Rory Stewart breaks down 'rotten state' of UK politics | LBC analysis

Do you still have political ambitions? I don't think so, no, no, mine faded a few weeks ago. older than you, I mean, it never occurred to me to do it again, but then I saw the

state

of the conservative party and I thought someone would have to pick up Carnage after this and I thought I could really play a role. in that um but it wasn't like that but you are as I say you are younger you could still have a political future ahead of you but I detect that you don't have that part that the virus in you is not as strong as it was in me, it is not and and and That's partly what I mean, I would be interested to see what you would have felt if you had spent 10 years in Parliament, but my feeling was that the institution is very, very

rotten

, in a way, it rots your brain, it rots your soul, it rots. rots I mean, it's bad for your body.

I mean, it's bad for you in almost every way. I was thinking about this when I was watching K and Rushi Sunak on TV yesterday. and as you can imagine, I saw a lot of people today. I attended some important events today. Many of the questions are: do you know why all these people are so desperate? And I thought, well, they're not really desperate. I mean, you know. They are people who are very hardworking people who are probably very successful bankers and lawyers, in fact, they were. So what somehow creates this problem? And I think it's something we don't talk about enough.

I think the way the parts work. the media works the way parliament works the way whips work the way we as voters work contort these people into very strange shapes and I was one of those people. They contorted me in a very strange way is that part of the reason you decided to quit because you felt like you felt like you were becoming a person that maybe you didn't want to become at all and I think looking back now, you know, I I say to myself that I left because I don't agree with Boris Johnson, I don't agree. with Brexit, but the truth is that for quite a while before that I became quite unhappy with who I was and you know the signs that I'm not sleeping well, I'm getting quite moody, I'm getting a lot of migraines but it's because work is a kind of fraud, I mean, it's a fraud on the voter because you pretend to do things you can't do, you pretend to have power that you don't have.

Are you claiming to know things you don't know? I mean, if you really start to take seriously what these jobs are, they're basically impossible and I'm talking to West Streeting, who will be our next Health Secretary almost certainly in a week's time and yes, of course, everyone thinks, well , you're going to come in, you're going to fix the NHS, but you and I know that there are 1.1 million people in the NHS, there are 350 million GP appointments a year, I mean. This is so incredibly big that it's not just that you as a minister maybe see 1% of the picture, you're seeing 0.00000000 1% of the picture and pretend to know everything, what have you done with this election campaign?

So far, because there has been some of this that has been very unedifying, the performance of the Conservative party, all the different errors, unforced errors that they have made, it has been the strangest election I think I have ever experienced, it is very strange. I don't see it and it's very strange because often the story is that people go to elections with a big lead and then they blow it, so Theresa May came in with a lead like K, with a 20 point lead she made her deadly packages and lost the majority, but in this case, the unions haven't really put a foot wrong or, if they somehow have, that's not the way it's presented in the media.

I mean, that's the other question, we don't really know how much of this is objectively what they are doing or is it that the public and the newspapers are so fed up with the Conservatives that the Tores can do something pretty small and it will appear on front-page news and workers can do similar things and no one really notices. What's your sense that you think sometimes it's just that we're fed up or do you just objectively think that the Bulls just ran a really rubbish labor campaign that hasn't made a single misstep? I think all long-term governments end This way, if you think about the McMillan Eden government in the 1950s and 1960s, 13 years the workers called it 13 wasted years, just like they call it now 14 and a half wasted years, um, at the end of the McMillan government there was something like scandals and SAS, you move towards Thatcher and you specialize exactly the same at the end exactly the same with Brown and Blair they don't tend to look at history in these things and it's almost inevitable, I think The longer you stay in power, the more susceptible you are to minor corruption.

I don't think we are a corrupt country, but I think there is minor corruption in our political system, possibly more than there used to be and now we have a voracious media that will do it. Take any excuse to attack politicians now that they have made their own bed in many ways, but if you have been in power for 14 and a half years it is very difficult to convince the electorate that you have new ideas and they certainly have not succeeded good. I also think there may be a psychological subconscious that they want to lose. I think rishy called this election because on some level he wants out, it didn't make any sense at all.

This

state

, I mean, literally, crazy. And I think HS Yus just did the same thing in Scotland, but Emanuel Macron almost did the same thing in France, that as they start to run out of ideas, as they start to run out of energy, they start to hate themselves and in Many people say that Rashi Sunak is not really a politician, he is a manager. I mean, you served in Parliament with him and overlapped for four or five years, what did you do with him? I thought he was someone who was very, very "I have confidence in the argument, but I didn't feel that way and you could see that in the debate last night he is very good at arguing and I as a minister when I was trying to convince him of something that often we would get in these very long ones". arguments and he's very good at those kinds of debates, but I never felt like he had a great sense of who he was and where he stood on the really important issues.

I wasn't entirely convinced where he stood on Brexit. I don't understand why he backed Johnson so quickly, except that he wanted to get a fast track into the cabinet. It is very understandable. I mean, I think in many ways, a lot of other people I joined Parliament with were like that. Matt Hancock, cute Patel. Liz had a bit of an idea of ​​who he was and what his values ​​were. trust and Boris Johnson, you know that I am going to vote for this report from the privileges committee, this is a shame, this is a new direction, I am changing things, he could have had hope in this election and it is very good. on the little things he needed to be the change, that's what you say he needed to be the change and you can't win an election with a Change message by just making things up during the campaign because there were times in your Premiership when I tried be the change and then the next week he would give a speech when you thought, well, it's the same old stuff you've always been hanging out with, there's no agenda for change here and this is strange, right?

That's right and I'm sure, as you, as I, were excited by what he did with the Windor framework, the way he managed to tackle the serious problems and all that was brave and bold, it made it really exciting. things with the EU like returning to the Horizon Scientific Agreements. I think he has had very intelligent ideas about Ed tion. He's pretty brave about that, but he was equally too worried about managing the rights of the match, so he brought in an excellent brave, who I don't think he would qualify and kept her for long, kept K bad when I don't think she would ever was going to be his friend, she was obviously running for leadership against him, he signed up for this Rwanda thing, whatever you want.

Think about the content of it, it was a very, very bad policy because he will never be able to keep it, I hadn't thought it through, you know, I make this promise, my five promises and I don't make them, what will this look like? and this this The calling of elections is a sign of something similar. I mean, when he called that election, my phone blew up with text messages, even from people in the cabinet saying: I have no idea what he's doing this guy. They had nine different theories that you can't be leading. Your troops into battle if they don't understand why you're going into battle today and if they have nine different theories about what your objective is.