TRIGGERnometry - Political Persuasion From Blair to Trump

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin.

00:00:08.980 And this is a show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they

00:00:13.820 know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts.

00:00:20.120 Our absolutely brilliant guest this week is a former chief speechwriter for Prime Minister.

00:00:25.240 He is the chief leader writer for The Times and the author of When They Go Low, We Go High.

00:00:30.300 Philip Collins, welcome to Triggerometry.

00:00:31.940 Hello. Delighted to be here.

00:00:33.040 Well, for anyone who doesn't know you, and before we go on, I should say,

00:00:36.280 Philip used to speech write for Tony Blair, but that was after the Iraq war,

00:00:39.940 so please don't switch off.

00:00:42.900 Tell everybody, I mentioned a few biographical details,

00:00:45.980 just tell everybody who you are, how are you, where you are,

00:00:48.200 what's been your journey through life?

00:00:49.420 Well, the point of where my career kind of took off

00:00:53.360 was when I went to work for Tony Blair, but that was a slightly random event

00:00:55.920 because I'd never written a speech before in my life.

00:00:58.120 the very first speech I ever wrote was for Tony Blair. I'd written in all kinds of different

00:01:02.960 formats. I'd written novels. I'd written plays. I'd written lots of comedy sketches. And I loved

00:01:08.040 writing. I'd also worked in politics, and I'd also worked in television. And I'd been an academic,

00:01:13.060 a political philosopher. So I'd had all these sorts of random things. I never stuck at anything,

00:01:17.660 my mom used to say. And it kind of all came together in political speech writing. So the

00:01:22.240 desire to write and craft arguments, which I got from philosophy, came together with

00:01:27.040 political interest and this person, this leader who really wanted to speak, who I was basically

00:01:33.180 in sympathy with politically, though I didn't agree with him on everything. And it just all

00:01:37.280 came together. And I knew people who worked for Blair from my previous life in working for Frank

00:01:42.800 Field many years before. And they approached me and said, Blair's looking for someone. And I

00:01:48.260 decided I wanted to be the speechwriter. I insisted that I would come, but only if I could

00:01:54.360 write speeches. They said to me, don't do that. That's a graveyard job. It's awful. He writes all

00:01:59.640 his own speeches. He hates people helping him. It's a terrible job. I said, no, that's the thing

00:02:05.000 I want to do. That was the best decision I ever made because it meant, as a speechwriter, I had

00:02:11.000 a real job, a very specific job. Nobody else wanted my job, which is really important inside

00:02:16.260 Downing Street. It meant I got to spend a lot of time with the prime minister because I needed to

00:02:20.760 hear all the time what he was thinking. So it was a slightly random event, even relating it like

00:02:26.760 that. I can't quite remember why I thought that, but I did. And that's what happened. And ever

00:02:32.500 since I left Downing Street, I've carried on writing speeches for lots of business people

00:02:36.520 and other politicians too. So I've written hundreds of them now.

00:02:41.220 And I was going to say, what is the way that you craft a speech? How do you do it? Is it,

00:02:45.860 because I've written for comedians, do you do it in the politician's voice? Or do you think,

00:02:50.580 right this is what they sort of want to say and I'm going to do it what I think or how does it

00:02:55.700 work yeah it's very interesting there is a sort of mimicry there sort of but you've got to be

00:02:59.900 careful that when I went to work for Blair he was just going through that period where his early

00:03:04.520 period where he didn't use any verbs you know you know new labor yes marvelous wonderful all that

00:03:09.840 you know one word sentences great impression although I have to say as a former primary

00:03:15.720 school teacher who taught English I'm disgusted at the lack of verbs well quite right so was I

00:03:20.260 So was I.

00:03:21.360 And so my job was to put verbs in, was to go from these very short, curtailed sentences

00:03:27.920 to proper arguments.

00:03:29.980 So my task was to change him a little bit.

00:03:32.740 So whilst you are trying to get his voice because you want this continuous character

00:03:36.980 to unfold through time, I was also trying to change him.

00:03:40.360 So that's a difficult thing.

00:03:42.480 You need to get to know someone quite well.

00:03:44.360 You need to get a sense of their voice.

00:03:46.380 But at the same time, you're trying to capture them at their best at all times.

00:03:50.140 So you're trying to give them the sort of edited highlights of who they are.

00:03:53.240 So whenever I work with people now, I say, we want it to sound like you, but you're at your really very best.

00:03:58.860 So let's take all the best things you've ever said, and let's put them all together and edit out all the rubbish bits.

00:04:04.640 And that, it will still sound like you, but at an elevated, heightened form.

00:04:08.260 And that's what I'm trying to do when I'm capturing a voice.

00:04:11.400 And what was it like for you coming in from, obviously you said you had worked in politics, but you clearly had a career that was much broader than that.

00:04:19.060 and suddenly you're in this place which is all about the politics 24-7, I imagine.

00:04:24.320 It's intense.

00:04:25.260 Everything is last minute.

00:04:26.400 What was that like?

00:04:27.180 Well, it was like that, but it also wasn't in the sense that Blair was very easy to work for.

00:04:31.840 And the calendar is reasonably fixed.

00:04:35.260 So I knew when the speech was, and so I had these sort of staging posts.

00:04:39.960 And I'm just quite inclined to do things at the last minute.

00:04:42.740 That's how I like to work.

00:04:44.100 I like the adrenaline rush of the deadline, and he was like that too.

00:04:47.940 Nobody else in the building was.

00:04:49.120 They used to go mad that with a day to go, we hadn't really started.

00:04:52.620 People start too early, in my view.

00:04:54.260 You just leave it until the last minute, and then eventually the rush comes.

00:04:57.860 That's what I'm doing for my Edinburgh show.

00:04:59.560 I think that's admirable.

00:05:01.000 I think it'll be marvelous.

00:05:02.320 It'll go swimmingly.

00:05:04.960 I used to have this, the procedure was for every speech, about a week before, 10 days before the speech was due,

00:05:12.360 we'd have a meeting with a bunch of the team to discuss what we might say.

00:05:16.960 And you couldn't do it before then because politics moves so quickly.

00:05:19.860 Anything you did before then would simply be eradicated and date.

00:05:23.620 So you'd have that meeting.

00:05:25.160 You'd come to a provisional idea of what you might talk about.

00:05:27.740 I would go away and commission work and research it and talk to the relevant ministers and square people off, et cetera.

00:05:34.180 I wouldn't write anything at this point.

00:05:36.020 And then with a couple of days to go, we'd have another meeting where I was supposed to present what I was going to suggest.

00:05:42.680 And about an hour before that meeting, I'd hastily scribble something down, present it there.

00:05:48.120 At that meeting, Blair would always, always say, oh, but I didn't want that.

00:05:53.320 I wanted this.

00:05:53.940 I wanted that.

00:05:54.460 You haven't put any of this in.

00:05:55.960 And when I was inexperienced, I'd made the mistake of saying to him, no, it's all in there.

00:05:59.740 Look, all of that stuff is in there.

00:06:01.800 What I learned to do was to say, yes, okay, definitely.

00:06:05.440 Then the next day, I'd give him exactly the same script.

00:06:08.160 And he'd say, oh, yeah, that's much better.

00:06:10.580 That's what I meant.

00:06:11.480 Are you exaggerating here?

00:06:12.780 Are you genuinely, is that genuine?

00:06:14.160 I'm exaggerating only a little bit.

00:06:15.840 So you change a couple of comments and suddenly he'll be like, yeah.

00:06:18.180 I change a little bit.

00:06:18.920 But I would say, I'd take the criticism.

00:06:21.100 I'd say, yeah, absolutely.

00:06:22.200 And then I'd give him essentially the same thing the following day.

00:06:25.300 And he would feel then that, yeah, yeah, that's what I wanted.

00:06:28.340 And at that point, we'd get serious.

00:06:31.000 And then it really kicked off on the morning of every speech where I would go into Downing Street very early,

00:06:36.540 sort of 5 or 6 in the morning, and he would have my script, which I would have given him.

00:06:41.320 And he would go up to his flat, and he'd be sitting there in his dressing gown or his boxer shorts.

00:06:45.940 It was a beautiful image.

00:06:48.200 And he'd be sitting over in the corner, and he would have my script, and he would be scribbling on it.

00:06:55.040 And with a fountain pen, he'd write all over it.

00:06:57.740 And then we'd cut and paste his bits and my bits.

00:07:00.900 And when I say cut and paste, I don't mean any newfangled computer terminology.

00:07:05.380 I mean literally cutting with scissors his bits and my bits.

00:07:08.940 And then we'd take them downstairs to the place where all the typists sat and we'd paste

00:07:13.820 them on a piece of paper and create this collage that was then the script.

00:07:18.640 I would take that away.

00:07:19.640 This would be like within an hour to go.

00:07:21.600 I'd take it away and then type through it to ensure that all the transitions between

00:07:25.840 his bits and my bits were smooth and that it made sense as an unfolding argument.

00:07:30.520 And that would then be the thing which we'd just about finish in time to go up on the

00:07:34.460 autocue.

00:07:35.460 Now, this is a ludicrous way to work, a terrible way to behave.

00:07:38.880 I wouldn't recommend it to anybody, but it sort of worked.

00:07:43.160 And was part of that down to the fact that your styles meshed together quite nicely?

00:07:48.940 And was it also down to the fact that Blair was and continues to be a superb orator?

00:07:53.260 Yeah, we did mesh.

00:07:55.820 We also, I think, brought complementary things because my task was to provide the body of the argument.

00:08:00.460 So most of the speeches I worked on ended up being his introduction, a political setting

00:08:05.380 of the scene at the beginning, which was more or less in his voice and his words, then the

00:08:09.860 body of the argument, which I would have right.

00:08:12.200 I came to realize that I shouldn't be precious about any words as such.

00:08:16.540 There's a real mistake you can make is to think that, no, it's got to be those words.

00:08:19.900 If you don't make the argument in those words, then I've failed.

00:08:23.440 Actually, what I wanted to get through was the correct argument.

00:08:26.100 So the main body of the speech would be mine, where all the facts and the illustrations

00:08:30.200 would be.

00:08:31.200 Then he would usually write the ending.

00:08:33.140 He'd write a kind of flourish at the end, which would be a political message.

00:08:36.440 That was usually the structure we ended up with.

00:08:39.880 That worked quite nicely because by the end, he came to trust me that I would get the argument

00:08:45.220 right.

00:08:46.220 You've got to remember, you've got to have a certain humility that you are writing for

00:08:49.480 him.

00:08:50.480 It's not me.

00:08:51.480 the Prime Minister, not me. Perhaps wrongly, but he was. And so there are times when you're

00:08:58.660 writing things that you don't necessarily entirely believe, but you have to make the

00:09:02.440 best possible argument that he wants to make, not import your own argument. And it's important

00:09:07.820 that you recognize that's a fact.

00:09:09.860 See, I'm glad you brought that up, because at what point as a script writer can you actually

00:09:14.940 go, do you know what, I vehemently disagree with what this may be? So for instance, it's

00:09:20.160 interesting that you say you came after the Iraq war. So a lot of people would say, hang on,

00:09:25.800 I mean, there's very legitimate arguments to say that Blair is a war criminal. Would you not feel

00:09:32.120 as a speechwriter, slightly morally compromised by representing his views? I think if you do,

00:09:39.660 if you get to the point where you just think, I can't do this, that's the point where you have to

00:09:43.260 leave. You have to judge that. It didn't occur to me on that issue. Prior to joining, I thought

00:09:51.780 the case for the right war was a poor one and I was opposed to it. However, I never thought

00:09:57.880 that that meant he lied about it because knowing what the chronology of it was, I know that's

00:10:04.580 not conceivable. He couldn't possibly have lied about it because everybody thought that

00:10:09.040 they had the weapons. The error they made was the use of that material. They exaggerated,

00:10:17.000 I think, the certainty they felt about it to uphold an opinion. But that rhetorically is

00:10:24.160 what you always do. You always make the best possible case. You think, well, I'm going

00:10:27.400 to do X rather than Y. Therefore, I'll make the best possible case for X. And that's what

00:10:31.780 they did. And I think probably culpably and wrongly. So I was always opposed to it. But

00:10:36.600 I never felt it was so clear-cut that it meant I couldn't do it.

00:10:40.620 The one speech I worked on where I really was a long way from his sensibility was on

00:10:46.780 identity cards.

00:10:49.340 I was much, much more liberal on crime and home affairs than he was.

00:10:54.240 He was quite right-wing on all that stuff.

00:10:56.800 He was very strongly in favor of British people having identity cards, and I wasn't.

00:11:01.900 And I thought, well, is this a resigning issue?

00:11:04.300 Do I care so much that I have to give up and walk away?

00:11:08.980 And I concluded, no, I don't care that much.

00:11:12.120 It's not a sort of defining issue of my life.

00:11:15.680 And the weird thing was I wrote probably the best speech I wrote for him, the most forensically tight speech I'd ever did,

00:11:23.240 because I was so accustomed to why this was a terrible idea, identity cards.

00:11:28.220 I avoided all the terrible arguments for it and found quite strong arguments for it.

00:11:33.040 And I gave him something which was quite unusual, but he really liked it.

00:11:37.840 So weirdly, that distance from the argument helped me.

00:11:41.880 You know, that is such an interesting point because one of the things we're kind of trying to stay away from in this interview,

00:11:47.160 but we talk about a lot, is the culture wars that are kind of happening now.

00:11:50.340 And one of the things seems to be is the desire to shut down the opposing argument.

00:11:55.020 And, of course, one of the greatest weaknesses of that process is you don't ever learn to understand how other people think and to present the counter argument.

00:12:02.300 That's absolutely right. Good speeches. Speeches fail a lot because people caricature the opposing argument. This happens in politics all the time. Gordon Brown used to do this really badly. If I were to do a speech as a Labour spokesman and I went to an audience which comprises people who are Labour, Tory and other things in between, and I were to say to them, the Conservative Party is deliberately impoverishing the nation, they're deliberately targeting the poor because

00:12:32.280 they relish the pain that the poor feel.

00:12:35.660 If I'm a conservative voter in the audience, I'd think, that's not me.

00:12:40.520 That's not what I think, actually.

00:12:42.020 I don't think that at all.

00:12:44.360 Whereas if you were to say instead that the Conservative Party doesn't give due priority

00:12:49.380 to the needs of the poor, and its desire to get the public finances under control, it

00:12:54.680 is doing so at the cost of the poor, that's different.

00:12:59.280 That's not a caricature.

00:13:01.120 That might make the conservative voters think, hmm, I fear that might be true.

00:13:05.880 So to be a little bit more generous to your opponents is actually a really good way of

00:13:09.500 then taking them on.

00:13:11.420 In politics, you don't get that very often.

00:13:13.000 I always try to get that into speeches, that you need to name the opposing argument.

00:13:17.880 I'll give you a really good historical example, Elizabeth I at Tilbury.

00:13:22.420 She's the leader of the armed forces.

00:13:23.920 She's queen.

00:13:24.920 Spanish Armada are gathered, ready to try and invade, and all the navy there just think,

00:13:31.880 you're a woman, you can't possibly command the armed forces, it's ridiculous.

00:13:35.920 She goes there to address them, and instead of pretending that's not what they think,

00:13:39.820 she absolutely names that argument.

00:13:41.620 She says, I may have the weak and feeble body of a woman, but I have the heart and stomach

00:13:45.380 of a king.

00:13:46.740 She goes straight to the perceived weakness of the argument, tells them what they're thinking

00:13:52.640 exactly as they are thinking it, and then turns it around. She wins a standing ovation.

00:13:57.040 And the idea that we have of Elizabeth as this formidable queen dates from that speech,

00:14:00.580 from that moment. And if you name the argument properly, and if I tell you or describe to you

00:14:07.240 what you're thinking already in terms which you recognize, and you think, yes, that's a reasonable

00:14:12.220 account of what I think, then I'm in a better position to engage with you if I take you on,

00:14:18.040 because you at least feel I've done you the courtesy of understanding what you think,

00:14:21.760 rather than if I say you're an obvious murderer

00:14:24.820 and a loathsome individual,

00:14:27.280 you think, actually...

00:14:28.980 Spot on.

00:14:30.320 I may be, but it's not how I think of myself.

00:14:34.420 Well, see, this is what I'm curious to get your opinion on

00:14:37.500 because, as you say, in politics,

00:14:38.900 it doesn't seem to happen often.

00:14:40.760 But in the last five years,

00:14:42.220 I think we've gone way off the deep end on that.

00:14:44.820 I mean, you had David Lammy talking about conservatives

00:14:48.040 as worse than Nazis, not just Nazis,

00:14:50.600 worse than Nazis.

00:14:53.820 Nazis were better dressed

00:14:54.900 than conservatives on the whole.

00:14:56.880 Well, Jacob Rees-Mogg

00:14:57.740 has got a bit of style.

00:14:58.740 Give him some credit.

00:15:00.140 I don't know if that's the only time

00:15:00.880 that's ever been said.

00:15:02.120 He has.

00:15:03.300 He's got a style.

00:15:04.560 Say what you want about Jacob Rees-Mogg.

00:15:06.240 He's got an authentic feel to him.

00:15:07.900 You know who that guy is.

00:15:09.080 You may not like him,

00:15:09.940 but you know who it is.

00:15:11.040 Right.

00:15:11.480 But we've got to this point

00:15:12.740 where we don't,

00:15:14.220 we're not even talking about

00:15:15.640 the argument anymore.

00:15:16.500 It's just you Nazi,

00:15:17.700 you this, you that.

00:15:18.760 It's name calling, isn't it?

00:15:19.660 Yeah.

00:15:19.880 It's insulting.

00:15:20.600 it's really, really bad. We're dialing up rhetorically to 11. I mean, David Lammy's speech

00:15:27.040 was really bad. I mean, David Lammy is a very interesting speaker because he's got the biggest

00:15:31.480 range between his good days and his bad days of any politician I've ever seen because David

00:15:35.800 is capable of being extremely good, really eloquent, and really powerful, and really

00:15:40.040 thoughtful. He's also capable of being terrible, as that speech indicates, because that is

00:15:44.960 absolutely ridiculous to describe anybody as worse than nuts. No, they're not. They're

00:15:51.780 really not. It's a stupid thing. And it does certainly cause no good because you don't

00:15:56.840 come away thinking, oh, those Tories, yeah, they're about to commit genocide. You come

00:16:01.160 away thinking David Lammy's lost it.

00:16:02.700 Yeah, absolutely.

00:16:03.500 So you've got to be careful. You've got to stay within the bounds of plausibility. But

00:16:07.960 I do agree with the premise of your question, which is we are becoming more raucous. We're

00:16:12.040 becoming less generous, less civil, and politicians are contributing to that.

00:16:16.660 I mean, the obvious example is Donald Trump in the States and Nigel Farage's sort of smaller

00:16:22.160 version here.

00:16:23.700 Trump is the one who's really dialing it up.

00:16:27.140 I mean, I noticed the first time I saw Trump, every American president goes to Gettysburg

00:16:32.980 to do a version of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

00:16:35.520 They all do it, the sort of cover version.

00:16:37.280 It's a rite of passage.

00:16:38.400 And they all go and they do exactly the same speech, really, which is a peon of praise

00:16:42.640 to the American Republic, like Lincoln did.

00:16:45.620 And it's kind of moving.

00:16:47.780 They're all cliches, really.

00:16:49.220 But it's nice that they do it, because what they're saying is, this is a secular liberal

00:16:53.380 democratic government, and we're paying our respects.

00:16:55.640 It is a cemetery, after all, the Civil War cemetery, and you're literally standing in

00:16:59.060 front of graves.

00:17:00.060 So it's a nice moment.

00:17:04.260 The only president who didn't do that was Kennedy, because on the day he was due in

00:17:07.100 Gettysburg to do the centenary address, he had to go down to Dallas instead on important

00:17:11.860 party business.

00:17:12.860 The next day he was shot, never came back.

00:17:15.940 And then in the campaign in 2016, Trump went to Gettysburg.

00:17:21.500 And Abraham Lincoln spoke for two minutes, 45 seconds, the Gettysburg address.

00:17:25.580 Trump spoke for 45 minutes.

00:17:28.460 Lincoln did a lovely eulogy to government of the people, for the people, by the people.

00:17:34.300 called Hillary Clinton a criminal, said American politics was rigged, said the media were out to

00:17:40.160 get the people, said that the political class was corrupt and was rigging everything against it.

00:17:46.280 And it was just a horrendous speech. It would have been awful anywhere, but to do it there

00:17:52.600 in Gettysburg deliberately was a real indication that he wasn't going to play by the rules.

00:17:57.840 I thought that is a real escalation. Well, that is something I wanted to ask you about,

00:18:01.880 because you can criticize Donald Trump for a lot of things, but not in terms of effectiveness.

00:18:07.800 He's clearly an effective orator. And a lot of people have been very snooty about him because

00:18:13.160 he doesn't speak very clearly. He doesn't come across as someone who's conventionally articulate,

00:18:19.380 shall we say. But there is no doubt that he's persuasive.

00:18:22.000 Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, persuasion comes in many forms and he actually

00:18:26.900 has persuasion. People talk a lot about authenticity and it's a very good example.

00:18:31.120 we need to be wary of authenticity because some people are really authentic but fucking awful.

00:18:38.520 Trump is extremely authentic. That is what he's like. He's really good at it. He has a character.

00:18:43.940 And the word character is very important in persuasion through speeches. And you think of

00:18:47.720 the dual meaning of character. Character is something that we play. So when you're speaking

00:18:52.020 on a podium, it's not a natural event to speak uninterrupted for half an hour. You have to play

00:18:57.260 yourself. You have to get into character. You know, it's not that unlike going on stage as a

00:19:03.340 sort of supercharged version of yourself if you're doing a sort of comic routine or some kind of

00:19:07.560 cabaret. You are yourself, but you're not like that all the time. But there's a connection between

00:19:12.640 the two and being a rhetorician is like that. But character is also something that you have.

00:19:18.020 You know, we have character. And so you're displaying that sense of character. And that's

00:19:22.260 That's where we get the idea of authenticity from, and Trump is really good at this.

00:19:26.380 If you go back to Aristotle, which is one of the only trades in which you can get, comedy

00:19:31.660 being another, where you can go right back to the classics and the analysis of how they

00:19:35.700 do it is the same today as it was then.

00:19:38.180 Rhetoric is like this, and Aristotle says three things.

00:19:41.160 There's character, which he calls ethos.

00:19:43.500 There's pathos, which means emotion, and then there's logos, which means rational argument.

00:19:49.600 like Trump, communicates so much through character that you know so much about him just from

00:19:54.640 the way he is, you know, businesses will be brand, and in rhetoric it's character.

00:19:59.620 And he uses emotional arguments all the time.

00:20:02.280 And Aristotle's view, which I'm sure is right, is that character and emotion are far more

00:20:06.620 effective in persuasion than rational argument.

00:20:10.260 Look at the European referendum debate in 2016.

00:20:14.480 side leave full of emotion, full of character. The other side remain full of rational arguments

00:20:20.440 and arithmetic and numbers. And the emotional argument prevailed. And you need all of those

00:20:27.180 elements in a really persuasive argument. And Trump is very effective. I agree. He's

00:20:32.200 extremely good at what he does.

00:20:34.600 He seems to me, when I watch him, he's very much like a stand-up comedian in that he's

00:20:38.960 a disruptive force. There is a status quo. He comes in and he disrupts it and he plays

00:20:44.080 it. How much responsibility do you think Trump needs to take for his words so it's drain the

00:20:49.540 swamp, you know, the American dream is dead, to this sense of crisis that we seem to have in

00:20:55.960 America? Well, I think he does, but I don't think he will. I mean, I think, you know, he can't be

00:21:00.080 absolved of the usual rules. He did say those things. He does say some terrible things. He

00:21:04.580 says them repeatedly. And he has got the knack of appearing spontaneous, but it's not wholly

00:21:09.780 spontaneous, it's choreographed, and it's planned. And during the election campaign,

00:21:14.340 he was very disciplined when he went to Michigan and Ohio, the old Rust Belt states. He gave a

00:21:19.480 very disciplined speech about how those people had been cheated by globalization. So his messages

00:21:25.020 are pretty clear, and they're pretty thought through. He's not just shooting from the hip.

00:21:30.340 You know, he has a script. You know, he might seem like, it's like Billy Connolly, you know,

00:21:34.740 away he goes, but it's all there. There's a sort of, there's a thread. And Trump is like that too.

00:21:39.080 So I think he does have to take responsibility, and it's up to other politicians to make him

00:21:44.220 take responsibility, not just the Democrat Party, but also the Republicans.

00:21:48.000 So I blame lots of the people in the Republican Party for letting this man be their candidate.

00:21:53.420 They knew what he was like.

00:21:54.940 They saw that Gettysburg speech I quoted.

00:21:57.600 They saw exactly what he was like.

00:21:59.180 They knew what he was going to do.

00:22:00.700 They knew that his whole appeal was to escalate the culture wars, and they knew that that

00:22:04.960 would make politics even less pleasant than it was already.

00:22:08.160 Hard to imagine, is that it? Yeah, absolutely. But I was thinking on the flip side of it,

00:22:13.380 a person who I respect, who I thought was incredibly eloquent, who I thought was incredibly

00:22:19.680 articulate, inspiring was Barack Obama. And I also feel like he got away with a lot of things

00:22:25.580 because he was articulate and eloquent. A lot of things that if, say, Trump was doing them,

00:22:31.240 we would be outraged. And we are. In fact, he's doing many of the same things that Obama did in

00:22:35.400 terms of immigration. Barack Obama was way worse in terms of foreign policy, in terms of bombing

00:22:40.640 other countries, etc. But he seemed to get away with it a lot more because he was this kind of

00:22:45.300 statesman-like figure. Yeah, Obama was definitely the best speaker in my political lifetime. Just

00:22:52.120 look at how he did it and what he was able to do with words. He was extraordinary. I mean,

00:22:57.080 he came from really nowhere. And he won the presidency because he was so, so good. At his

00:23:02.060 best too. He's very moving. But there's something about Obama which makes him good, which no

00:23:08.100 one else has got. And it's not the crafting of the words. We can all, anyone who's good

00:23:13.000 can do that. It's the fact that behind Barack Obama lies a story. I have lost count of the

00:23:18.660 number of last years, of the number of politicians have come to me and said, can you make me

00:23:21.940 a bit like Barack Obama? And I have to say to them all, let me count the ways in which

00:23:28.900 you are not like Barack Obama.

00:23:30.240 I love it. Obviously, you can't say if Michael Gove came up to you.

00:23:34.200 Let's count the ways in which he's not like Barack Obama. One, he's not Barack Obama.

00:23:38.460 Two, he's not president of the United States, which gives you a certain license to be grand

00:23:43.000 in a way even prime minister of the UK, it doesn't. But three, most important of all,

00:23:47.360 you're not a black man who's president of the United States when there's people who

00:23:51.380 live in that country still remember segregated cities. Now, that is a story. He has behind

00:23:56.000 him the legacy of civil rights.

00:23:58.340 And at his very best, like the speech he did on the night of his first election victory

00:24:02.260 in Grand Park in Chicago, where he talks about a 102-year-old woman in Alabama coming to

00:24:08.100 the polling booth to vote for the first time for a black candidate to be president of the

00:24:12.760 United States.

00:24:13.760 He's using her as a metaphor for the progress of the country, and it's incredibly moving.

00:24:18.120 And if anyone else said that, of course, it just wouldn't...you know, if you're on just

00:24:22.000 after lunch at the local government Chronicle conference talking about housing benefit.

00:24:26.820 That's not going to work.

00:24:27.820 You can't do that kind of thing.

00:24:29.740 He has a grandeur, Obama, that other people simply can't have.

00:24:34.240 That gives him a lot.

00:24:35.540 That's the ethos.

00:24:36.540 That's the character he's got.

00:24:38.360 That's more important in writing brilliantly than anything else.

00:24:42.520 It's not the writing so much as the setting, the moment.

00:24:45.400 I'll give you another classic example, a really great example, Churchill, who in the

00:24:51.680 In the wartime, he becomes a great, you know, mobilized English language, as said of him.

00:24:56.000 But if you go back to 1899, Churchill's 24 years of age, he's a candidate for the Liberal

00:25:01.340 Party in Oldham, in the Northwest, and he stands up in a church hall, sits on a podium,

00:25:06.560 there's about seven people there, and he's talking about food rations.

00:25:10.920 And he says, never before in the history of Oldham have so many people had so much to

00:25:16.360 eat.

00:25:17.360 And there's a sort of incredibly lavish rhetoric.

00:25:21.900 Then eight years later, he's a junior minister in the colonial department in Africa.

00:25:26.320 And he's standing around a hole in the ground at the opening of an irrigation scheme.

00:25:30.360 There's about seven dignitaries in this vast expanse.

00:25:33.480 So you can imagine acoustics aren't great.

00:25:35.460 And again, he sits on a podium and he says, never before in the history of Africa have

00:25:40.300 so much water been held up by so little masonry.

00:25:45.660 It's rubbish.

00:25:47.360 1940, suddenly, in the House of Commons, never before in the field of human history has so

00:25:53.540 much been owed by so many to so few. Exactly the same construction, exactly the same rhetorical

00:25:59.780 flourish, but all of a sudden, the country's in peril. We might be about to be invaded.

00:26:05.260 It seems to fit. The idea of decorum is a rhetorical term. It comes from Cicero, and

00:26:11.740 it's decorous, it fits the moment. Whereas before, he's talking at a level of elevation

00:26:17.720 which is too big for an irrigation scheme. And when people get things wrong in rhetoric,

00:26:23.680 they're doing that, they're going far too high for the moment. You've got to hit the

00:26:28.420 moment. You've got to be appropriate to your audience, to your time. And if your audience

00:26:33.660 is a bit flat and your subject's a bit boring, well, you don't have to be boring, but you

00:26:37.760 You have to be plain.

00:26:39.560 You can't go too high.

00:26:41.360 And lots of inexperienced writers reach for purple prose.

00:26:45.200 See, man, this is why my punchlines don't work as well as I think,

00:26:47.700 because the audience isn't good enough.

00:26:49.360 I need to be playing the Apollo, then I'm going to be crushing it.

00:26:52.500 You need to be on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

00:26:54.120 Exactly.

00:26:54.820 Martin Luther, at the end of the march in Washington.

00:26:56.640 What Constantine is trying to ask is,

00:26:58.380 can you turn him into Barack Obama?

00:27:01.160 Hey, man, I've got the story.

00:27:02.880 Let me count the ways.

00:27:04.840 I've got the story.

00:27:05.840 But when it comes to speech writing, how important?

00:27:09.340 So it's a lot like stand-up comedy.

00:27:11.780 And I think it was a very good British comedian, Russell Kane, said that stand-up comedy, about 10% of what you say, 90% is delivery.

00:27:19.860 Would you agree with that when it comes to speech writing, political oration?

00:27:24.360 I would, yeah.

00:27:25.220 I mean, Demothemes, who was one of the greats of speech writing, said there are three things that you need for a great speech.

00:27:29.980 Delivery, delivery, delivery.

00:27:31.540 So I think that's largely true.

00:27:33.780 I think all of that stuff about character and ethos and emotion largely comes across

00:27:38.460 through delivery.

00:27:40.220 The task of the writer is to write with the grain of that.

00:27:44.340 It's to provide that character sketch so that you don't get this dissonance between the

00:27:48.760 words that you're saying and the character that you've already established.

00:27:52.120 Delivery is crucially important, and not many people can do it.

00:27:55.520 One of the tasks I always give people when I'm trying to get them to be better is to

00:27:59.000 watch yourself with the sound down.

00:28:01.200 Watch yourself back, but turn the sound down.

00:28:03.280 do we get? What you get is loads of character. You get a lot of information from people just

00:28:08.360 wandering around or standing at a podium and say, well, you've already got a character.

00:28:13.460 Gordon Brown was a good example because he gave you weight, gravity, without doing anything.

00:28:17.600 He just had that in his demeanor. But what he would do is write in a weighty, grave way.

00:28:24.940 And that was too much. So it just felt like incredibly serious and just way too much.

00:28:30.980 what he should have done is lighten it a little bit

00:28:33.700 in the writing with a little bit of poetry

00:28:35.880 for example because it would have been authentic

00:28:37.580 because he did read poetry and it was

00:28:39.740 believable

00:28:40.480 you've got to make sure that you're writing in a believable way

00:28:43.980 I learnt this by

00:28:45.500 I used to write for John Prescott quite a bit

00:28:47.900 I used to get told to try and help him out

00:28:50.500 and I gave him

00:28:51.940 Sorry, it's an involuntary response

00:28:54.660 Yeah but just wait till I tell you the story

00:28:56.040 although it's really

00:28:58.260 my fault rather than his

00:28:59.320 But I found this story, which is a standard speechwriter's opening story.

00:29:04.700 It's probably apocryphal, but it works really well.

00:29:07.320 And it's allegedly about Dr. Johnson and Boswell in their house, in Johnson's house in Gough Square, just off Fleet Street.

00:29:13.900 And incredibly narrow streets.

00:29:16.120 And you can, someone who's in this side of the street can lean out the window and reach someone on that side of the street.

00:29:22.340 And Johnson's alleged to have seen two women leaning out of their windows on the respective sides of the street, hitting each other with sticks.

00:29:28.760 and he's turned to Boswell and he said,

00:29:31.060 those two women will never agree because they're arguing from different premises.

00:29:35.140 Nice little setup for a speech about different premises.

00:29:39.480 So Prescott does the setup really nicely, tells the story,

00:29:43.680 and then he hits the audience with the punchline.

00:29:45.500 Those two women will never agree because they're arguing from different buildings.

00:29:50.320 Right?

00:29:51.040 Which doesn't make any sense at all.

00:29:53.160 There's no metaphorical impact at all.

00:29:54.960 It's just a rubbish story at the beginning of a speech about something else.

00:29:59.640 And I realized that was my fault because even if he had told it correctly

00:30:03.900 and got the play on words, that's not the sort of thing he would say.

00:30:08.560 That was an obvious insertion by a clever, clever speechwriter.

00:30:12.520 It's bad writing because I wasn't writing in character.

00:30:15.840 So you've got to keep writing in character.

00:30:17.500 So it is like writing, in a sense, it's like writing a character in a play

00:30:21.880 Whereas, you know, your character has to kind of unfold, but not depart from what we expect of them or is reasonable for them to say.

00:30:51.880 And if a speechwriter writes a duff line, which we, you know, as writers, we have all written duff lines.

00:31:07.300 My favorite example of a duff line, and you would probably know that, is Ian Duncan Smith when he was leader of the Conservative Party.

00:31:14.440 And do you remember the line?

00:31:15.320 Yeah, it was the quiet man.

00:31:16.940 It's turning up the volume, yes.

00:31:19.360 Whose fault is that?

00:31:20.540 Was it the delivery?

00:31:21.640 Is it the speechwriter?

00:31:22.640 Is it a bit of both?

00:31:23.640 It's a bit of both.

00:31:24.640 It's a bit of both.

00:31:25.640 In that one, I can see what they're trying to do because they've been called hopeless

00:31:30.640 and they were trying to counteract.

00:31:32.640 They were trying to name the central weakness, take it on, and then counteract it.

00:31:36.640 So I can see the thought process.

00:31:38.640 I can see it's not a great line.

00:31:41.640 It could have been a lot better.

00:31:42.640 But the delivery is truly shocking, isn't it?

00:31:45.640 If you remember it, the quiet man is turning up the volume.

00:31:49.640 You know, he just shouts at random.

00:31:52.160 It was really, really terrible.

00:31:54.160 I think if he'd been, in a sense, if he'd been very good at delivering it, he wouldn't

00:31:58.480 have needed the line because the line was a concession that he was rubbish.

00:32:02.780 So if he hadn't been rubbish, he wouldn't have needed to do it.

00:32:04.900 So in a way, he was bound to get it wrong because he was so awful.

00:32:08.640 Another good example of someone who wasn't awful but was terrible as a speaker was Mrs.

00:32:12.720 Thatcher.

00:32:13.780 So, I mean, she was very effective, but she was odd.

00:32:17.860 And she notoriously had no real sense of humor.

00:32:21.500 And she was given a line.

00:32:22.620 That's a surprise.

00:32:23.660 Yeah, she was given a line by one of her speechwriters.

00:32:27.120 It was meant to mock the Liberal Party at the time.

00:32:30.340 And they'd just gotten this new logo, which looked like a dead parrot.

00:32:34.080 And so they just used it.

00:32:35.380 It was lame even then to use a dead parrot sketch, but they did.

00:32:38.680 They gave her the dead parrot sketch to deliver to mock the Liberal Democrats.

00:32:43.600 And she dutifully trotted through it.

00:32:45.160 You can imagine how bad this is.

00:32:46.460 So you should look it up because it's really shockingly awful.

00:32:49.540 Margaret Thatcher doing the John Cleese part in the Dead Parrot sketch.

00:32:54.280 And she obviously, throughout the whole of the rehearsal process, she had no idea why this was funny.

00:32:59.760 She kept asking people, is this funny?

00:33:01.680 Will people laugh?

00:33:02.660 And they kept saying, yes, Prime Minister, it's funny.

00:33:04.580 And at the end of it, she did it and everyone laughed and she had no idea why they laughed.

00:33:08.680 And she came off and she said to John Whittingdale, who was her chief of staff at the time,

00:33:13.200 she said to him, this Monty Python chap, is he one of ours?

00:33:16.460 She just had no understanding of what she was saying.

00:33:20.440 And yet she still managed to pull it off.

00:33:22.700 And they realized, they judged their audience correctly, I suppose.

00:33:26.280 And she just about managed it.

00:33:28.360 It's interesting.

00:33:29.040 You're talking about quite a lot of leaders.

00:33:30.800 And I was curious.

00:33:31.440 One of the things I always find curious is, and I don't know if you'll agree with me,

00:33:35.480 but there is this idea that we strive towards an alpha male kind of figure,

00:33:40.620 even if it's a female, alpha, alpha.

00:33:43.460 Do you know what I mean?

00:33:44.780 What do you think about that?

00:33:46.180 Is projecting that sense of strength and power and authority an essential quality of being a leader?

00:33:53.420 It's important, yeah.

00:33:54.720 I mean, we often pretend we don't want that anymore.

00:33:58.240 And then when we find we haven't got it, we think, oh, why aren't they strong?

00:34:01.500 I mean, Theresa May.

00:34:03.240 Remember when she was briefly the most popular prime minister in the opinion polls there had ever been.

00:34:09.180 Really?

00:34:09.980 Yeah, that did happen.

00:34:10.700 The first three months of Theresa May's premiership, her poll ratings were higher than anyone has ever been before.

00:34:15.580 That's amazing.

00:34:16.000 I'm triggered.

00:34:16.800 And people said at the time, it's so refreshing to have someone who's authentic.

00:34:21.700 After David Cameron, there was all that spin, et cetera.

00:34:24.560 Exactly the same thing happened with Blair to Brown.

00:34:27.400 It's really refreshing.

00:34:28.740 We've got someone who's really himself, all of that.

00:34:31.060 And then after a while, you think, yeah, but these people don't know what they want.

00:34:35.340 They don't know what they're for.

00:34:36.780 And we turn on them.

00:34:38.280 So I think we're a bit hypocritical about this.

00:34:41.060 We say often we want that, but we don't really.

00:34:43.880 The other thing we say of leaders, too, is we want them to be conviction politicians.

00:34:47.620 And we don't, really.

00:34:48.840 What we mean by that is we want them to believe what we believe.

00:34:53.080 Blair was a very good example because Blair, in his early years, from 1997 onwards, when he was immensely popular, 179-seat majority, poll rating through the sky, he didn't really know what he wanted to do.

00:35:04.780 He came to office and wasted quite a lot of time because he didn't quite have a plan for anything.

00:35:08.840 He didn't know what he wanted to do with health or education.

00:35:11.480 He had loads of scope, but he didn't really know what he wanted to do.

00:35:14.400 Later on, foreign policy had no views at all.

00:35:17.220 Later on in his premiership, of course, he's acquired really strong convictions, and everybody hates them.

00:35:22.700 So it's not really true that when you are clear and you've got strong convictions, everyone therefore likes you.

00:35:28.940 They might respect you in a regretful way, but they don't necessarily follow you.

00:35:34.460 So politics is a weird business because you've got to try and win people over who don't agree.

00:35:40.400 So, for example, if I'm trying to win office rather than win notoriety, like someone like

00:35:45.660 Nigel Farage, and I want the votes of you too, but you think one thing and you think

00:35:50.660 the other, I could say absolutely categorically, I agree with you.

00:35:54.860 And that's fine.

00:35:55.660 I've got your vote, but I haven't got yours.

00:35:58.300 What is more tempting for me to do is to find some rhetorical construct that makes you think

00:36:02.960 I'm kinder with you, but you think the same.

00:36:05.600 So that leads me to a level of vagueness, which is inevitable.

00:36:10.580 And obviously, over time, you find out, you discover that in the end, when it comes to

00:36:16.800 policy and action, I have to take your line or your line.

00:36:20.240 And at that point, one of you will feel disappointed.

00:36:23.080 Or perhaps both of you will feel disappointed because I won't do it well enough for you

00:36:26.600 and I won't do it at all for you.

00:36:28.200 So that's what happens.

00:36:29.200 That's the process.

00:36:29.800 And that's why politicians are vague and murky.

00:36:32.820 It's not because they are vague, murky people or they're bad people.

00:36:35.920 is because the structure of politics leads you in argument to try and win the highest common

00:36:41.440 denominator. A counterexample of that is someone like Farage, who precisely because he's only

00:36:46.520 interested in a small section of the population can be as clear as he likes. So he knows very well

00:36:51.820 that he is never going to track my vote because I hate everything he stands for. But that's his

00:36:57.020 calling card. He doesn't want to win Ponzi as columnist in The Times. He wants to parade Ponzi

00:37:02.620 columnist in the Times as exactly the sort of London liberal elite who hates him. So he can

00:37:08.040 be hell for leather about the EU and about immigration because his base, which could be up

00:37:13.580 to 30% of the people at its height, will go for that. He's got no chance of getting to 40% when

00:37:19.880 you're in election-winning territory, but he's not trying to. So it's a lot easier to be clear

00:37:24.760 when you don't want a wide range. And that, I think, is the key to why speech is not as good

00:37:30.120 as they used to be.

00:37:31.380 And is that the dilemma

00:37:32.520 that Corbyn is facing now?

00:37:34.020 Because before he was hard left,

00:37:35.900 he was, you know,

00:37:36.640 pro-Brexit, anti-EU.

00:37:38.600 And all of a sudden,

00:37:39.580 he's now got his desire.

00:37:40.940 He's a leader of the party.

00:37:42.740 People used to say

00:37:43.700 he's a man of principle.

00:37:46.440 Sorry, he's Jewish.

00:37:47.640 It just triggers him.

00:37:48.940 Yeah.

00:37:49.780 It is his problem.

00:37:51.080 Yes, it is his problem.

00:37:52.940 Jeremy Corbyn has gone into politics

00:37:54.660 for the first time in his career.

00:37:56.400 He's been in protest

00:37:57.380 for such a long time.

00:37:58.800 Now, all of a sudden,

00:37:59.460 he's landed with this horrible job that he never wanted of leading the Labour Party,

00:38:03.640 which means he's got to make that kind of appeal across the lines. And he's getting into trouble

00:38:08.420 because of the things he genuinely believes. I left the Labour Party because I believe the top

00:38:13.420 of the Labour Party to be anti-Semitic. I just do. I think they're indefensible. But they do have,

00:38:19.500 if I gave a more generous account of what they think on foreign policy, they do have strong

00:38:23.280 view about imperialism and capitalism. And that's what they think. But that's not a winning

00:38:28.360 proposition if you're looking to expand beyond the left to people who voted Tory last time.

00:38:34.900 In order for Jeremy Corbyn to become prime minister, people who voted conservative in

00:38:38.860 only a couple of years ago will have to vote Labour. So he then has to construct an argument

00:38:43.360 that not only keeps his own tribe faithful, but also wins those people over. And that's really

00:38:49.300 difficult. And as he said in your question, he's won his sense of authenticity by not doing that

00:38:57.360 kind of thing. He's a man of principle. He believes what he believes. And in the campaign

00:39:02.700 to be a Labour leader, he was by far the best person, but better than Andy Burnham and Liz

00:39:07.240 Kendall and whoever else it was, because he did have something to say. I didn't agree with him,

00:39:12.640 but I could see he was clearly the guy who was telling you the truth as he saw it. The others

00:39:17.580 were all over the place with their triangulation and their vagueness. But it's really hard to

00:39:22.240 maintain that once you try and expand the coalition. And so he is finding that really

00:39:27.200 difficult. And on Europe, he's found it very difficult, too.

00:39:30.260 So you're saying, and this is my, and add on to this question, you're saying politicians,

00:39:35.000 it's all about being murky, you know, not really committing. But in the age of Brexit,

00:39:40.300 can they really do that anymore? Where you have a simple binary question?

00:39:44.300 Yeah, I think they can't. I think they can't do it anymore. And I think the transition of

00:39:47.960 politics from class politics to culture war politics is making that kind of old rhetorical

00:39:52.400 style redundant. So I think they can't do it. And I think the Labour Party has found

00:39:56.740 that on Brexit, where I've got some sympathy with Jeremy Corbyn's position, actually, because

00:40:01.440 his position has been, though we're a Remain party, we lost the argument, we lost the vote,

00:40:07.280 and therefore we should respect the vote and carry it out. And that's calculated to some

00:40:11.460 extent because lots of Labour voters were leave, but it's not an ignoble position. And

00:40:15.680 I've defended him against lots of the critics.

00:40:18.460 But when you test that in an election, like the European elections, it's never going to

00:40:22.860 work because it's like the counterpart of what I said before.

00:40:26.060 If you're a very strong Remain voter, you suddenly think, this guy is not on my side.

00:40:30.160 If you're a really strong Leave voter, well, you're going to go to Farage instead.

00:40:33.580 So you're caught not quite being one or the other.

00:40:37.360 And although it's quite an attempt to make a sophisticated position, this is not a sophisticated

00:40:42.560 argument.

00:40:43.500 And it needs to be black or white.

00:40:45.600 And weirdly, Jeremy Corbyn, who's always been a black and white politician, is now the sort of Blairite, vague, murky triangulator getting caught in the middle.

00:40:54.560 It's gone full circle.

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00:43:19.600 without any of the drama i didn't expect the interview to go this way but you mentioned i

00:43:25.540 didn't notice that you'd left the labor party because of of their uh allegations of antisemitism

00:43:30.720 I am someone who's, I'm very wary now because the labels of racist get thrown around so much.

00:43:37.720 I don't even automatically believe it.

00:43:39.800 You know, when people call someone racist, I'm like, well, I don't know.

00:43:42.840 Are they not?

00:43:43.740 But you're obviously someone who's been inside the party.

00:43:46.640 So tell us, you know, what are the reasons that you left?

00:43:51.380 What are some of the evidence for these allegations?

00:43:53.820 Well, I don't think Jeremy Corbyn sits there thinking I'm an anti-Semite.

00:43:58.000 I'm now going to do anti-Semitic things.

00:43:59.860 I don't think that.

00:44:01.080 So I don't think in that sort of conscious, proud racism.

00:44:04.540 Round up the Jews.

00:44:05.700 Yes.

00:44:06.160 I don't think any of that.

00:44:07.440 I don't think that.

00:44:07.860 I think he ends up being an anti-Semite out of a series of other convictions.

00:44:14.020 So he believes that imperialism is the most important and potent force in world politics.

00:44:19.720 He believes that America is a driving force of that imperialism.

00:44:23.620 And he believes that American capitalism is a beneficiary of its conquests around the world.

00:44:27.600 And the most sort of notable imperial state in that analysis is Israel, because it's caught

00:44:36.280 in the midst of a whole series of others, and it is oppressing, and it's the poppies

00:44:39.560 of America.

00:44:40.880 And that set of convictions, plus an exaggerated sense that this is the most important thing

00:44:47.880 of all human history, leads him to a position of such hostility to what he would call Zionism,

00:44:57.440 Yet he is then blind to what is overt anti-Semitism.

00:45:02.520 So if you look at the mural on the wall, for example, he didn't see anything wrong.

00:45:07.080 Anyone else would see it straight away.

00:45:08.080 Sorry, could you just describe that a little bit, the mural for our American viewers?

00:45:11.400 There was a mural.

00:45:12.400 A mural was painted on a wall in East London with a whole series of very blatant anti-Semitic

00:45:17.560 caricatures on it, all money lenders and usury.

00:45:21.680 It was all implying that the Jews, it was implying a world Rothschild type Jewish financial

00:45:27.040 conspiracy.

00:45:28.580 And it was as clear as day that that's what was being depicted.

00:45:32.980 Jeremy Corbyn shared that mural, a picture of that mural on Facebook group, didn't really

00:45:37.000 notice it.

00:45:38.580 And so I think he becomes blind to those things.

00:45:41.920 He also, because of that, he licenses the entry into the Labour Party of people who

00:45:48.440 really are overt, overtly anti-Semitic.

00:45:51.340 So there's always been a very small minority of people on the hard left who are anti-Semitic.

00:45:58.580 There always has been.

00:45:59.840 I mean, I don't mean to imply by that there aren't some terrible racists on the right.

00:46:03.540 Of course, there are thousands of different types.

00:46:06.700 Well, hating Jews is a bipartisan issue.

00:46:09.020 It absolutely is.

00:46:10.020 It absolutely is.

00:46:10.660 I mean, right now, the conservative artist's problem is more with Islam than it is with Judaism.

00:46:17.380 but we're not choosing which is the best racism. I think they're both quite bad. But the one

00:46:23.560 which I, because I was a member of the Labour Party, this one is particularly pertinent to me.

00:46:28.000 And so those people, those overt anti-Semites, are now members of the Labour Party, whereas once

00:46:33.380 upon a time they weren't. And so I think the party has been really infected with this, and the

00:46:40.840 response to it has been very, very slow. And I just felt, it's not a once and for all thing,

00:46:46.940 I can rejoin the Labour Party if and when this is eradicated as a problem,

00:46:51.020 but I thought I don't want to be a member of it whilst this is there

00:46:54.880 and not being taken seriously enough.

00:46:57.120 I don't mean to make a great fanfare of it, but I just think there we are.

00:47:00.940 No, I really wanted to ask you about it because it's something that we keep hearing about,

00:47:05.560 but I'd never heard anyone sum it up quite so succinctly

00:47:08.820 and kind of explain what the allegations are, what's the substance behind it.

00:47:12.480 Again, I think it's quite important to be as generous to the people you're criticizing as you can.

00:47:16.940 You know, because I don't think it's, as I said before, I'm not accusing Jeremy Corbyn

00:47:22.720 of being a racist.

00:47:23.720 I think that's ridiculous.

00:47:25.100 So I think everything I've said is compatible with his claim that he's an anti-racist campaigner.

00:47:30.360 And of course, he is in one sense, and spent his life protesting against various oppressions

00:47:35.100 and injustices.

00:47:36.100 And I don't want to wash away that record, but I just think he has a blind spot here

00:47:42.800 where his various causes clash and it ends up in a position which I think is really dreadful.

00:47:50.620 And I don't want to be a member of a party which has that feeling.

00:47:54.480 So it's a hard left sensibility which I just don't want to be part of the Labour Party.

00:48:01.560 But it is.

00:48:02.480 They are the governing force in the Labour Party.

00:48:06.860 And you can either choose to stay there and try and win it back and engage in that fight.

00:48:11.120 It's not my fight anymore because I'm not active in politics.

00:48:14.540 And I thought, actually, better off just to have the freedom to criticize by coming out.

00:48:20.140 And then I can be honest about it.

00:48:22.140 You're outside the tent pissing in.

00:48:23.560 I'm outside the tent, yeah, pissing on it.

00:48:25.620 Pissing on it.

00:48:27.480 That's right.

00:48:29.960 Fantastic.

00:48:31.800 It's a great thing.

00:48:32.780 I'm glad we talked about that because it's something that doesn't get talked about with that clarity enough, I think.

00:48:38.180 But coming back to leadership, who do you see on the horizon who you think has the rhetorical skills, perhaps, to convince, you know, there's some interesting candidates in America on the Democratic side, obviously.

00:48:55.500 I'm curious about Tulsi Gabbard

00:48:59.800 and Andrew Yang

00:49:01.140 the people who are bringing a totally different offering

00:49:03.600 do you think those two people

00:49:05.500 may have the rhetorical skill to go

00:49:07.680 with their ideas? Yeah I think they're interesting

00:49:09.780 I think they do, they are doing something

00:49:11.660 different and the Democrat party needs to do something

00:49:13.700 different because it's just tried

00:49:15.460 the old conventional form with Hillary Clinton

00:49:17.640 That's why they're going for Joe Biden

00:49:19.140 Creepy joke

00:49:21.400 I think Joe Biden

00:49:23.760 might have beaten Trump actually

00:49:25.900 Really?

00:49:26.260 Yeah, because Joe Biden was very, very strong in the places where Trump won the election.

00:49:30.280 I mean, Trump won the election very, very narrowly.

00:49:32.440 And he won in places where Hillary Clinton thought she would have sewn up in Michigan,

00:49:36.640 the old industrial heartlands.

00:49:38.400 That's Joe Biden's patch.

00:49:40.000 That's who he is.

00:49:41.840 So I think he might well have won in those places.

00:49:43.880 And if you win there, you win.

00:49:45.320 So I think he might have beaten Trump, though I don't think he'd be the great candidate for next time

00:49:49.760 because I think the politics is so different now.

00:49:52.080 And Hillary Clinton was the last of the really conventional Democrat candidates.

00:49:57.120 At a time when the big issue is the elite versus the people, what do you put up but

00:50:01.760 a Clinton?

00:50:02.760 It's just a terrible, terrible candidate.

00:50:05.600 I think she'd been quite a good president because she's administratively really smart

00:50:09.720 and all of that.

00:50:10.720 But as a candidate, I think she was really, really bad.

00:50:13.700 And I think they do need to do something different.

00:50:15.760 They might go to the left.

00:50:17.980 They might do what the Labor Party has done.

00:50:20.980 They might go for Bernie Sanders still.

00:50:23.160 They might go for Elizabeth Warren somewhere.

00:50:25.740 Elizabeth Warren is a much more polished kind of performer.

00:50:29.220 But...

00:50:30.220 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

00:50:31.220 Well, she's not old enough yet because there's an age threshold for the American president.

00:50:36.480 You have to be 35 years of age, and she won't be 35 in time.

00:50:39.680 So she can't yet be a candidate.

00:50:42.420 I mean, clearly in time, if she manages to keep her elevation up, she's very effective.

00:50:48.080 I mean, there's someone using social media and coming to your attention in a really clever

00:50:53.760 way.

00:50:54.760 It's not at all clunky, and that's part of rhetoric now, is getting across in different

00:50:59.840 ways.

00:51:00.840 But with her, I feel she's like the left-wing Trump, in a way.

00:51:03.840 Do you know what I mean?

00:51:04.840 In a way, she is.

00:51:05.840 In a way, she is.

00:51:06.840 She's got to see if she can make a transition, because her job at the moment is simply to

00:51:10.360 critique and criticize.

00:51:12.360 But that's fair enough, because that is your job in opposition, and she's really good at

00:51:15.600 it.

00:51:16.600 She's very effective.

00:51:17.600 when she speaks, she's very good. Sometimes her arguments are a bit cheap. But again,

00:51:23.520 that's part of politics. I'm not going to criticize people too much for that. I mean,

00:51:27.000 part of your job is to get attention and to put your opponents on the spot. And so she's very good

00:51:32.020 at that. Whether she can now make a transition to being a bigger figure who can then make positive

00:51:36.700 cases for things, we'll see. I wouldn't say she can't because she's clearly talented.

00:51:40.740 But some of the other candidates are, you know, Harris is interesting.

00:51:47.740 I'm not sure I've seen yet the person who has quite got the measure of Trump in that.

00:51:53.740 I'm not sure any of them have the measure of Trump.

00:51:55.500 I'm not sure they have either, and Trump is changing the rules, and I think they're

00:51:58.620 spooked by him.

00:51:59.620 I think they don't quite know how to approach him.

00:52:01.260 There's a very interesting argument about what strategies he would deploy to try and

00:52:05.120 take on Trump.

00:52:06.120 Do you go really serious and try and shame him or do you mock him or do you have someone

00:52:13.260 who's a real patriot?

00:52:14.360 Do you get an ex-veteran to be the Democratic candidate and make him seem un-American?

00:52:19.380 What's the best way of doing it?

00:52:20.400 Do you get someone from his heartland who then represents authentic American values

00:52:27.520 of the old industrial north who can then move out from there?

00:52:32.560 It's a big argument within the Democrat Party about what they need.

00:52:36.120 And I'm not sure of the answer because Trump really does pose a problem of the kind we've not seen before in a developed democracy.

00:52:43.000 Well, one of the things that Donald Trump is famous for is you talk about mocking.

00:52:47.760 His what Scott Adams, I think, calls linguistic kill shots are incredible.

00:52:52.600 I mean, as if you abstract yourself from whether you agree with him or not, he's incredibly effective at caricaturing the person he's talking about.

00:53:03.180 in a two-word, absolutely destructive combination.

00:53:07.480 Marco Rubio, please applaud.

00:53:10.900 That was Jeb Bush.

00:53:12.080 Oh, was it Jeb Bush?

00:53:12.840 Low energy Jeb, lying Ted Cruz, all this stuff.

00:53:16.980 Like crooked Hillary.

00:53:18.540 And there's a visual component to it that's accurate.

00:53:21.540 If you look at Hillary, she kind of does look a bit crooked

00:53:24.220 and then it all kind of glues together into this thing.

00:53:27.920 So the mocking, I don't think it's going to work.

00:53:29.580 He's going to blow anyone out of the water who comes after him.

00:53:31.940 The visual element is really important because painting pictures is what you're trying to

00:53:35.940 do.

00:53:36.940 That's what works far better in any speech than any long argument.

00:53:40.940 If you can paint somebody a picture, then that's just going to last.

00:53:45.560 We know that that sticks in the memory longer.

00:53:47.940 And Trump is good at it.

00:53:48.940 But other people can be good at it.

00:53:49.940 There's no reason why you can't come back.

00:53:51.940 I mean, God, he's given you enough material, isn't he?

00:53:56.100 It's not that hard to come back at Trump and fight fire with fire.

00:53:59.940 It's a question of whether that's the right thing to do, because you might be right.

00:54:03.440 He has got the command of that, and he's fearless.

00:54:07.260 He will say stuff that you won't say.

00:54:09.260 So you've got the internal filter where you think, actually, that's beyond the rules of

00:54:12.920 ordinary civilized conversation.

00:54:15.320 I'm not going to call him that here, even though it's just popped into my head.

00:54:19.360 But he'll just say it.

00:54:20.780 You know, the most remarkable moments in all of political history, I think, is when Trump

00:54:25.220 started mocking disabled people.

00:54:27.660 I'm not going to do it because it was like the playground of the 1970s in Manchester

00:54:33.300 where people would do, you know, Joey Deacon jokes.

00:54:37.080 And Trump, I thought we were better than that now, but we're not.

00:54:40.360 There was some debate about it, wasn't there, whether he intended to do it or whether he was knocking him?

00:54:45.240 There was, and typically he started to climb down and then basically thought, no, no.

00:54:51.440 So he didn't deny it.

00:54:53.180 I suppose in due course, he said he didn't really mean to do it, but you just look at

00:55:00.180 him.

00:55:01.180 It was pretty obvious what he was doing.

00:55:03.180 His attacks on Hillary Clinton were way beyond what you'd expect in the normal course of

00:55:07.760 politics.

00:55:08.760 I mean, politics has always been pretty raucous.

00:55:10.760 I don't want to be too pious about it, because you go back to 1800 and Thomas Jefferson and

00:55:15.420 John Adams, and Adams accuses Jefferson of fathering a child with his slaves, which he

00:55:20.680 had.

00:55:21.680 Jefferson, in response, accuses Adams of being pro-British.

00:55:26.140 He imagined a more brilliant insult than that, pro-British, just after the Revolutionary

00:55:31.760 Wars.

00:55:32.720 And it was really, really acrimonious, and they hated each other.

00:55:36.120 So it's not as though it's always been sweetness and light.

00:55:38.980 But still, there was a sort of rules of decorum that people observed, which Trump just doesn't.

00:55:44.680 He's like the nutter.

00:55:46.120 You look into his eyes, he'll do anything.

00:55:48.120 So he's frightened of him a bit.

00:55:50.160 And do you think that what you've just said, we've now reached a new low?

00:55:55.840 Well, every time I think we've reached a new low, every time we set the bar, he manages to like a sort of belly dance to get underneath it.

00:56:04.740 So I hesitate to say we've reached a new low.

00:56:07.400 I fear we're heading that way in this country, though.

00:56:10.000 I fear that the early tactics of the Johnson campaign are mimicking some of Trump's stuff.

00:56:15.200 I mean, Johnson is close to Steve Bannon, and I can see already some of their tactics being flirted with.

00:56:21.980 So, for example, at the Johnson launch event, they had some of his supporters booing a question by a journalist.

00:56:28.420 That wasn't a great question, but you'd never do that.

00:56:32.340 You'd never do that, but they did.

00:56:34.760 You're getting people turning up on television shows with choreographed ambush attacks on the positions that journalists have taken.

00:56:43.360 do a sort of pre-planned aggression just to up the stakes.

00:56:47.940 They're starting to flirt with some of that stuff,

00:56:51.060 the way they controlled the press conference.

00:56:53.140 It's really quite clearly Bannon-like,

00:56:56.160 and I just really hope they don't head that way.

00:56:59.940 Well, that's why I mentioned David Lamme early,

00:57:01.660 because I feel like everyone's doing it now.

00:57:03.520 Everybody's got basically an illegal move that they're coming to pull.

00:57:07.940 It's the inevitable and understandable response

00:57:10.380 when one side goes rogue is you go rogue back.

00:57:13.280 You hit them back.

00:57:14.380 And it's exactly, I've had this feeling the last few days,

00:57:17.100 I think, why don't the other candidates bring out loads of dirt on Boris Johnson

00:57:21.000 and tell the truth about it?

00:57:22.240 Why don't they just, there's loads of things I know,

00:57:24.500 which I won't say even here.

00:57:26.680 Oh, come on.

00:57:27.540 Oh, come on.

00:57:30.140 Why are they not using it?

00:57:31.280 Why are they not going there?

00:57:31.920 Oh, I thought he was going to do it.

00:57:32.860 Yeah, I saw it.

00:57:33.480 Because, and then you think, well.

00:57:35.420 This is only going on the internet.

00:57:36.680 Well, the reason I won't, I mean, no one reads the internet.

00:57:40.080 The reason I won't is because, actually, you have to stop yourself

00:57:43.360 and think that that is another escalation,

00:57:45.700 and then you go up there, and then they come back.

00:57:47.900 But think of how many clicks we've got.

00:57:49.420 Well, I know, I know, which is why it's very tempting.

00:57:52.160 It's very, very tempting, I know.

00:57:54.200 I love that you just said that.

00:57:56.180 Well, exactly.

00:57:56.620 So I'm naming the problem.

00:57:58.320 I'm being brutally honest about the agenda here.

00:58:01.200 Think of all the business I'd get on the back of it.

00:58:02.860 I mean, it's very tempting.

00:58:04.860 So we're in complete agreement.

00:58:06.300 But we've all got an obligation to the nation to which we're broadcasting.

00:58:10.520 So, you know, obviously we'll set a good example.

00:58:12.700 Because it just escalates and then, you know, you hit each other.

00:58:15.400 And this is what's happening in America where the Congress has been the most partisan Congress.

00:58:19.980 The last two sessions of Congress have been the most partisan in the history of the American

00:58:23.800 Republic because there's no collaboration and cooperation between the two parties now.

00:58:28.380 And in a split constitution, if they don't cooperate, it doesn't work.

00:58:32.060 But they're not cooperating because they're in these tribal blocks now.

00:58:35.720 And the Democrats say, why should we cooperate with this really right-wing, nasty Republican party?

00:58:41.080 So we're going to just behave like they do, which is understandable, but then is completely locked.

00:58:46.420 And the Republicans then say, oh, the Democrats is impossible.

00:58:49.060 We can't get anything through because of these lunatics.

00:58:51.140 No, you're the lunatic.

00:58:51.920 And it just becomes childish.

00:58:54.380 And there's a real risk we do that.

00:58:56.720 Brexit is doing that to us.

00:58:57.960 We're doing that in Brexit.

00:58:59.300 Well, we're recording this, as you said, just at the time of the conservative leadership election.

00:59:04.420 And by the time it goes out, we will see if the tactics have worked for Boris.

00:59:08.620 The thing with Boris is, though, it's like it's hard to get stuff to stick to him

00:59:12.240 because everyone just thinks he's an idiot anyway.

00:59:14.080 Yeah, they do.

00:59:14.700 Yeah, they do.

00:59:15.240 They think it's sort of priced in.

00:59:16.460 Well, it's become a character, hasn't it?

00:59:18.000 Yeah.

00:59:18.200 That's what's happened.

00:59:18.800 That's what it is.

00:59:19.640 He does have a character.

00:59:20.940 The very fact that you called him Boris then.

00:59:23.320 I would like to go back and do this again where you call him Johnson.

00:59:25.940 It's very important that opponents of his destruct the idea that he's Boris.

00:59:31.580 No one else is Jeremy or Michael.

00:59:34.420 You don't talk like you know the others, but you have a relationship with this Boris character,

00:59:39.380 which you've just described by use of that word.

00:59:42.020 And that's a real gift for a politician if he's managed to do that.

00:59:45.700 And it's part of the rhetorical task in deconstructing him is to take that apart

00:59:49.840 and try and treat him as a serious politician.

00:59:53.960 So exactly for that reason, Boris, you've priced in all of these personal transgressions

01:00:00.880 and these things which make him unsuitable to be a prime minister.

01:00:04.420 You've just, in a way, said, oh, well, that's just Boris.

01:00:08.320 That's what Boris is.

01:00:09.200 That's the character of Boris.

01:00:10.620 Let's not worry about it.

01:00:12.380 And if you're an opponent of his, you need to take that apart.

01:00:16.020 And touching on comedy in speech writing, but using Boris Johnson as an example,

01:00:22.820 he has created what I see as a comedian as a comic persona.

01:00:26.880 The bumbling English tough who wanders from crisis to crisis,

01:00:32.020 He's putting his foot in it, you know, all the rest of it.

01:00:34.820 He has.

01:00:35.820 It's a little bit Jeeves.

01:00:37.820 He's exactly that.

01:00:38.820 He's a little bit Woodhouse and it's very interesting how it translates.

01:00:43.300 I've always thought that that persona, precisely because it is bumbling and it's not very effective

01:00:48.340 and the whole joke is that you're a bit hopeless, is not a very good persona to take you all

01:00:54.460 the way because when you're actually then at an international summit doing really boring

01:00:58.360 but important work, I'm not sure we want a clown.

01:01:02.020 I'm not sure it works at that point, but he does have that.

01:01:05.120 And you saw, I don't know if you saw his launch speech,

01:01:07.120 but you had a very uneasy juxtaposition of that comic persona

01:01:10.840 with a load of really quite boring, serious stuff.

01:01:13.820 It's quite difficult to do the transition from one to the other.

01:01:16.860 So to have a bumbling persona and get your comedy out of it

01:01:20.720 and then go serious is really hard.

01:01:23.280 There is a character you could do, of course,

01:01:24.840 which lots of comedians have,

01:01:25.780 which is that the comedy comes from the serious subjects

01:01:28.560 and you're quite grave and pious and earnest,

01:01:31.060 but you're funny.

01:01:31.960 You can do that, and lots of people do it.

01:01:34.260 And at some point in Johnson's career,

01:01:36.120 he should have chosen to make that kind of transition.

01:01:38.800 He could keep the comedy, keep being funny,

01:01:40.460 because I did used to find him funny.

01:01:42.700 He is a personally witty person

01:01:44.920 who's capable of seeing a joke and delivering it.

01:01:48.040 So he is bright and funny,

01:01:50.200 much more so than most politicians.

01:01:52.000 But I now found that his comedy really great.

01:01:54.620 I find it annoying.

01:01:56.620 I see the construction of the character and beginning to see the lines of the joke.

01:02:02.640 That's the crucial thing, isn't it, that you've got to try and conceal the construction

01:02:06.800 of it.

01:02:07.800 So it appears as though you're just making this up off the top of your head, even though

01:02:10.660 of course you haven't.

01:02:12.740 My big moment as a speechwriter was, in fact, a joke.

01:02:15.940 That's why I made it by a brilliant Les Dawson gag.

01:02:20.500 It was in 2006, I think it was, Tony Blair's last conference to the Labour Party.

01:02:25.780 He'd always announced he was resigning, and he had to go and speak to them.

01:02:29.540 And the day before he spoke, Sheree Blair, his wife, had said something really rude about

01:02:34.800 Gordon Brown.

01:02:36.040 She was caught by a journalist calling Gordon Brown a rude word.

01:02:39.140 And she denied she'd said it, but we knew she probably had, because she definitely thought

01:02:42.540 it.

01:02:43.720 And it sounds incredibly trivial now, but it was all over the evening news, and it was

01:02:47.900 all over the following day's newspapers. And Brown was furious because he'd done a big speech

01:02:52.040 which wasn't being covered. It shows how trivial we are. A rubbish joke by Sheree Blair was

01:02:56.980 knocking out the Chancellor's speech. But it was, and he was absolutely furious.

01:03:01.020 So we realized we had to deal with this the following day in Blair's speech.

01:03:04.500 And I thought the obvious way to do that is to make a joke of it. We've got to make light of it.

01:03:08.700 And I thought, well, how can we do that? What joke can we tell? And I just thought it's got

01:03:13.940 the elements of music hall here because it's the guy next door, it's his wife. There's

01:03:18.720 a sort of seaside postcard vintage music hall element to this. So I started looking up old

01:03:25.820 Arthur Askey jokes and Max Miller and I found this Les Dawson gag, which was, my wife's

01:03:31.680 just run off with the guy next door. And do you know what? I'm really going to miss him.

01:03:36.840 Which is a classic old setup joke. And I thought it's a little bit vulgar for the Prime Minister,

01:03:41.740 but we customised it

01:03:43.040 and we wrote it up as

01:03:44.700 he made a sort of eulogy to his wife

01:03:47.940 and he said at least she won't run off

01:03:49.080 with the guy next door

01:03:49.820 and we didn't put it in the script

01:03:53.560 because we didn't want the press

01:03:54.980 to know that it was there

01:03:56.320 because we released the script

01:03:57.820 beforehand to the press

01:03:59.040 but we left it up to Blair

01:04:00.880 to judge whether to say it or not

01:04:02.460 to judge whether it felt right

01:04:04.700 because we tried to clear it with Brown

01:04:06.460 and he didn't want him to say it

01:04:08.000 and we just left it to Blair to say it

01:04:10.560 And I've told that story many times, and you'll know better than I do,

01:04:14.360 when you trip over the line, you don't always get the laugh.

01:04:17.700 When on occasions I've told the story and not delivered it properly,

01:04:21.040 I don't quite get the laugh.

01:04:22.700 So for him to deliver it at that moment, judge whether to,

01:04:26.720 he didn't have it with him, he had to remember it,

01:04:28.780 it was a really last-minute thing, and deliver it,

01:04:30.920 and he did it perfectly, and it just totally brought the house down.

01:04:34.500 It shows the low standards of comedy in politics.

01:04:37.320 It's not that good a joke.

01:04:38.620 But it absolutely brought the house down.

01:04:41.020 And the next day, there were double-page spreads in the newspapers about this joke.

01:04:44.620 And the book I got the joke from was featured on Channel 4 News.

01:04:47.720 And it just became a big thing.

01:04:50.140 And the interesting thing about it, I thought later, was that the joke, of course, the reason the joke's so good,

01:04:57.120 not because it's such a fantastic joke, it's because it concedes the point.

01:05:01.020 It's because it contains in it the admission that she did say it.

01:05:04.860 It's like, yeah, yeah, we know, but it doesn't matter.

01:05:07.080 That's what the joke said.

01:05:07.900 The joke was part of the argument.

01:05:10.060 It wasn't just a joke.

01:05:12.140 And that made it worth saying, and it made it potent.

01:05:16.360 And the laughter, I think, was partly the release of people thought, that's a tense

01:05:20.840 moment which you've just got rid of with a joke.

01:05:23.260 You've not stopped and said, oh, now, here's a joke.

01:05:25.940 We've said something in the joke.

01:05:28.060 And concealing that plot line in a gag is what lots of playwrights do.

01:05:33.840 you know, when your guard is down, they sneak a point past you. And that's what I was trying to

01:05:40.800 do there. On that brilliant note, we have to wrap up, mainly because I want to end the interview

01:05:44.800 so you can tell us the salacious details of Boris Johnson's private life. The last question,

01:05:50.400 thank you, it's been a brilliant interview, but the last question we always ask is, what is the

01:05:54.200 one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we should be talking about? Boris Johnson's

01:05:58.880 private life. Well, apart from Boris Johnson's private life. I mean, at any point, if you'd

01:06:03.580 asked me that until recently, I would have said climate change because that has been

01:06:06.840 the great issue that we haven't talked about. And it's very interesting why no one's ever

01:06:10.620 done a great climate change speech, which they haven't yet, but maybe one day they will.

01:06:15.880 So now we are talking about that happily. The big domestic question we're not really

01:06:22.000 talking about is housing and why kids, people of 30 years of age now in good jobs will probably

01:06:30.980 never own their own home because it's so ridiculously expensive. And no one's got any

01:06:36.980 clue how to do that. It involves a whole series of difficult things like taxing wealth and taxing

01:06:41.340 property and taxing land, which sound incredibly left-wing, but I'm in favor of all of them. And

01:06:45.740 There are, in fact, old Lloyd George liberal ideas at the turn of the 19th century.

01:06:50.640 And we need to do that.

01:06:52.120 We need to talk about wealth taxes and land taxes.

01:06:54.700 It's a difficult conversation to have because lots of people lose out.

01:06:58.020 But that's the conversation I think we need.

01:06:59.940 We can't fix the housing market until we get really, really tough about it.

01:07:03.640 Let's dig into that a little bit because this is a debate Francis and I often have because I own property and he doesn't.

01:07:09.800 By debate, substitute the word row.

01:07:12.080 I only bought my first flat two years ago and I'm in my mid-30s so I know exactly what you're

01:07:20.780 talking about but what the way I've always seen it is neither party of the two mainstream parties

01:07:26.520 or frankly any other party can fix the housing bubble which is essentially what we have the

01:07:32.480 super high housing prices because the people who own property have way too much invested

01:07:38.340 in the house prices being high

01:07:40.760 and they are the people

01:07:42.020 who essentially vote, right?

01:07:43.600 That's right.

01:07:43.960 So you're not...

01:07:45.240 That's why we don't talk about it.

01:07:46.160 Right.

01:07:46.980 It's your fault.

01:07:49.060 I'm sure you own property as well.

01:07:50.400 I do.

01:07:50.820 It's also my fault.

01:07:51.780 Yeah, it's also your fault.

01:07:52.540 But my point is

01:07:53.160 you're basically going to have to say

01:07:55.220 to every homeowner in the country

01:07:56.460 you're going to lose 40% of your assets

01:07:58.520 so that France is here can get a flat.

01:08:00.700 And that is frankly not worth it.

01:08:01.860 I may not phrase it like that

01:08:03.680 but you are essentially right.

01:08:05.240 That is the political predicament.

01:08:06.720 But that's what leadership in politics is.

01:08:08.340 is finding a way to make that unpalatable argument. Yeah. So there will be losers from

01:08:13.280 this, but you'd have to make the argument about equity, about generational impact. So yes, okay,

01:08:18.620 you are currently in a position where you might lose out, but in due course, or take me, I've

01:08:23.980 been a real beneficiary of house price inflation in London, but I also have two children. So what

01:08:30.120 about them? Am I not bothered that unless I just gift them money, they won't be able to do that?

01:08:35.600 So, you find a generational argument for it, and you also find a way of mitigating the

01:08:40.360 impact.

01:08:41.360 So, it's not a punitive thing.

01:08:42.360 I'm not trying to punish you for having a house.

01:08:44.280 I'm trying to spread the burden in a more just way.

01:08:47.820 So, I wouldn't have wealth taxes in order to make a load of new revenue and say, what

01:08:53.700 we need to do is just smooth the taxes.

01:08:55.700 So, we'll reduce income tax, so you can keep more of your money, but we'll transfer that

01:09:00.160 tax onto things like property, which doesn't move and no one can hide it, or land likewise,

01:09:05.400 would have the beneficial impact too of making housing less volatile as an asset, reduce

01:09:11.520 the prospect of a crash, and reduce the prospect of then austerity for the rest of us. So we're

01:09:16.960 all complicit in this bubble, and we do need to prick it in an orderly way. But I'm not

01:09:22.640 going to try and punish you. I don't want you to pay any more tax than you're paying

01:09:27.020 today.

01:09:28.020 You can see his skill coming out.

01:09:29.020 Yeah, he can.

01:09:30.020 He's keeping us both happy.

01:09:31.020 Yeah, he is. There was elements of Blair there.

01:09:34.940 Thank you very much for coming on the show.

01:09:36.200 Tell everybody your Twitter handle.

01:09:37.740 My Twitter handle is at pcollinstimes.

01:09:41.300 Perfect.

01:09:42.000 And buy Philip's book.

01:09:43.520 It's a brilliant book.

01:09:44.680 As always, follow us at TriggerPod on other social media.

01:09:48.420 Subscribe to the YouTube channel.

01:09:49.880 Click the bell button next to subscribe button so you get notified.

01:09:53.280 As you all know, this is also available as a podcast.

01:09:55.960 And we will see you next week with another brilliant episode.

01:09:58.260 Take care.

01:09:58.700 Goodbye.

01:09:59.200 Bye-bye.

01:10:04.940 Thank you.

01:10:34.940 Thank you.

01:11:04.940 Thank you.

01:11:34.940 Thank you.

01:12:04.940 Thank you.

01:12:34.940 Thank you.

TRIGGERnometry - September 22, 2019

Political Persuasion From Blair to Trump

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