.000 That's 20%.

00:45:51.000 From 10%.

00:45:52.000 From 10%.

00:45:53.000 Yeah.

00:45:54.000 So that's doubled in a week.

00:45:55.000 That is a politician's answer, isn't it?

00:45:57.000 I haven't finished yet.

00:45:58.000 Because we've got, we've got a budget coming up.

00:46:00.000 Yeah.

00:46:01.000 All right.

00:46:02.000 And I think what the budget does is very important.

00:46:05.000 The issue you've been talking about of borders, you know, I think there are some solutions available.

00:46:13.000 I've talked about the Albanian issue and the more practical issue of how we deal with it.

00:46:20.000 I think there's quite a lot going on there.

00:46:22.000 I've been, I've been, I've been talking a lot to number 10 about those things.

00:46:25.000 You know, I used to be shadow home secretary for five years.

00:46:27.000 I mean, I used to be a specialist in removing home secretaries when they were Labour ones.

00:46:32.000 So, you know, you can imagine I have views on that.

00:46:35.000 And I think those three issues could move it the other way.

00:46:38.000 I mean, that's the thing.

00:46:40.000 So, you know, I've been around in politics long enough to see much, much worse circumstances

00:46:45.000 than we're in now.

00:46:46.000 And I think the…

00:46:47.000 Really?

00:46:48.000 Yeah.

00:46:49.000 Oh, yeah.

00:46:50.000 I mean, bear in mind, I was an MP in 1997, you know, when we had 100 and whatever it was.

00:46:57.000 Bought, no.

00:46:58.000 That was worse for the Conservative Party.

00:46:59.000 I don't think the country was in a worse state than it is now.

00:47:02.000 No, no, no.

00:47:03.000 The country was a good state.

00:47:04.000 That's what I mean.

00:47:05.000 The amazing irony there was that we delivered a fantastic economy and we got zero credit for

00:47:10.000 it.

00:47:11.000 So, no, no, no, no.

00:47:12.000 Oh, no, there's no doubt that the countries, but all countries in a difficult state.

00:47:15.000 Yes.

00:47:16.000 And what I said to you before, I'm a sort of Gladstonian liberal in my intrinsic politics.

00:47:27.000 In my view, the greatest positive thing that's happened in the history of the world in the

00:47:33.000 last century happened in 1995.

00:47:36.000 And what happened then was the World Trade Organization and the Gap Round had a dramatic

00:47:42.000 reduction of extra tariff barriers around the world.

00:47:47.000 And what that did was it led to about one and a half billion people, billion, 1,500 million

00:47:55.000 people coming out of absolute poverty.

00:47:58.000 In my view, probably the greatest event in modern times.

00:48:02.000 And if we're not careful, that trade liberalization could go into reverse.

00:48:08.000 Ukraine, China, Taiwan, the Chinese state capitalist behavior, Huawei and all those other issues.

00:48:15.000 So you've got that.

00:48:17.000 That's huge.

00:48:18.000 You've got other knock on effects.

00:48:21.000 Obviously, Ukraine, what is in effect the attempt to recreate the old Soviet Union is going 0.75

00:48:33.000 to be agonizing one way or another, the outcome, either for the West or for Russia at some point.

00:48:40.000 You've got post-Brexit.

00:48:42.000 I think that's all of a sudden, that's a rather different color.

00:48:45.000 That looks much warmer than it did before.

00:48:48.000 You've got a United States that's sort of indecisive in where it is in the world at the moment.

00:48:54.000 I mean, I didn't like Trump.

00:48:56.000 Don't get me wrong.

00:48:57.000 I disliked Trump intensely.

00:48:58.000 I was a very bad influence.

00:49:00.000 But I'm not sure that Biden's a great leader either for all sorts of reasons.

00:49:06.000 So, you know, of course, we've got a huge number of problems, but they're not just British 1.00

00:49:11.000 problems.

00:49:12.000 They are a worldwide problem.

00:49:13.000 Well, let's talk about one of them, which is the war in Ukraine.

00:49:16.000 And one of the things that we saw during COVID particularly is the breakdown of trust in

00:49:22.000 what we were being told that had been going on for some time.

00:49:25.000 I think it probably really kicked off in 2015, 2016 and the way that it is going now.

00:49:29.000 Now, we've got to a point now where there's a lot of people, particularly people who are

00:49:33.000 sort of anti-woke or maybe lean right, who quite understandably, I think, really distrust

00:49:38.000 what anyone is telling them from the mainstream media, politicians, et cetera.

00:49:42.000 And we've got to a point with Ukraine where I'm sort of tearing what's left of my hair 1.00

00:49:46.000 out in the sense that there are quite a lot of people who've sort of delved into all sorts

00:49:50.000 of conspiracy theories.

00:49:51.000 In fact, we had a debate with Peter Hitchens only a few days ago in here talking, and there

00:49:56.000 are people who think this is all NATO's fault and all of this.

00:49:59.000 I actually disagree with you about the attempt to recreate the Soviet Union.

00:50:02.000 Putin wants to recreate the Russian Empire.

00:50:04.000 That's why he hates Lenin so much because he gave away parts of the Soviet Union, of what

00:50:09.000 the Russian Empire to create the Soviet Union.

00:50:11.000 But from SW1, they look quite similar.

00:50:14.000 Yes, I can imagine.

00:50:16.000 I can imagine.

00:50:17.000 Well, the Russian Empire was bigger.

00:50:18.000 I know.

00:50:19.000 You've got to remember.

00:50:20.000 But in any case, we talked about Thatcher as well.

00:50:26.000 How do you think she would have handled this for a start?

00:50:31.000 Very clinically.

00:50:32.000 You mean the Ukraine episode?

00:50:33.000 Yes.

00:50:34.000 Very clinically.

00:50:37.000 Probably in a quite similar way to what's been done, i.e. supply of arms rather than direct

00:50:47.000 intervention.

00:50:48.000 She might have been a bit more aggressive in the first part. 1.00

00:50:53.000 She wouldn't have allowed direct engagement, but she might have done something like, I don't

00:50:59.000 know, provide a no-fly zone for the west of Ukraine, something like that.

00:51:05.000 I mean, designed to stay out of entanglement, but to provide some sort of safe spaces.

00:51:10.000 She might have done that. 1.00

00:51:11.000 But broadly speaking, she should have done something similar to what we're doing now.

00:51:15.000 She would probably have taken a more active international role, pushing around than any 0.86

00:51:24.000 British, current British Prime Minister really able to do, because, bear in mind, the structures

00:51:31.000 in her day were far more entrenched in place.

00:51:35.000 And I remember vividly sitting in the tea room, not in the tea room, in the dining room in the House

00:51:40.000 of Commons, and she came in and sat next to me. 0.79

00:51:42.000 And I said, and it was at the time of the Reykjavik talks.

00:51:46.000 And I said, what have you been doing, Margaret?

00:51:50.000 She said, I've been straightening out Ronnie.

00:51:55.000 And we forget, of course, that juanvirate was very important.

00:51:59.000 It had some friction from time to time over Grenada and other things, but that juanvirate

00:52:04.000 was very important.

00:52:05.000 And there's no real equivalent juanvirate around today.

00:52:09.000 But there would have been an incredibly clinical exercise in how far can we go.

00:52:16.000 Remember what I said before about controlling risk.

00:52:19.000 What's the strategic aim?

00:52:20.000 Her strategic aim would have been, I'm quite sure, complete expulsion of Russia from Ukraine.

00:52:27.000 She might have had a different view about Crimea, because Crimea's got different histories.

00:52:33.000 But broadly speaking, I think she would have gone through, she would have had from the beginning

00:52:39.000 the idea of a complete expulsion, but she would have sliced it into very, very small pieces,

00:52:44.000 and then each bit managed very carefully.

00:52:47.000 And she would have paid close attention to herself.

00:52:51.000 She would have appointed somebody like Ben Wallace, who she trusted as MOD, but it would

00:52:59.000 have been under daily review in Number 10.

00:53:02.000 And what would she, and what do you say to the people who say, this is, West intervention

00:53:08.000 is unnecessary.

00:53:09.000 And in fact, by expanding east towards NATO has caused this.

00:53:13.000 We are leading to World War III and the potential for nuclear engagement between the world's 0.93

00:53:18.000 two superpowers.

00:53:19.000 Why don't we just let Russia have influence over what it has?

00:53:22.000 Ukraine is Russia's sphere of influence.

00:53:24.000 Putin's talked about how it's just Russian land that's temporarily called Ukraine.

00:53:29.000 You know, what do you say to all those people?

00:53:31.000 Well, I think the first of them, you know, go back to my original principles, the right

00:53:36.000 of self-determination is individual self-determination and state self-determination, you know.

00:53:42.000 And at the end of the day, what does Ukraine want to do, you know, the nation of Ukraine?

00:53:47.000 Ukraine.

00:53:48.000 That's the first thing.

00:53:50.000 Second thing is, I don't pay a lot of attention to the conspiracy theories and so on.

00:53:58.000 Why?

00:53:59.000 Some of them might have some substance of truth.

00:54:01.000 I don't know.

00:54:02.000 I'm not in a position to know, to have a detailed intelligence brief on what EU's activities

00:54:08.000 in, you know, pre-Maiden and so on were in Ukraine.

00:54:13.000 But wars are horrible, rough-edged things.

00:54:17.000 You know, the things we did in the Second World War, you know, there were some nasty things

00:54:21.000 we did, you know.

00:54:22.000 Don't get talked about because we won, you know.

00:54:25.000 Quite.

00:54:26.000 Quite.

00:54:27.000 And so I'm afraid, you know, once you're at war, you've got to recognize that this is,

00:54:31.000 I mean, there are still rules.

00:54:33.000 But, you know, there's going to be lots of stories flying around and you won't know the

00:54:36.000 truth for years and years and years.

00:54:38.000 So we have to decide, you know, we are supporting one side.

00:54:41.000 That's what we should do.

00:54:42.000 I don't suppose that side is perfect.

00:54:44.000 I don't suppose pre-invasion that the Ukrainian state was a perfect state any more than, well, 0.78

00:54:50.000 less than we are, you know.

00:54:52.000 But it doesn't matter, you know.

00:54:54.000 You know, there is a big symbolic thing here and it doesn't just affect Ukraine.

00:54:58.000 Because if we had stood back and let Ukraine fall, what would happen to Taiwan?

00:55:05.000 You know?

00:55:06.000 What would happen elsewhere with the next time?

00:55:08.000 I mean, bear in mind, this is what, number seven in Putin's excursions.

00:55:13.000 You know, you've got South Ossetia and Abkhazia and all these other, all these other,

00:55:20.000 and all carefully calculated.

00:55:22.000 I mean, well, you know, we should be, and Syria.

00:55:25.000 You know, I'm one of the few MPs here who's been to Damascus since the Syrian war.

00:55:30.000 I went and I saw Assad and spoke to him, you know, about what was going on there.

00:55:36.000 And just as an aside for you, I don't think I've ever said this publicly.

00:55:39.000 I said to him, what's going on?

00:55:41.000 Because Russia is supposed to be pulling out.

00:55:43.000 I crossed the border or coming across the Bekar Valley.

00:55:45.000 There were clearly Russian, what looked like Spetsnaz, at the border.

00:55:50.000 In the hotel I was staying in, in Damascus, there were plainly at least two sets of Russian aircrew.

00:55:56.000 I don't speak enough words of Russian to know what they were saying, but I knew it was Russian.

00:56:03.000 And he said, oh, Putin has pulled back because he'd been accused of undermining the peace process.

00:56:09.000 But I spoke to him about it and Putin said to me, we will not let you lose.

00:56:14.000 And astonishingly chilling thing, this is way back when, this is 2016 I think it was.

00:56:19.000 An astonishingly chilling thing, but you know, you can see the calculation going on.

00:56:24.000 And mostly his calculations have worked in his favour.

00:56:27.000 You know, South Ossetia, why did they pick South Ossetia?

00:56:30.000 South Ossetia, part of Georgia, has got the highest number of gallantry medal wins per capita in the old Soviet Union.

00:56:43.000 You know, an incredible high level of pro-Russian, pro-Soviet patriotism sort of thing.

00:56:49.000 They picked it for a reason, you know, picking away.

00:56:52.000 And if he keeps winning, then he'll keep going.

00:56:55.000 And there has to come a point, this is the lesson of the 1930s.

00:56:59.000 We didn't have nuclear weapons in the 1930s, people would say.

00:57:02.000 We didn't have nuclear weapons, but you can't allow nuclear weapons to then suddenly just give the advice the other side.

00:57:06.000 A lot of people said, oh, early on there was lots of fear of this.

00:57:10.000 And bear in mind, I grew up with nuclear weapons.

00:57:13.000 As I said, part of my role in the reserve forces was related to that.

00:57:19.000 In the event of a nuclear exchange, one of the people who would be greatly at risk would be Putin himself.

00:57:28.000 That's what would happen.

00:57:29.000 Now, is this a man who is a sort of, you know, such a heroic self-image is willing to give up his life.

00:57:36.000 This is a man who spent two years in a bunker avoiding Covid.

00:57:40.000 All right.

00:57:41.000 It's a man who has meetings.

00:57:43.000 He wouldn't have a meeting as close as we're having.

00:57:45.000 You know, whose security meetings are, you know, in a room as big as this, but with four people in it.

00:57:50.000 You know, the man is a man, an aging man with intimations of mortality.

00:57:56.000 You know, so he's not going to rush into a nuclear exchange. 1.00

00:57:59.000 You don't be stupid about it. 0.99

00:58:00.000 You don't take unnecessary risks. 1.00

00:58:02.000 But don't don't let yourself be frightened by your own weapons.

00:58:06.000 Final question on this, David.

00:58:07.000 Are we in Cold War two?

00:58:08.000 Yeah, we are.

00:58:09.000 We've been in it for a longer time than we think, I think.

00:58:13.000 All that's happened is we haven't recognized it, you know, and we haven't calculated around it.

00:58:18.000 What's happened is the war on terrorism has elided through Syria in particular into a sort of involuntary slippage into Cold War.

00:58:28.000 And this Cold War actually includes China, too, actually.

00:58:31.000 We have, I mean, we've allowed the great benefit I talked about before, the 1995 transformation.

00:58:41.000 We have allowed the real benefits of that to blind us and handicap us in our responses to things like China's treatment of the Uyghurs.

00:58:53.000 China's basically kleptocratic approach to state capitalism.

00:59:02.000 And we should have been a bit more rigorous about that.

00:59:05.000 But we aren't.

00:59:06.000 You know, I'm afraid that is the nature of Western politics.

00:59:09.000 It is quite, I mean, democracies are quite weak a lot of the time.

00:59:12.000 I mean, this struck me most starkly when, after the Litvinenko killings, a few years later, David Cameron was taking Putin to the Judo Olympics.

00:59:28.000 What are we doing there?

00:59:29.000 What signal do we think we're giving us?

00:59:31.000 You know, for a trivial diplomatic advantage, we were telegraphing that we'd sort of forgiven them for murdering people in our territory.

00:59:39.000 You know, we have to, you know, there are lessons we have to relearn in this world.

00:59:45.000 And Cold War 2 or 3, whatever it is, is not a bad description, I'm afraid.

00:59:51.000 We've got to learn to manage relations with not necessarily actively hostile states, but potentially hostile states in such a way that they know there's a price for breaking our rules.

01:00:06.000 David, we're going to move on to a subject very quickly.

01:00:08.000 That's even more toxic than the Ukraine war, which is obviously Brexit.

01:00:13.000 What's going on with Brexit at the moment?

01:00:15.000 Just sum it up for people who aren't au fait with Northern Ireland discussions, the protocol, etc.

01:00:21.000 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.

01:00:36.000 Right?

01:00:37.000 That created intrinsic problems for us.

01:00:39.000 Either a barrier within Britain, or we'd all have to follow, you know, Brexit becoming useless because it wouldn't allow us to deviate from European standards and so on.

01:00:49.000 And from that, there's been a cascade of problems, which has been handled not terribly well necessarily by successive governments.

01:00:56.000 We got to a point really where we were heading towards a number of things.

01:01:03.000 One, 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.

01:01:19.000 And also, not making it difficult for the North to deal with the South as well.

01:01:26.000 What's happened in the last week or so, effectively the last few months, but it's come to the surface the last week, is 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.

01:01:44.000 It's important.

01:01:45.000 But, you know, 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.

01:01:54.000 So we're back to being a single nation.

01:01:56.000 Right?

01:01:57.000 If you're selling them to Northern Ireland to go south, then it does go through a barrier.

01:02:01.000 That's not a big deal.

01:02:03.000 We have got to the point where we've got a block on new laws being imposed on Northern Ireland, which, two blocks.

01:02:15.000 One, they will only relate to its ability to trade.

01:02:20.000 They've got to have a reference to that point.

01:02:22.000 So quite a lot have been removed.

01:02:24.000 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.

01:02:37.000 Now, when people say, oh, well, how will this work and so on?

01:02:40.000 I'll tell you how it will work.

01:02:42.000 We'll act as a disincentive for the Europeans to pick a fight over it because, you know, we have the veto. 0.53

01:02:49.000 So there'll be a lot of talking.

01:02:51.000 We'll go on, which is fine.

01:02:53.000 I've got nothing, I've got no problem with that.

01:02:55.000 So we've got, at 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.

01:03:04.000 We didn't do a Thatcher, really.

01:03:07.000 But we've, at long last, got to the point where Brexit is now looking like it's working, as it broadly should.

01:03:13.000 I mean, I would have preferred not to have to do the deals in Northern Ireland, but that pass was sold by a long time ago, which led to my resignation.

01:03:22.000 So I think we've got a good outcome.

01:03:25.000 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.

01:03:35.000 You know, and they're our biggest neighbour.

01:03:37.000 And that's what we should be aiming for.

01:03:39.000 You know, you couldn't have it at the beginning because there was bound to be tension at the beginning, the resentment and all that.

01:03:43.000 That was inevitable.

01:03:45.000 But we're now in a position where we're talking to them.

01:03:47.000 And the reasons for that, partly it's, I think, Rishi's skill.

01:03:52.000 But part of it is, they suddenly realised that if they kept pressing the way they did, they would destroy the Good Friday Agreement.

01:03:59.000 And the world would not, history would not forgive them.

01:04:02.000 And secondly, post-Ukraine, they realised that actually, we're really still very important to them.

01:04:09.000 You know, and even the people who are most resentful of Brexit, who I think the French, probably realise it most.

01:04:15.000 Because, you know, there's a major military power on the continent.

01:04:18.000 So I think that the outcome is a good outcome in the final announcement.

01:04:25.000 It's not going to be perfect.

01:04:26.000 I guarantee you, the next week, there will be loads of little wrinkles.

01:04:29.000 Oh, look, they didn't tell us about this.

01:04:31.000 There's always that in international deals.

01:04:34.000 It's a pretty good outcome.

01:04:35.000 Which is why I gave it a stronger welcome than I normally give most government actions this week.

01:04:41.000 And you don't think the DUP are going to try and scupper it?

01:04:44.000 Well, I think at the end of the day, the DUP is divided amongst itself, I think.

01:04:50.000 You know, there's a spectrum of views inside the DUP.

01:04:55.000 And I think there's a corollary which has got almost nothing to do with Brexit,

01:05:00.000 which is do they want to go back into government wishing and fame?

01:05:03.000 They don't like being in government wishing and fame, I don't think.

01:05:06.000 I mean, this is my surmise. I don't know this.

01:05:08.000 I think history will tell us that.

01:05:11.000 Like they said, I think history would tell us that.

01:05:13.000 And for whatever reason, they may not end up supporting this.

01:05:20.000 But, you know, they don't get their powers unless they go back into government.

01:05:23.000 They don't get their veto power unless they go back into government.

01:05:26.000 So I think there's a good incentive to restart the Good Friday Agreement, 0.88

01:05:29.000 the mechanisms of it.

01:05:31.000 They may abstain.

01:05:33.000 They may even vote against.

01:05:34.000 The truth of the matter is this is going to get carried in the House of Commons by over 400 votes

01:05:38.000 because Labour are going to support it.

01:05:40.000 The SNP are going to support it.

01:05:41.000 The Liberals will end up supporting it.

01:05:44.000 And it will be seen, broadly speaking, as a success.

01:05:47.000 And you've got people ranging from Steve Baker, Reece Mogg, me.

01:05:52.000 You know, people who are not later rivals to Brexit.

01:05:56.000 You know, we've been fighting these battles for a long time,

01:05:58.000 saying this is the right outcome.

01:05:59.000 And I think it is.

01:06:00.000 David, it's been an absolute pleasure.

01:06:02.000 Thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:06:04.000 It's been a wonderful conversation.

01:06:05.000 We always finish our interviews with the same question, which is,

01:06:08.000 what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

01:06:12.000 Science. Technology.

01:06:15.000 The future of the country, not the future of the world,

01:06:20.000 but the future of this country in particular, because we are such a big science superpower,

01:06:24.000 is going to be dictated by everything from DNA manipulation, modern methods of healthcare, artificial intelligence, you name it.

01:06:43.000 And the level of public discussion of technology today is...

01:06:52.000 Both of you are too young.

01:06:54.000 I've got all these old analogies.

01:06:56.000 It's sort of on a level of tomorrow's world.

01:06:58.000 It's sort of pop science.

01:06:59.000 You know, it's a science comic.

01:07:01.000 We don't have enough people in government, or in public life generally, who are scientists, who happily sit down.

01:07:09.000 So let me give you an example.

01:07:11.000 During COVID, we treated models, the product of models, as though they were facts.

01:07:17.000 Remember all those imperial models and all that stuff?

01:07:20.000 You know, I wrote along with Matt Ridley, an article in Telegraph way back at the beginning,

01:07:26.000 saying, look, for heaven's sake, stop treating this as a fact.

01:07:28.000 He's got every lasting prediction wrong in all the pandemic so far.

01:07:33.000 Why should we think it's true now?

01:07:35.000 So things like that, the use of mathematics, the use of scientific techniques and so on, are very, very poorly understood in public life.

01:07:43.000 It's not so true in places like Singapore and Japan.

01:07:48.000 But in this country, we've got to wake up that science, technology, engineering, mathematics are the future.

01:07:55.000 And it's about time government started understanding it and talking about it properly, and the public at large.

01:08:01.000 I want to, my throwaway last policy for you, I want to do away with university loans for STEM subjects.

01:08:09.000 I would like to put science, technology, engineering and maths on a grant basis, a full grant basis for anybody who wants to do it.

01:08:17.000 Why do I want to do it?

01:08:18.000 One, because of the reason I just told you.

01:08:20.000 Two, because I think it would be a way of pulling really clever working class kids into higher education,

01:08:26.000 because they'll look at it as risky at the moment, and give them proper careers, which is not happening at the moment.

01:08:32.000 So, you know, it's a very grand, broad subject, and I could sit and talk for hours on it.

01:08:38.000 But that, for me, is the big hole in modern politics.

01:08:43.000 David, that's a great point.

01:08:45.000 Of course, you're cancelling all the amazing media studies graduates we've produced over the last many decades in that process.

01:08:52.000 It's been an absolute pleasure.

01:08:53.000 We're going to ask you a couple of questions that our supporters have submitted that only they will get to see on Locals.

01:08:58.000 But for now, thank you so much for coming on the show, and thank you guys for watching and listening.

01:09:02.000 My pleasure.

01:09:03.000 We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or our show.

01:09:06.000 All of them go out at 7pm UK time.

01:09:08.000 And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.

01:09:12.000 Take care and see you soon, guys.

01:09:15.000 This is a very good question from Clean Purple Bunny.

01:09:18.000 What a name.

01:09:19.000 Would you regret most about the British government's response to COVID and your fight against it?

01:09:28.000 We are a little bit concerned here, but I'll consult in a��ings at the end of the war.

01:09:44.000 I have my Olanum.

01:09:46.000 I'm getting fallen without go.

01:09:47.000 I hope you liked that!

01:09:48.000 It's a very good question.

01:09:49.000 You do everything.

01:09:51.000 I think there's nobody but the את objet beingkurr to assist me. 0.96

01:09:53.000 Tell them a chance for me.

TRIGGERnometry - March 13, 2023

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

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