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July 19, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:16:17
Nick Timothy
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Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James DellingPod.
And I am so excited about this special guest.
I didn't know how I managed to lure him onto the pod, because, I mean, Nick, Nick Timothy, can I just say, I'm really, really glad to have you on the podcast, because I think, I'm sure I've been quite rude about you in the past, and yet I think you're a great guest.
I think you've been...
Your recent pieces in The Telegraph have been absolutely on point.
So whatever I may have said about you in the past, in a rude way, I kind of forgive you for and I hope you forgive me for being horrid.
My bark is worse than my bite, I think.
Yeah, it's all water off ducks back.
You're definitely mean about me on occasion.
I'm sure you'll be mean about me again in the future when we cross on economic things.
But I think on some of the cultural things, I think we're probably in agreement.
That's interesting, isn't it?
That...
That is where we disagree on economics.
Because reading your pieces about, in the Telegraph, about, well, first of all, you did a blistering attack on the Archbishop of Canterbury.
And I thought that you beat him on theology, which is...
Which is impressive or would be impressive if you didn't get the impression that Justin Welby doesn't actually know much about theology.
Just remind me what you were saying about, remind me of the thrust of that particular piece first.
Well, I mean, I must say I was a bit nervous when I submitted the piece because it is something to cross swords with the Archbishop on theology.
But what he said struck me as being completely baffling.
I mean, he was under pressure from absolutely nowhere, as far as I could tell, but he went on the radio to announce that he was reviewing All the statues and buildings that were named after the Church of England estate.
But he was also asked by Justin Webb on the Today programme whether we should forgive people who had committed sins in previous generations.
And he said something really strange, which was that there can be forgiveness if there is change now, which I thought was a really odd thing to say.
Firstly, it's an interesting addition of conditionality to Christian forgiveness, but how one generation can be held to account for the sins of another is very surprising.
There are obviously biblical extracts that say that fathers shouldn't be punished for the sins of sons and sons shouldn't be punished for the sins of fathers.
There are other bits of the Bible, I think, in the Old Testament that say that nations can hold collective guilt.
And I was slightly surprised by some Christian left-wingers on Twitter trying to make that argument to me.
It's a slightly novel thing for the left to be saying that nations should be held collectively guilty for several generations and a pretty dangerous argument to make to beat.
You sound like somebody who's quite versed in your scriptures.
Are you a churchgoer?
Not really.
I mean, I consider myself a Christian, I suppose, but I'm always...
I think I'm sort of theologically torn in that I find Anglicanism a little bit wishy-washy the older I get.
And I sometimes wonder whether I'm destined to become a Catholic.
There's a bit of Catholicism in my family, so maybe there's a pull towards Catholicism that I haven't understood before.
Yes, I think a lot of us, you know, feel that pull as we get older.
I often look, it's a bit like the distracted boyfriend meme.
I find myself looking over my shoulder at the Catholic Church and my Anglican girlfriend is going, what?
Because, I mean, you can see why evil in war converted.
There is definitely an appeal in Well, the Catholic Church at its best is not embarrassed by ritual.
It's not embarrassed by rigor, which I think the Church of England has largely abandoned.
And there's also something quite seductive about...
The Catholic Church has emissaries.
I don't know whether you've ever come across Father Michael Seed, for example.
He was...
The Catholic Church has these very, very charming priests, which I'm sure you'll have come across in your life, who are very good at evangelising on behalf of the Catholic Church.
And it makes you think, that's a club I'd really like to belong to, in the way that you...
At the same time, you know, we've got these fantastic churches all over the country, which are Anglican.
When my children were younger, I used to take them to Chelsea Old Church and I used to sometimes take part of the children's service because I wanted them to grow up to understand that this is part of the fabric of your culture.
Yeah.
And your nation.
That seems to me very important.
I think the Church of England is almost more important culturally than it is religiously.
Would you kind of agree with that?
Well, I mean, I think it's for everyone to make decisions about what they believe in, in terms of faith.
But I think it's really important.
I think it's interesting what you said about children.
I think the same about children.
It's really important, I think, that kids are brought up with a certain kind of baseline of knowledge of Christianity.
A, because that is what then gives them the chance to make an informed or, you know, sort of...
An educated decision about their own faith.
But B, because it's part of what educationalists call cultural literacy.
And it actually depends on the questions of national identity and things like that.
And I always laugh at politicians who talk about things like British values, because they end up either saying it's Well, it's like it's liberal democracy, isn't it?
Which is true of pretty much the whole of the West.
Or they say it's it's the NHS, which is like the NHS is great.
It's one particular institution, but it's that that doesn't exactly amount to Britishness.
And I think Britishness and national identities of any kind come from the really long sweep of history and the stories we tell about ourselves and the institutions that we inherit.
And our sort of collective memories, some of which might be mythologized slightly, some of which might be real and actually happen in our own lifetimes.
And part of that is our Christian history.
And even if you don't believe it, it's important in that respect, but it's also hugely important to even understand other aspects of our cultural heritage.
I mean, there's large parts of English literature that you wouldn't really understand if you didn't understand the foundations of Christianity.
Yes, absolutely.
I agree with that.
What did you study at university?
Oh, I read politics, which I kind of wish I hadn't.
Wish I'd read history or English literature, I think.
Yes, so I read English.
Or maths if I wanted to be a billionaire.
Or what?
Or maths if I wanted to be a billionaire.
Yeah, but can you do that?
I mean, if you've got a kind of artsy brain, I think this is one of the things that always bothered me about all those people who say, yes, we should only be studying STEM subjects because STEMs are where the growing economy is and everything else is worthless.
And it's just not true.
Some of us are gifted.
Some of us have a mathematical bent.
Some of us have an artistic bent.
And I think that the arts degree is very good at training you to think Critically, or at least they ought to be.
But yeah, when I read English, it struck me, that point you made, that right up until the most recent generation, every vaguely educated English person Knew about the parable of the loaves and fishes, say, or any, Martha, Lazarus.
These were all familiar names, water into wine.
And of course, every writer in literature would have been familiar with these stories and was writing for an audience that they understood would be familiar with these tales.
And suddenly, we've been deracinated.
And that, I think, is where your cultural conservatism and my cultural conservatism align, and why I think you're far more of an ally than an enemy, even though you're a kind of panty-waist squish on the subject of economics, which is good.
Yeah, and it's kind of a case where you agree on some things and disagree on others.
I find it really weird the way in politics people They'll get drawn to a particular body of thought, whether it's like conservatism or social democracy or whatever.
And they'll be attracted to it for a particular reason.
And then they feel like they need to conform across the whole piece because they've decided they're a social democrat or they've decided they're a conservative or a libertarian or whatever.
And therefore they have to apply that logic to everything.
I'm not really sure the world works in that kind of way.
No.
And I have to say, Nick, that it's not just you that I've been disappointed with on occasion.
I looked, for example, only yesterday I found myself falling out with the kind of economic allies that I have.
People like Christian Nimitz, who has been on the podcast a couple of times.
But...
He belongs to that school of thought which really doesn't give a toss about whether the whole of England is concreted over and whether we build everywhere.
And again, I think it's when I see people on the kind of libertarian end of the argument talking in this way, I realise I'm not really a strict libertarian because I very much care about the English countryside.
I don't think we should be building all over it.
And I imagine that you probably feel the same way on that score.
Yeah, well, I mean, so you're a libertarian who lives in the country?
Well, no!
Do you know what?
It's interesting.
When people sort of use the term libertarian about themselves, my scepticism antennae start twitching, because it seems to me that...
Libertarianism is missing some key elements, one of which is that cultural thing that we just talked about just now, that religion really is quite important.
Whether or not you're a believer, it doesn't matter so much as you have to believe that this is a good thing, this is part of our culture.
I'm not sure libertarians would care much about that.
No.
Culture isn't only important in its own right.
Because it contributes to identity, if you think about what it actually means to belong to a nation and a national community, It requires a sort of solidarity, which means that in extremists, you might be prepared to go to war to defend your fellow countrymen and your territory.
But you might also, in a more prosaic way, be asked to pay certain taxes or to accept the laws that are passed in your country.
And that requires a way of recognising one another and understanding that...
You will, you know, if you do right, you can fairly expect somebody else to do right by you, that there's going to be some kind of trust and reciprocity.
And it's the familiarity of all the shared stories and shared symbols and institutions and places and the stories we tell about those places that mean that, you know, if you bumped into a fellow Brit overseas, you would recognise things in one another quite quickly and you'd be able to talk to one another about faces.
And in the same way as if, you know, people were pitched alongside one another in trenches during wartime, there was plenty that banned them together because of that kind of common culture.
And lefty liberals don't get it either.
No, I think that's right.
I think that's right.
You can answer this question, or at least attempt to answer this question, because it was raised in the more recent piece you wrote about why it is that our political class, including our conservative political class,
have surrendered to this relatively tiny minority of hard-left thinkers indoctrinated by Foucault, You made the point actually that it was Rudi Dutschka who talked about the long march through the institutions, not Antonia Gramsci as is commonly thought.
You mentioned Gramsci.
You also mentioned another person that I hadn't heard of.
I've got the piece in front of me.
He sounds a scary character.
Gitano Mosca.
Gitano the fly.
He sounds bloody evil.
Who is he?
Tell me, where did he come from?
I don't think he's evil.
He was associated with people like Pareto and they were theorists of power.
And so he was exploring the way certain groups in society can hold power over society at large.
But I do think that that sentence about how an organised minority can sort of impose their will on a disorganised majority is actually quite an important quote for trying to understand where we are today.
Because it is kind of baffling, right?
I mean, I think the mainstream majority...
Would agree that racism is bad, but likewise they don't want to tear down statues of Robert Peel on the basis that his dad had investment in the slave trade.
Most people would say that we should treat transsexuals with respect and decency, but it doesn't mean that we should deny the reality of biological sex or impinge on the rights of women to feel secure and have privacy and that kind of thing.
And yet there is this quite small extreme fringe that is driving the debate on all sorts of different issues.
And I think it is partly because they're organised.
I think it's partly because, to be honest, I think the majority of us just don't understand what's going on.
What is this stuff?
Where is it coming from?
Why is it happening?
And also, the rules are so confusing.
You can say something that was quite right two years ago and is now going to throw you in jail.
It's very confusing for a lot of people.
And actually, I think it's confusing for politicians as much as anybody.
I think we've got a particular challenge in the Conservative Party in that quite a lot of Conservative politicians are in politics to feel like they're running the economy well and to treat things a bit like a business.
And they're not in it for cultural issues.
And so they find a lot of this quite distasteful and weird and would prefer not to talk about it.
And to be honest, I've always hated the idea of a culture war.
I think a culture war is really worrying because there's little room for compromise compared to on a lot of economic questions where you can kind of recalibrate back and forth.
With cultural stuff, it feels like it's quite zero-sum where the winner takes all and then maybe you Change who's in power, and then that winner takes all.
And I really worry about it, but I've got to the point where I now think we can't wish this away.
It's here.
And people who want to stand up for cultural inheritance, who want to stand up for the kind of values of the mainstream of society and the institutions of the country really need to say enough's enough.
And we need to fight this.
And to do that, we need to be much better organised.
Yes.
You mentioned earlier that when politicians tried to come up with a list of things which were quintessentially British.
Who was it who did that?
Which government was that?
It was very folkish when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister.
I'm fairly certain it was entirely because focus groups said English voters found him a bit Scottish.
And so he was desperately trying to show what a patriotic Brit he was, which is why he talks about British values a lot.
And he used the Union Jack a lot.
And he obviously talked about British jobs and British workers at one stage, which got him into quite a bit of trouble on his own side.
Yes.
I remember that one of the feeble offerings they came up with was tolerance.
And I was thinking, yeah, right, so what, the soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder in the trenches, waiting to go over the top, were fighting to preserve our tradition of tolerance?
I don't think so.
It is much more...
You and I could come up with a list now, and definitely...
High on the list, I think, would be our history and our religion, if those two are one or the same thing.
And it's interesting, isn't it, that while we're seeing it now with Black Lives Matter...
That we're so embarrassed of our past, we're not even prepared to shout from the rooftops the fact that in 1807, I think it was, we passed an act against the slave trade and William Wilberforce had been campaigning to end the slave trade and we sacrificed some of our Royal Navy to police the slave trade.
Stuff like this, we should be proud of.
But whenever I In the past, I don't know anymore, when I used to go on BBC programmes to debate history with a BBC-endorsed historian, usually a female, what I'd normally find is that the BBC-endorsed female historian would balk at the notion that we had anything to be proud of with our history, and actually we should be taught our history warts and all, as though somehow we'd...
We'd engage in this massive cover-up and actually, of course, President Trump is experiencing this at this moment as well from things like CNN, that they're saying the same thing, that actually you may feel proud of America's history and you may feel proud of Britain's history, but actually it was built on exploitation and slavery and blood.
And it's not like that, is it?
I mean, we've got much to be proud of, much to bind us.
Well, there's quite a lot of exploitation in our history.
I mean, I've got ancestors who were deported to Australia for stealing a chicken.
Well, quite right, too.
You're thieving bastard ancestors.
If Justin Welby is listening, I apologise for the sins of my ancestors.
I... Of course there is oppression and exploitation in the whole history of humanity and the idea that everybody whose ancestors can be traced back all the way through the entire history of the British Isles were not exploited and oppressed is absurd.
I do think that we need to find a way of Of being able to enjoy and educate younger people about history and our institutions and these shared stories.
We do also need to do it in a way that is still inclusive for new colours.
I mean, it is definitely...
It is definitely the case that we need to avoid telling these stories in a way that means they are exclusively for white Anglo-Saxons and Celts, because that would actually fail the test on its own objective.
We are a multiracial society now.
So we do need to find ways of telling these stories that are inclusive for Brits who come from, whose parents and grandparents and so on came from other parts of the world.
But that is obviously not impossible.
I mean, a large number of the people who live in Britain who won't be able to trace their ancestry all the way back to the days of Shakespeare do nonetheless have ancestral stories that are connected to Britain in different ways, whether that's through the Empire and Commonwealth, whether it's through common European whether that's through the Empire and Commonwealth, whether it's through common European history and that kind
So I think sometimes these things are set up in a way that means that you either want to talk about British history, you know, or you don't because you're mindful of the interests of ethnic minorities.
Actually, we need to find a way of being able to do both of those things and make sure that everybody is able to take some pride in the country's history and the institutions we have.
But that's obviously possible because while of course there is some bad in our history as there is in every country's history, there's plenty of good too.
It's interesting, Nick.
I think you've fallen into the intersectional trap there.
This is where my cuck antennae have been twitching quite a lot as you were speaking there.
I couldn't disagree with you more.
I don't think we've got any business trying to adjust our history teaching to I really resent the idea, and I think it's common throughout the political class, and I think it's a function of intellectual sloppiness and cowardice.
This idea that somehow somebody's skin colour or their particular background means that they can't share in the British identity and the British history.
As far as I'm concerned, I agree with you.
If you're a Muslim kid, say you've come over from Syria, If you become a British citizen, then Britain's history is your history.
We don't have to have some special modules about Syria to make them feel good.
We don't have to have special Islam modules to show that we care about Islam.
Look, the Black Prince may not have been black, but he did his stuff on behalf of every British person, whatever their skin colour.
It's our heritage.
And I think that it's...
This is the thing that really exercises me.
I think that what is really important about our culture is...
Where am I going with this?
I think we need to feel not embarrassed about clinging on to our past, as the enemies of history might put it, because actually we're not trying to take refuge in a world that no longer exists and rejecting the modern world.
In order for the modern world to be a good place to live in, we have to embrace our past at As our collective history and celebrate that fact.
Am I making any kind of sense there?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
And I actually, I agree with what you just said.
And I actually think, I think it's a real problem when people start to argue that kids of minority ethnicities need to be taught, you know, Stormzy instead of Shakespeare.
Yeah.
That in itself is racist and patronising anyway, but it's...
I'm a Stormzy as shit as well.
Yeah.
Shakespeare is one thing and Stormzy is quite another.
I mean, I agree.
But it also means that we'd be teaching kids, on the basis of their skin colour, things that were less relevant to the national story, and we'd be depriving them of the cultural literacy that they need.
To get by in Britain.
We need to teach everybody about Shakespeare and about all aspects of our history.
I think what I mean is, and I've got a section in my book about this where I take the piss out of Gordon Brown a little bit.
Stop with the title of your book.
My book is called Remaking One Nation, The Future of Conservatism.
And it talks about some of these things.
I take the piss out of Brian a little bit for what he said about precisionness.
And I list some of the things that I think, you know, add up.
So it's not an exhaustive list, but sort of add up to a sense of precisionness, whether it's, you know, sort of 10-6-6 and all that, or whether it's, you know, cup fine all day or neaps and tatties or whatever.
But I think, but firstly, there are certain things that are true to the modern British identity that actually do come from other parts of the world, which should be acknowledged a lot.
You know, the Balti, I'm a Brummie, you know, the Balti...
So am I. I can tell from your accent.
And that was very convincing just now.
That was terrible.
I won't be doing mine.
But that's as much as part of our food heritage now as lots of traditionally English things.
But I think that one of the challenges is, if you're If your heritage is subcontinental Asian, if your grandparents are Indians, then if you look at a picture of Churchill and you're talking about Churchill, then firstly Churchill doesn't look like you, whereas he does look like you and me, a bit fatter, a bit older.
He doesn't look like you, but also the stories that their families might know about Churchill are sometimes different and sometimes more complex than ours, because we immediately associate Churchill with the Second World War.
They might associate him not only with the Second World War, but also with opposition to Indian independence and things like that.
I'm not saying we should become really apologetic about those things.
I just mean that I think when we When we talk about our history, we've got to do it in a way that is also cognizant of the fact that a fifth of the country can't date their ancestors in England all the way back to Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution.
Yeah, again, I sort of disagree with that.
I mean, okay, I agree.
Most of us, we're all descended from...
All those of us who are born here are descended from Edward III, aren't we?
I think he's the kind of...
It's a bit like everyone's related to...
Is it Genghis Khan?
I think we're all descended from Genghis Khan as well because of his mass rapes across...
Or is it Attila the Hun?
I forget.
One of the two.
But I can't disagree.
I think history teachers should teach...
Churchill from the British perspective and every teacher should be ready with the answer at the back of the class when a kid from a kind of probably an Islamist family comes up and says You're Churchill, he was responsible for the Bengal famine, innit?
And the teacher should be very well briefed to come up with the answers, having probably read Andrew Roberts' book, explaining why actually that's just complete bollocks.
You know, this is a kind of left-wing, divisive propaganda point.
I mean, I had this once on that BBC programme I hinted at earlier, with the token BBC historian and there was an Islamist who made this point.
And I'm thinking, we should stop indulging this crap.
We should teach...
Pretty much the G.A. Henty version of history.
It should be, or H.E. Marshall, it should be our island story.
Something we can be proud of.
It doesn't matter what colour we are, what religion we are.
This is the basic.
You live in a Christian culture, of course you're free to practice your own religion because that's one of the things we do in this country.
We allow diversity of religious practice.
But at the end of the day, you are in an Anglican country.
We broke from the Church of Rome because of this that happened in Henry VIII's time.
Yadda yadda, there it is.
Your history, be proud of it.
If at home you want to celebrate your own history and talk about that with Grandad or whatever from Bengal or whatever, absolutely fine.
But we don't go any further than that.
I mean, I'm quite hardcore on this point, and I wish that...
I think Conservatives ought to be more hardcore.
By the way, sorry, here we are.
We've got halfway through the interview.
We've been talking for half an hour.
And I haven't really introduced you to...
I mean, there are going to be American listeners who have no clue who Nick Timothy is.
Just take me back.
Tell us what you did in the Theresa May government.
You were a special advisor to a former prime minister.
Yeah, but before I do that, can I pick you up on what you just said?
Yes, do.
You said that we allow people to practice different faiths and worship different religions.
But that's precisely the point.
That tradition of pluralism comes from religious difference and actually quite a bloody religious past post-Planet.
Reformation.
And in the end, we, as a society, learned to become more pluralistic and tolerant of difference on the basis that, you know, there was a lot of unnecessary bloodshed, a lot of unnecessary conflict,
and we concluded, you know, put simply and oversimplistically, that it's better to tolerate I think it's quite a good example of how history, I don't think it should be taught in an overly simplistic narrative sense.
Of course, you know, we need...
We need kids to understand chronology and narratives, and it should be taught in a positive way.
We've so much to be proud of as a country.
But actually, I think it's through difficulties like that that we became a more pluralistic society.
And we should apply some of that logic in what we're talking about now, I think.
Yeah, except that you're demanding a level of nuance, which I think is actually might be acceptable if you're studying it for A level.
But if you're doing it GCSE level, there's not room for that.
You just need the stories.
You need the stories served up.
I agree with you about narrative.
It needs to be a fairly straightforward narrative.
Kings, queens, battles, that kind of thing, dates.
That's all in the early stages.
Later on, maybe you can learn more about the Bengal famine, but not at the basic level.
Anyway, tell me...
Sorry, I haven't given you a chance to come back there, but I just don't want to get this conversation bogged down in education because I want you to tell us a bit about yourself.
Tell us about how you started out in politics and where you ended up.
Well, I've been knocking around Tory politics and Westminster and Whitehall for about 20 years now.
So I think I graduated in 2001 and I wrote to Tory HQ, to the guy running the research department, Rick Nye, and said...
I'm going to have a job, here's my CV, and for no apparent reason they gave me one.
I think the reason was because the Tories were so screwed at that point at Blair's sort of heyday, and we'd just got rid of William Hague and had replaced him with RDS. So I suspect nobody else wanted to work there, so that's how I started off.
Right.
And then you...
You started working for Theresa May when she was, what, Home Secretary?
Is that kind of thing?
Yeah, so I spent a few different periods working for the party in opposition.
And then in 2010, I'd worked for Theresa a little bit sort of through the research department where I worked, but alongside other people too.
And then in 2010, I went into the Home Office with her.
I spent five years in the Home Office, which, as the Brits listening will know, is the Department for Crises and Disasters, and that's where all my hair fell out.
So I left there burned out in 2015.
And then you became Special Advisor to Theresa May when she was Prime Minister.
Yeah, so then I had a year out running a charity and then the Brexit referendum came along and the country did the right thing and voted to leave and David resigned and at that point my holiday in Sicily was rudely interrupted.
I flew back to the UK and we were straight into a leadership contest.
And which Theresa won very handsomely and then she became Prime Minister and we had a year before we screwed it all up in the 2017 election.
Because I'm torn here, Nick.
What I really like talking to my podcast guests about is ideas, and you're clearly a man of ideas, and we could have a great discussion.
But at the same time, it would be a complete waste if I didn't ask for your insider view of Conservative politics.
And I was thinking, I kind of owe you a semi-apology in that I've said in the past that Theresa May was the worst Prime Minister, Conservative Prime Minister ever.
But Boris Johnson has said, hold my beer.
Hold my beer.
And he's, I mean, effortlessly, effortlessly eclipsed.
I mean, I don't know whether you agree with me on this one or whether you even want an adventure opinion, but it seems to me that this has got to be I mean, Ted Heath, I suppose.
Ted Heath was really, really shit too.
But I'm not sure I could ever envisage a worse conservative administration than this one, or a worse prime minister than Boris Johnson.
They seem to have sold every conservative value down the river, including the cultural wars we were discussing earlier.
Well, at the same time, You are a polemicist by profession, I think.
Is that fair?
Well, I don't deliberately...
I don't wake up in the morning and say to myself, what can I argue in a really exaggerated way in order to generate lots of heat but no light?
That's not how I think.
I think sometimes we...
Polemicists, as you call us, or the other word people use is contrarian, as though we adopt positions just to be difficult.
I speak very much as I find things.
I suppose I do get passionate and angry about real injustices, like we're experiencing at the moment with, for example, the masks, which were foisted on us this week.
I think this is absolute lunacy.
But I do very much worry about the authoritarian direction that this government is going in.
And I'm not even inviting you to agree with me here.
What I really wanted to ask you is a more basic question, which is why is the Conservative...
Well, the Parliamentary Party, so utterly shit.
I mean, it seems to be a government of all the no-talents.
There seems to have been nothing good about the Conservative Party since Margaret Thatcher.
And I wonder whether you could sort of help make sense of this to me.
Why is it that there are so many...
Well, number one, why are there so many MPs in the party, like that thicko ex-army chap, what's his name, Johnny Mercer, who clearly are not Conservatives, who are clearly just there to be MPs?
Why are there so many of those?
Why is the Conservative Party incapable of standing up for conservatism of any form?
And is there any hope?
So those are my questions to you.
Well, I mean, I'm very glad you said that you weren't encouraging me to agree, because I think what you said was a load of bollocks, to be honest.
I think partly it depends on what we think conservatism is.
And I think a lot of people are under the mistaken impression that conservatism is What about Thatcherism?
Is that an aberration?
No, I think Thatcherism is a bit complicated for me because She did an awful lot of what was necessary and, frankly, just in time.
But I think she also unleashed some sort of social forces and bequeathed some quite serious long-term economic problems that we're still struggling with as a country.
Briefly what?
Well, I mean, the sort of rapid de-industrialization of parts of the country, and I'm not defending the sort of state subsidies or the way in which some of those nationalized industries were run, but I mean, it's definitely true that if you look at some of the regions in the Midlands and north of England and in Wales,
some of those places are still suffering from quite long-term economic problems, some of which were Some of which were brought about by the loss of the large employers in those places in the 80s.
Do you mean the mining industry, for example?
I can see why that might have been essentially destructive.
Manufacturing at large declined considerably through the 80s and 90s.
I mean, the West's manufacturing basis has declined quite rapidly over the last 20 years or so, but actually Britain started declining much earlier.
Does that make you a Donald Trump fan?
No.
Because he's kind of on-shoring American industry, isn't he, after years when it's been kind of sent out to Mexico and China and stuff.
I think there's a couple of things that Trump actually correctly observed, whether he did it himself.
Whether it was his advisors, whether he kind of stumbled across it, or whether it was really thought through, I don't know.
But I think he spotted two things that I doubt some of his solutions, but I think the observations were correct.
One is the world has needed to stand up to China for a long time, and actually he started to do that.
And the second is that We've got this kind of mentality with policymaking, it's true in Britain as well, where there's this kind of crude utilitarian calculus.
You can sort of see it, like when you're inside government, you see it all the time with impact assessments.
And policies are subject to these impact assessments, which themselves are based on all sorts of assumptions about the way the world works.
And if the impact assessment comes back saying, well, this particular policy, in net terms, overall, over a period of 20 years, will make the country a fraction of 0.01% better off than it's worth doing,
even if it completely ruins an entire region of the country or an entire sector of the economy or Or requires things that the public don't really want.
And correspondingly, there are things which might be of real social benefit or of real benefit to a particular part of the country that won't get done because the great impact assessment treasury machine comes back and says, oh no, it will make us incredibly marginally slightly worse off over a period of years.
And see the way that logic applies in things like trade agreements or, in Britain's case, a lot of the time, immigration policy, for example.
And I think it was that kind of utilitarian logic that led, you know, certainly the Clintons, both of them, would sort of stand up and say, well, you know, free trade is good because it makes us all very slightly better off.
But They didn't really stop to think or talk about what that meant for families in the Rust Belt.
And I think since...
Yeah.
Since Bill Clinton signed the treaty that effectively took China into the WTO, I think something like 60,000 American factories have closed.
60,000!
Yes.
We did a podcast about this, actually.
The admission to...
Of China to WTO, three months to the day after 9-11 was far, far more damaging to, certainly to the Western world, than 9-11 was.
The fallout has been far greater.
I agree with you on that one, although it does sound like a kind of observer editorial from 20 years ago, what you're saying there, that the erosion of Britain's manufacturing base.
Where are you on these freeports?
This is one of the very few Boris wheezes that I think might have legs.
I mean, do you not think that if we want to rescue these regions, I mean, I agree with you, Wales is just a...
It's a failed state, isn't it, really?
It's a sort of failed welfare state.
I suppose you could say the same thing as Scotland as well, which is a shame, because they've got nice countryside and stuff, and I've got nothing against the people.
But I think their economy is a disaster.
So do you think that if we have free ports with low taxes, that might be a solution?
I don't disagree with the characterisation of Scotland and Wales.
I don't think it's quite like that.
The Scottish economy in particular is more prosperous than most of the English regions, I think.
Wait a second.
Scotland's got a tiny, tiny percentage of the population which produces all the economic value, and the rest are just kind of living off fried Mars bars on a taxpayer's expense.
I mean, that's the deal in Scotland.
Come on.
Let's not pretend.
Yeah, I kind of disagree with your characterisation.
You've been too long in politics, Nick.
That's the problem.
You've become kind of too cautious about telling it like it is.
I think that's true.
How much time have you spent in Scotland and Wales if you think that's true?
I've got family.
I don't want to have them single out in case they get, you know, denied medical care or something or get, you know, get force-fed leaks or something.
I've got enough experience of Wales to know that even though I love Wales and wish good things on it, the economy is basically just kaput.
It is.
I mean, you might get exceptions, but it's run by...
Look, devolved government has been a disaster for Wales and Scotland, I think, despite what Dan Hannan promised us, that if you give people more of a democratic say in their region, then wonderful things will happen.
It hasn't happened.
You've just got the kind of...
Really no talented people who shouldn't be anywhere near the reins of government making oppressive rules and just wasting money on an epic scale.
We've come to the crux of our disagreement.
I do not believe that government spending has the power to do good.
I really genuinely believe that government should leave The economy well alone, and that it's the private sector that generates value and enables people like you to do all your kind of lovely public sector stuff.
But it's an indulgence which is only possible as a result of the hard work and efficiency of the private sector.
I mean, I'm sure sort of fresh off reading some Hayek or something that might feel real.
But I mean, you know, you just disparaged, you know, the economies of Scotland and Wales.
You know, we've been sort of waiting for the invisible hand to come and rescue.
They're a product of government.
They're a product of over-government.
It's precisely this, that the welfare state saps people's desire to go out and do stuff.
In fact, rather like furlough, which is another classic example of this, Furlough, the reason we're in this mess right now, one of the main reasons is because of the over generous furlough payment, which paid people 80% of their wages to sit on their arses doing nothing for no real reason.
And is there any wonder people don't want to go back to work?
I mean, they may say, oh, we're frightened of the virus.
What it really is, is they've been so cushioned by this free money for doing bugger all that they'd like more free money for doing bugger all.
Well I was under the impression we were asking people to stay at home because we were living through an unprecedented pandemic and a serious threat to life.
But the bigger question is it's not unprecedented.
Well I mean it's unprecedented in the modern world.
Even though I dispute even that actually.
I think you need to spend more time reading lockdown skeptics if you haven't already.
Which global pandemic have you missed?
Well, the one in 1968, the Hong Kong flu.
There have been a number of so-called pandemics, if you want to use that word, where the number of deaths has been as bad.
Nothing on the scale with the means of international The only different thing about this pandemic is the response to it.
The pandemic itself is, you know, flu is nasty.
People die of flu.
It's not pleasant.
I feel sorry for anyone who gets it, but I think there's been a massive, massive government overreaction.
If you think there's been an overreaction by government, then you have to accuse pretty much every government of the world and every medical establishment of the world, almost all the world's scientific advisors of the same overreaction.
I suspect those scientific and medical advisors are better equipped to tell us about the dangers of it than you and I are.
Yeah, the patronising point.
It's always much better, I find, to find points of agreement rather than disagreement, because otherwise it's just like, you say this, I say that, I say that.
Let's go back to the original questions, which you dismissed as bollocks.
I'm not sure that I would agree with that, which is that Okay, we'll go back to the piece that you wrote, the most recent one, headlined Our fearful leaders are failing to stand up to a radical, woke minority.
And it's clear from reading that piece that you and I do agree quite strongly on some things.
And one of these things is the failure of our political class to stand up for conservative values, to stand up against the hard left.
And we see this...
I mean, even...
Even people that you would expect to be quite forthright in standing up to this stuff, people like, okay, they're either marginalised, largely, like Andrew Bridgen, MP, who I think is very courageous, but he's on a wing of the party, which is all but ignored.
You've got people like Steve Baker, who's sound on some issues, but clearly has to be quite politic at times, that...
There is something in the Conservative governmental party apparatus which prevents people from defending Conservative values.
Would you agree with that at least?
Well, I think when I criticise leaders, I actually think there's a problem across pretty much every level of society.
So it's, you know, whether it is the Archbishop of Canterbury, whether it's the people who run universities, whether it's business leaders.
I mean, like, you know...
Arsenal Football Club, very quick to say, yeah, we're going to encourage our players to take the knee.
And say that Black Lives Matter and things like that.
But when Mesut Ozil spoke out about the treatment of Muslims in China, they told him to shut up because of the number of shirt sales in China.
You know, these things are almost all hypocrites along the way.
But there is also a problem with political leaders too.
And I think I think in the Tory party, a significant number of MPs just aren't in it for cultural reasons.
They're economic liberals and some of them are social liberals too.
And that's what they want to spend their time doing, talking about, thinking about and legislating for.
And they find a lot of these arguments terribly embarrassing.
Partly because they're so polarising, so it really is quite often a case of, do you believe in pulling down these statues or are you a racist?
Yes, you're right.
If you're a politician who says, well no, I think statues should only come down if there's proper due process and it's done under the rule of law, then you're already suspected as being Some kind of mean-spirited racist, which is obviously nonsense.
But it scares a lot of people into silence.
So I think some of them are just afraid.
Some of them are just not interested in this agenda.
Some of them just wish it would go away.
But it's not going to go away.
It's only going to get worse, I think.
So, OK, now we come to the heart of it.
So yours is...
A council of despair in a way, and it reflects something I've noticed.
One of my best mates is Michael Gove.
We occasionally speak to each other and what's fascinating about Gove is he never tells me anything of interest or use about anything that's going on in politics.
He is pathologically discreet and it's really, really annoying.
So I'm constantly having to read between the lines about the shit that's going down in the Conservative Party and he's my in, in a way, to what you can and can't do within government.
The impression I get, and maybe you can confirm this, is that you can go in to politics and be an ideologue like me, and I'm very proud to be an ideologue.
You know, I believe in first principles and I think that we should act according to first principles and think everything through on those grounds because then you know what your clear line is and you know how to do the right thing at all times.
And the impression I get reading between the lines is that The system is so compromised that the deep state, the civil servants are so irredeemably left-wing that there are so few decent players to pick from for cabinet-level appointments that actually to expect the Conservative Party to do anything Conservative anymore
is just a fantastical delusion.
Am I right?
Well, I think when you say Something that is properly conservative, I think you might mean something different to me.
I mean, I think the state itself is a problem, and it needs to be reformed considerably.
I think the civil service is a problem.
some of the senior civil servants, I think, have delusions of grandeur, enjoy the lack of accountability, think that they're the permanent power.
Politicians come and go.
But there's not enough expertise.
They recognize generalism and people move in and out of jobs every three minutes.
So nobody really knows everything.
They don't move in and out of the private sector for maybe cultural reasons, actually.
Actually, I think things like pension contributions and boring rules like that make it harder for them to do it, which is a problem.
So I think the civil service needs to be reformed.
I would decentralise more.
I think part of the problem is that we're trying to run a complex country of 70 million people from Whitehall, and that almost by definition means it's very difficult to succeed.
And so I think, I mean, I personally favour a federal United Kingdom with an English parliament and government.
And probably decentralisation within that.
And I think if things are managed at a more sensible scale, then people who are elected might stand a better chance of doing the things that they promise and their mandate gives them the power to do.
But it's very difficult at the moment, partly for the reasons I've given and partly because ministers really are here one minute, go on the next.
Yes.
Are you a fan of Margaret Thatcher?
Yeah, I mean, I think I've probably got a qualified opinion of her in the sense that I think she did some incredibly important things, but I think the speed of the change was such that certain communities haven't recovered, and then later decisions by other governments have probably compounded.
Some of those problems.
And I think she, you know, I can't remember who it was said, that she thought that by freeing the economy, she sort of envisaged a society in the image of her father and she bequeathed a society in the image of her son.
And I think there's a little bit of...
There's a little bit of truth in that.
So, I mean, I think she's undoubtedly one of the great figures of Conservative politics and British government.
But I mean, it's not that, you know, I wouldn't lionize...
Any individual politician because they all, you know, they all make mistakes as well as alongside their achievements and even their achievements are sometimes tainted by the fact that actually, you know, times move on.
And I think it serves the Conservative Party really badly to be arguing about her, you know, 30 years after she left office.
Okay.
The reason I was asking you about Margaret Thatcher is that Martin Durkin's line on Margaret Thatcher is that she wasn't really a conservative.
She was a radical and that she wasn't representative of conservatism.
And I have to say, looking at...
It is partly true.
Partly, yeah.
I think she was actually quite socially conservative.
I think she was probably underestimating some of the forces she was unleashing through her economic radicalism.
Because...
Okay, so...
We've agreed that your version of conservatism, your understanding of conservatism is different from my conservatism, which makes it quite difficult for you to answer the next question in a way that's going to satisfy me.
But what conservative things have any conservative governments done in the last decade or so, other than sort of holding the line and maybe being slightly less shit than it would have been under Labour?
I actually, to be honest, I think if you think about the fact that Blair was Prime Minister for 10 years and he created devolved government in Scotland and Wales for better or worse and he And he and Gordon Brown left really big legislative frameworks like the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act,
which we're still living with, then actually of the really lasting things that have happened since 2010 and the Tories getting back in, you would say that Brexit is probably the only one.
And that was done by mistake because Cameron didn't want it to happen.
Yes.
And I'm frustrated with the modern Tory party that it hasn't tried to build institutions or renew institutions or reform them to make sure that power resides with people and communities and so on.
And it hasn't tried to unpick some of those quite Yes.
You know, unfortunate changes that Labour bequeathed us.
And so if your complaint is that, I completely agree with you.
That is my complaint.
If your complaint is, look, Boris's government is talking about spending lots of money through infrastructure spending and it's telling people to wear masks because of the virus, then I kind of disagree because I don't think those things are unconservative.
But if it's the first thing, I'm taking it with you.
Yeah, well, I'm a great believer in kindling our love rather than fomenting dissent between us.
I think that the Equalities Act and the Human Rights Act have been devastating to Britain's culture.
Surely, The very least the Conservative Party should be doing, the Conservative government should be doing, is repealing those things because they are undermining everything that a Conservative Party ought to be doing.
So why is there no appetite for that?
Well, I'd like to see that.
And I think we should also remember it's kind of incumbent on all of us to make these arguments.
We need to try to create an intellectual climate in which people...
Understand why these things might be necessary and where there is some pressure that starts to be put on Conservative ministers and advisors to do something about these things.
I wouldn't be altogether surprised if the Human Rights Act, and it's not just the Human Rights Act, it is actually membership of the European Convention on Human Rights itself that I think is the problem.
I wouldn't be altogether surprised if that did become an issue over the next few years.
And the same with the Quangos, which as we know, Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown stuffed with Labour apparatchiks.
And yet when it's come round to, let's give one example, the Electoral Commission.
The Electoral Commission is bought and sold, but it belongs to Labour.
Or it belongs to the left anyway.
Look at the way it treated people like poor old Darren Grimes.
It's not about justice.
It's not about preserving the integrity of the electoral system.
It's about enforcing the left's agenda.
And yet, what are the Conservatives doing about this injustice?
They don't seem to be reforming it.
They seem to be letting it get on with its own evil work.
Yeah, I think there's a few things about this, because I think periodically you get Tory activists or people in the conservative sympathetic media saying, you know, why the bloody hell have they just appointed this person to this quango?
Or how is the NHS still run by a former advisor to Jamie Blair?
Or what the hell is the Electoral Commission all about?
I mean, I think the Electoral Commission...
It's beyond redemption.
It needs to be abolished.
And we need to probably replace it in some way, but it certainly should be abolished.
My view is it is partly about personalities and the political beliefs of the people in the positions, but only to a point.
Because even if you appoint perfectly sensible conservatives to these positions, you find that I think there is a case for...
Plenty of the quangos to continue existing.
Some of them, that might not be the case, and we might be able to abolish some of them.
But actually, I think, and this, you know, I come back to the Human Rights Act and Equality Act.
Why is it that relatively normal people, many of whom aren't especially political and aren't necessarily left-wing, why aren't they creating this permanently politically corrupt culture?
And I think part of my answer to that is, well, it's not a surprise if every time the police or the probation service or prison officers or whoever, whenever they have to make a decision about protecting the public and cutting crime and catching criminals, they have to balance it with the rights of criminals or illegal immigrants or whatever because of their article this rights and article that rights.
Especially in bureaucracies, because they're always overly cautious, they always like to gold plate and make sure that they're just going a bit further than they have to, to cover their arses maybe, but that is the culture.
If you're always asking people to consider the human rights aspects of something, then that is going to skew their decision making.
And similarly with the equalities legislation.
So if you impose on every bit of the public sector across the country the public sector equalities duty, and you say pretty much anything you have to do, every change you want to make, I don't think these are technically compulsory, but in effect they end up being something like that.
They have to do these equality impact assessments.
Then it's just the same as the human rights thing.
It's chilling.
It sets the parameters of a decision.
And I don't think it's then a surprise that all these public sector bodies basically come across as left wing as they are right now.
I think it's in large part because of those legal frameworks.
I think, no, I've heard this before.
I think this is a point that Peter Hitchens has made.
So, look, you've got better Westminster contacts than me.
Do you get any sense there's any appetite for making those massive changes?
I mean, it's quite a big deal, abolishing axe, isn't it?
Yeah, well, I think...
Axing axe.
Difficult to say that, axing axe.
I think that...
I think it's more likely that there will be a debate about the Human Rights Act of ECHR than the Equalities Act.
I think there is a part of the Tory parliamentary party that will find that very difficult.
I hate them!
I hate them!
Some of those people I think have actually left the parliamentary party because they're the kinds of people who are upset about Brexit too.
So I don't think either of these things are likely to happen without any kind of fight.
But I think whether it's for sort of cynical electoral reasons...
Or whether it's actually just because the issues that keep coming up show that we need to do something about this, or whether it's actually just the way politics is changing on a structural basis.
It feels to me like certainly human rights are going to come up as an issue for the Tories to address because in electoral terms, right now Keir Starmer wants to kill all the cultural questions and take things back to an economic devising line because the cultural issues kill his potential electoral coalition.
So all he wants to do is keep everything focused on economic matters and competence.
And for Boris to protect his electoral coalition that he won in December...
One wing of which is the now slightly marginal seats of posh places like Winchester, but is also real places like Dudley and Walsall and Derby and Middlesbrough and Bolsover and places like that.
Then to win in those places again, I think he probably is going to have to move to the left on the economy, but he's also going to have to be quite robust on cultural matters.
And I'm sure Dom Cummings is more than aware of that.
And Keir Starmer is, after all, a career human rights lawyer.
And so you can sort of see the politics drawing the parties, perhaps, to a row about the future of human rights legislation because I suspect Starmer wouldn't be able to help himself.
Right.
Interesting.
Well, that's a sort of tiny crumb, tiny crumb of comfort you've given me in an otherwise desert of despair.
Now, I've got to ask you, far more important, I noticed from that blue, the blue behind you on the shutters on your window, whatever they are, you are in Greece, well, you told me before, so it wasn't exactly a difficult...
It normally looks like that.
It's lovely.
What I want to know is, where are you?
How did you get there?
How much hassle was it?
And are you getting a kind of good deal?
So I'm glad I can clear this up, actually, because I don't want to be accused of a Stanley Johnson-style trip via Bulgaria or wherever he went.
My family situation is a little bit complicated, and Martina, my partner, I still worked in Geneva.
So we've been living between London and Geneva for a while.
And so just before lockdown was obviously about to arrive, I went out to Geneva.
So I'd been to Switzerland for most of the lockdown.
And then last week we came to Greece because there are hardly any cases in Switzerland and not very many cases in Greece.
So they're completely relaxed about flights from I think they're a bit more paranoid about it.
But are you renting somewhere?
Are you staying in a hotel?
Are you renting an apartment?
Or what is your property?
A little house on the island of Paros, which is very nice.
And so, look, this is what I'm trying to find out.
I'm desperate for some Mediterranean sun and some calamari or similar.
Is it kind of empty at the moment?
Is it a good place to go at the moment?
Paros or the various Greek islands?
I think it's a little quieter than in other summers.
So it's not quite the same.
And I think the locals are a bit Nervous.
You can tell that there's a certain...
I think they probably take the distancing and the mask wearing and that kind of thing a bit more seriously than certainly they do back in Geneva.
Do they?
Yeah.
Oh, right.
So when you go out to your Taverna, Zorba is coming over the mask.
Is that right?
Yeah, quite a lot of people wearing masks, especially in shops.
And the restaurants are just quite quiet.
Right.
And have the prices gone up, or is it about the same?
It's all about the same.
The flight's quite difficult to get, but other than that, it was the same.
Right.
Okay.
Well, thank you for that key travel bulletin.
And listen, Nick.
It was called Wish You Were Here, that terrible travel program in the 80s.
I feel like I just did a bulletin.
Judith Chalmers, I believe, was the presenter.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Those were happier times, though.
We concerned ourselves with trivia in a way that we don't anymore.
You're not allowed to talk trivia.
You're not allowed to talk...
Everything is politically charged.
I mean, that's not my imagination, is it?
I definitely think that's true.
I think we spent years saying...
Lots of people spent years saying that they wished people were more politically engaged.
Now everybody's politically engaged.
Everyone's permanently furious.
It's awful.
I think people's natural state should be not to think about politics.
I think it should be for weird wonks, obsessives like you and me.
But the civilians should be left out of this war.
I kind of agree.
Yeah.
Okay, Nick, thank you so much.
I mean, I particularly appreciate this, given that you've sacrificed over an hour of your Greek son.
So I think you should go and reward yourself now with a delicious Greek salad and perhaps some tzatziki and maybe a glass of ouzo or red tea.
I'm just being envious here.
I'm fantasizing about your situation.
Thank you very much.
I really appreciate it.
I'd appreciate that.
Oh, one more thing.
Some people, the subscribers to my Patreon and my Subscribestar are getting this podcast much earlier.
So if you want access to future podcasts earlier and also to my weekly Not My Spectator column, don't forget, sign up to me, either Subscribestar or Patreon, and then I can afford more holidays in Greece, probably, just like Nick.
Thanks, Nick.
Great.
Enjoy your holiday.
Thanks very much.
Bye-bye.
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