Powerful speeches, population control and Isabel Oakeshott

foreign policy question time with me Rory Stewart and I ask bet very well okay now here we are Joe Irwin to start Alistair Joel asks what decides an election then he says or she maybe the oppositions don't win the elections the governments lose them argue about Alistair uh I think you need both I think you need both I think if you go back to '97, the country was fed up with the Tories, there's no doubt about that, but to get the kind of big victory that we got, there had to be a Opposition sensation also won.

I think the reason David Cameron for example didn't win in 2010 is that he was too confident of the government losing and he didn't actually do enough for the opposition to win, so both are definitely needed, so just So let's talk about that a little bit and because it's obviously relevant to Kirstama, who is 20 points ahead in the opinion polls and looks like he can barely lose in the race against the Conservatives, but I guess what you would say is that the lesson is that David Cameron was leading strongly in the opinion polls, not by that amount, but he was leading strongly for two years and it looked like he was going to win a large majority and then when the event came he didn't really manage to overtake Gordon Brown in 2010, did he? what was your feeling? about the weakness of that campaign, what Dave was, not brave enough, not clear enough, how he got it wrong.

I don't think the public has introduced the idea of ​​being an alternative government, um, I. I think they quite like Cameron and I think they thought he was a fairly credible figure, but I don't think there was a sense that he was the only thing they thought was that he would change the Conservative party rather than the country, um and I think there was a sort of feeling that they were against everyone and that is something that the country simply decided. Well, let's just throw Nick Clegg into the mix and see if the Coalition idea works, but I think it does. was that, while I think in '97 we had a really strong positive agenda and the reason we talked last week about Kia's five missions and in fact, you've written a pretty interesting long article in this week's new States where you are building. about some of the things we talked about last week, where I think it's really about knowing what he's leading to get to a place when the election comes for those people who right now may not be thinking too much about changing the I vote that in fact, when the election comes around, you want there to be absolute clarity about what you want those people to think Labor stands for, so I hope that's the plan and I think at the moment Labor's advantage is.

I said this in this speech I gave. I think the other day that at the moment the Labor leadership is largely or mainly driven by people who are fed up with juries, but they have to get on with the Positive agenda and they have to develop it and implement it because that is, ultimately, which will push them to the limit. Here's one for both of you. Stephen Clark. What was the best speech you've ever heard? Well, I'll give a little acknowledgment if I'm thinking about very short parliamentary

speeches

. The speech that Tom Tugenhart gave during the Afghan withdrawal was and if people want to see it it is easily accessible on YouTube.

It was a really extraordinary example of a modern parliamentary speech at a time when I was starting to lose faith in parliamentary rhetoric because it had a bit of informality, it had raw emotions, it had a very serious argument, both a kind of argument about the character of Britain as a political argument about what we should have done and it was presented with real sincerity and force, how about it? What is your favorite speech? I'm going to choose if it's in Parliament. I'm going to pick John Smith against John Major. If people want to look for it, just look up.

The man with the distracted touch that he was. One of the funniest but devastatingly brutal

speeches

I have ever seen and it was so funny that all the Tory MPs were laughing but basically the feeling they got was that they were laughing off the road. The road's eyes declined, I think the other. Yeah, I think Neil Kinnick's famous militant speech when Eric Hefferer stormed out and Derek Hatton, the Liverpool militant leader, was kind of angry and flashing in the crowd, was a really brilliant speech, I mean, Neil was a great speaker, um, and then still I once saw Bill Clinton give a speech in Belfast.

I remember thinking God, this is good, you know, great speeches I still think great speeches are really very important and I wish we had more of them in our politics now they can be amazing, right? They and humor can be incredibly important. I'll look for the John Smith one, honestly it was a lot of fun, it was the time we'd just had the Grand National which had to be restarted because a hotel had fallen into the sea in Scarborough. which I shouldn't laugh at, but he just made this whole cocktail of things go wrong and he did it like it was John Major's fault, but he did it with such ingenuity that, yeah, that was

powerful

, well, you.

I have these little moments in the house because I remember it's so unfair to Jeremy Corbyn, but it was an extraordinary moment. I was in the house for this, where Jeremy Corbyn had said very, very solemnly, he was speaking very slowly, it was during Brexit. I was just in Brussels and I went to see the European Commission and I went to see the officials and you know what they told me and then one of the conservatives shouted who are you and literally the whole place collapsed, including all the work and peace behind Corbin couldn't stop laughing at him and it was an extraordinary reminder of the fact that you can't be too pompous in the House of Commons;

It's a very, very dangerous place to try to be. too slow and grand Yes, yes, a question for you, then, a very big cabinet, Francis, why is the cabinet so big? How can the Prime Minister manage more than 20 people? And I'd love to go after you on that. Well, the number of people who can. Taking salaries in the cabinet is limited by law, but what seems to have happened in recent years is that people who are not necessarily involved in a cabinet job attend the cabinet, so every time you have those cabinet photos, especially when Johnson was there, it's like you knew. standing room only um I look I think a cabinet of about 20 people you build a government according to the government departments.

I think 20 is manageable um and I think the way to manage it is you have to prioritize prioritize according to the government. general objectives and strategy to meet those objectives, but I think 20 is about right, so when I was in the cabinet there were, I suppose, 23 secretaries of state and then there were seven other people who had been invited along with more junior ministers, the chief of work. There were almost 30 people around the table and it was pretty terrible. Basically what would happen is that the Prime Minister, who was then Theresa May, would set the agenda for the day and then we would all talk, but there was no response.

Back and forth it was like a little statement from each of us, usually with Michael giving a bit of sass coming towards the end trying to make a bigger picture and summarize, but it wasn't a sensible way to start a discussion. a great opportunity for us to make a great presentation, we would all make some great comment, often not on the topic of our own department. I don't have the relevant Telegraph article in front of me, but in one of these WhatsApp exchanges from Matt Hancock's phone, Hancock says: Michael Gove what is this meeting for and Michael Gove says let everyone express themselves and vent, so you and I will decide the policy, that's how they appreciate it, so obviously that's the way he operated it, yeah, but I mean.

I remember talking to Ken Clark about this and Quinn Clark, obviously his father of the house, eventually, when he left, he had been in the House of Commons since the early '70s, he had been a minister under Ted Heath and Thatcher and older and Cameron and said that the cabinet had really deteriorated over the course of his tenure and recalled that cabinet meetings used to last two or three hours and were very important opportunities for conversation where people could really get into issues and the prime ministers would take ownership his cabinet ministry and certainly at that time He returned to David Cameron's cabinet in 2010.

He thought they were very brief and superficial matters where David Cameron was trying to tick a clock. He obviously wanted everyone out the door pretty quickly and certainly, from Ken Clark's point of view, he didn't believe that. the country was already really governed by cabinets now of course he and others would to some extent blame you and Tony Blair for moving away from these three long four hour cabinet meetings towards what was known as armchair government , It is not like this? but you know, Tony would always say that if the first time I know someone has a problem with something we're doing is when it's being discussed at the Cabinet table, we're not handling things properly, you know, when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister.

I know you had current meetings that lasted for days and Tony Ben made sure they continued. I exaggerate, very long cabinet meetings, so I think it is about political management and I know what you are saying about that. Something I remember especially when we had political cabinet meetings where public officials had to leave and sometimes there would be days away and everyone felt like they had to tell an anecdote that they were supposed to take a more vantage point on. broad. and the fact is that, as you know, within a cabinet there is a hierarchy, there is a power structure, um, you know the possibility of the Home Secretary, the Foreign Secretary, governing the people who have some kind of political power, whatever job they have.

I have and then you have everyone else who is contributing from time to time, but I think that and you also know that the cabinet committee structures are where a lot of the decisions are actually made and I think that's a good Yes, although even those they were pretty grim, I was on the biggest of those committees, which was the National Security Council, which was Cameron's invention and that was a pretty terrible, miserable thing, um, here we are, giving advice to teenager Alastair Luke Blasiuszewski, if you could go back to your teenage self and say, don't do that, do this, what would it be and why would I definitely say don't smoke, because even though I quit smoking 35 years ago, I still think I have a little bit of excess. on my health, so I certainly would have said to stop drinking so much.

In fact, I know people think that you and I read a lot of books, but I wish I had read a lot more when I was younger. I really wish I had had a Now I look back, although I did well in school, I did well in college, but I look back and I think I had all those years where I really could have read and I didn't, so I would say quit the drink and read a book, what about you? I am with you. I agree with that. One of the things is that I read a lot when I was at school, but when I got to Oxford I basically stopped reading. partly because I felt guilty because I was never working on the work I was supposed to do, so I never felt like I could read for fun and I think I would have said look even if you're not getting your essay.

Ready, take the opportunity to read, don't waste all your time, uh, pathetically, trying to ask the girls out for a cup of tea, yes, a cup of tea, that's what you did, lovely, yes, draw, uncover a veil. I had a much better line of conversation. I told you. You know you want to come to a loading game? We're James Thomas, who would you rather trust Isabel Oakshot or Xi Jinping with your phone? Very, very good, very good. I like it. Well, I think XI Jinping probably already has it. everything I think I've complained before. One of the things that really bothered me as a minister is that I would leave my phone, for example, when I went to Saudi Arabia when I was going to a meeting and they wanted to take it.

They say that for security reasons I would go out and they would have put so much spyware on my phone that the battery would last about 45 minutes before I had to recharge it because I was just transmitting my banal nonsense to Saudi Arabia. intelligence service all the time um Eddie G, you both appreciate the importance of artistic literature, etc. What is one thing you read and watched in your youth that had a profound impact on your worldview? Oh God, it was good, wasn't it? I don't know why the book that came to mind was Sporting Life, was it David's story?

David's story, I think, uh, and it was a book about a rugby league player in a northern working class town and I think I just don't know why that book had such an impact on me, but it did and it didn't. It was just the fact that it was about the sport, but about the kind of, I think it's, I think it's one of those books that really interested me in this whole thing.topic of, you know, the class on British life and British history, etc., so I'm going to go with that very good one, what about you?

For me, yes, well, I think it was a biography of Lawrence for Arabia, unsurprisingly, written by an American academic called John Mack, written in the '70s, called The Prince of Our Disorder, which was an incredibly complex story. sympathetic to Lawrence's struggle of trying to be a hero and trying to live in the 20th century trying to make sense of his life, trying to make sense of Arab nationalism and his own failures, and I took that book very, very seriously and It's still in print. I still think it's probably the best most comprehensive biography I know of by Mac okay Prince of our mess the life of T Lawrence right so let's take a quick break and welcome back to the restless politics question time Now I have a difficult one to read for you Roy Okay, I'm going to give you two questions that go together.

It's okay, John Brown. I've asked a question before about perhaps one of the most controversial topics. It is not surprising. What should we do to reverse

population

growth on our planet? every aspect of the mess we are in is a direct or indirect consequence of it James Morgan why doesn't Rory focus on

population

control

and contraception in Nigeria as well as lifting people out of poverty? There are too many human beings. Well, it's very interesting. because of course there is a big movement in many countries, Japan, USA, Germany, Russia, to increase the population, because Africa is unusual in that it is one of the few parts of the world where the population is growing and where we will probably end up with 40 of the world's population in Africa by the end of the century, while of course in Japan we have the problem of demographic collapse and even in Britain our population will continue to grow almost entirely through immigration, that It will be the reason our population grows.

It won't be through our own birth rate because, well, Abraham was going to have to go at that time, we certainly won't have any immigration, nothing more than population growth, as you say, population growth is happening in parts of the world , except in our countries. We need it because we have so many older people and so few young people. Well, that's the problem, isn't it that we're in this very unstable situation? On the one hand, people do not want the population to grow endlessly. and Britain has a denser population than most countries in Europe, a denser population than India, but you are absolutely right, if you look at Japan, if you don't bring in young people, you end up in a very, very bad situation.

I mean the Japanese. The economy is paralyzed. Japanese society has become basically synonymous with sclerosity and it is very, very difficult to take care of the elderly and Japan because there are simply not enough young people, but equally the answer to this, of course, has to be to eventually get to a stable population with the correct way what we do not want is to bring in more and more young people to try to take care of our elders or on the other hand a demographic collapse that will bring with it its own problems and and and at the end of the century century the map of the world population will be very different the populations of places like Russia China populations We have discussed that the Chinese population dropped by 10 million this year and is going to start falling very, very steeply so why am I not in favor of population

control

? in Africa um, I think the answer is that, uh, the best solution to population growth, in the end, comes through writing living standards that as you get richer, people have fewer children and one of the reasons why in Mali or northern Nigeria people still have The average size of children per family is 7.2 because poverty, insecurity and mortality make them feel that they need that many children to help them survive and what about contraceptives?

Well, I'm one of the favorite contraceptives, I mean, I think, um, family planning. The organizations are really important, but there is a problem which is that in Uganda, for example, the president's wife is a very active Christian and she has not supported this and this is true in many countries, unfortunately there are religious objections to doing what there is What to do to really help control the population now Rory, we received a bit of criticism last week. I don't know if you noticed, but in some of the comments and questions, although people are admiring, there is honesty in saying how useless we were.

There was a suggestion in the house that we needed to engage Emma Atkins after the discussion about sharing the domestic burden, which they both admitted was important, but neither of them did. 50 Could you commit to taking on an activity in your home? It was disappointing to hear it. recognition of the problem, no action change comes from small steps, so I've actually been saying that if you own it every day, is there anything I can do to help? and then happily she usually says no, I'm fine, but I've decided I'm going. ask every day, yes, that's my son, what about you?

That's good and it's like it's some kind of North Korean re-education camp. We have to make a series of commitments. Do we have very tough listeners? Yes, we have it. for the difficult listeners here, really difficult listeners, okay, I think the compromise is taking on a lot more of the admin around the kids, so taking on more in my case, I have to take on more of the burden of things like booking trips . accommodation, sorting out the holiday and not letting the burden of that fall so much on shashana has 300 other things to do, well, I thought, I thought for a horrible moment, I thought for a horrible moment, are you going to talk about applications for Eden, please? , tell me, fortunately, fortunately they are not old enough, so, Leslie, that is not a no, Leslie, what are two men sinking that are us?

How have women's rights improved throughout your life? What do you think are the most important things we need to address for women? I'll see if we agree, gosh, thank you, I think women are at uh, well, I think women are at the next stage of equality. I think they have won equality, a lot of equality in many parts of the world in terms of legislation, but I still think that women have to fight for this to be seen in large organizations, to be seen in terms of the labor market and particularly in positions. higher, and I think there's still a lot of misogyny around and I think it's seen in places where, frankly, you shouldn't, you talked about Hancock's WhatsApp messages, that there's some kind of guy and, uh, a little bit Clubby and stuff , and I think that's still the norm in many large organizations.

I think women still have a long way to go, yes, yes, I think that's true, we are reaching the end, but here is an interesting challenge from Sean, who comes from Ireland and is helping with the right to participate in the campaign against cancer. survivors, so the campaigns to regulate the insurance industry to guarantee cancer survivors mortgage protection, so right now one of the things preventing people from getting up the housing ladder is that the industry insurance will not provide mortgage protection if you have had cancer. and the political system in Ireland has blocked this reform, they have not blocked it by saying that they do not like the idea, but because of DeLay.

So it's much more acceptable for them to say they're okay and working on it while they're actually doing nothing and the consequences of delay for the people involved are life changing, so ask the question: any tips for avoiding this? death due to delay in a campaign? We have to find it, since it is a legislative issue, it must find the politicians who really want it. To try and make it a problem, we have the same problem here with mental health. I have higher insurance premiums because I've been open about having had mental health problems because people assume you know they could happen again.

Now I think that's wrong. I think what it's about is that we're encouraged to be a lot more open about mental health things being obvious, but I think cancer is the same thing, but openness comes at a price if you can't actually get a adequate insurance or you can't access things that you should normally have access to, so my advice would be to find politicians who think this really matters and I think in Ireland, like in the UK, you should be able to find them, okay, very well, what about you, very well, yeah? I mean, I think it's true.

I mean, sometimes charities and others approach me to do these things and you're absolutely right. I mean, it's about yes, it's about the campaigns, it's about the media. but in the end it's about getting MPs to key government ministers and getting them to really want to do this and feel like their feet are being held to the fire by the public, but there's also a bit of momentum by the public. The people themselves in the book I have just written I have a survey section about campaigns and where people outside Parliament have wanted to make something happen and then they have found the right person inside Parliament and in fact an interesting person is that that a campaign that Fiona was involved in that was about civil partnerships so that she and I, who are not married, have the same rights as a married couple, given that you know we have been together for so long and it was a young couple that tried to do the test. in court and they failed and did not get equal rights even though they were not married and you may be surprised at the MP they actually meet who became their advocate in Parliament and actually helped make this.

What happened was Tim Louton who just felt it was an equality issue, so finding the right person who has access to the government, who has the power, who can make an argument, etc., that's the key, so I wish Sean the best, now listen why don't we close this one because I have a really funny story I can tell about this? Okay, it goes back to Hancock, the Hancock Oak shooting stuff, Ian McDonald, what's your best private message that ended up being published? Do you have any? of those Rory best private message no luckily no luckily no I don't think so okay okay I've been scared with that I think what the best rights are so I don't even remember but when Michael Howard was leader of the Conservatives and Oliver Letwin was, what?

Was he the Shadow Chancellor? He was certainly on the phone, yes, yes, he was the Shadow Opportunity for a while and then he was in the cabinet office for Cameron, yes, so they had this line that they could basically increase public spending and cut taxes, yeah, it's completely absurd, almost trussonomic, so we did this kind of online poster campaign, it wasn't even a proper poster, it wasn't, they weren't put on billboards, but we were just trying to You know, make a point , so we had Howard and uh leave their heads on top of the hole in the front of Pigs and the pigs were flying and it was the classic type of you know the pigs will fly before these two reduce your taxes. and increase their expenses, okay, it hadn't even crossed my mind that they're both Jewish and it became sort of an anti-Semitic thing and they were accusing us of anti-Semitism, right? and we were having to defend ourselves and then some Jewish camp charities got involved and everything went in a terrible direction.

Trevor Beatty was our advertising executive and he messaged me and said, "I've got a fucking news night outside my door." coming to my door to give my comment on this damn sign that I had nothing to do with what I should say and I said: I write why don't you go away and cover something important. You're okay, just me talking to Trevor in a you know kind of way. Trevor and Alistair are friendly, unfortunately I accidentally copied it to the editor of the news line that I did and he guided his bullet, he guided his show that night basically the lie was, you know, it's Alistair Campbell finally went crazy um, so that was like that . that was not intended for public consumption, that came out and it hurt me a little, very good, I guess I think about that, about that happy memory, we'll bring it to an end, but it's a pleasure to talk to you and uh, see you soon, It will be a pleasure to talk to you, I heard this, I heard the sound of a crispy potato being eaten there, you did it towards the end, you, I, I have to explain, justify myself, yes, I have been flying through Addis Ababa overnight.

I just changed planes, I think I got ahead of myself three times over Malawi on a trip to Rwanda and I need a little popcorn now and then to keep me going because we've been at this longer than many of your listeners will be aware of. This has been quite a marathon session. I know, I know, I know, we've had it, we've had a lot of trouble today and it was some nice wildlife that I heard in the background did it. I hear some birds and you heard something tooof beautiful wildlife because unfortunately I have not managed to get out into the daylight, but night is approaching, the light is fading and there has been an incredible sound of African birds and I hope you can, listeners.

By listening carefully you will have caught in the pot a little of the incredible signs of luongway here here at night. I heard them, that's good, okay, Royal, have a good trip, okay, all the best, okay, bye.