All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Sept. 12, 2023 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
46:20
20230912_piers-morgan-uncensored-luis-rubiales-preview-rory
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Rubiales Quits Amid Crisis 00:01:24
Tonight on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Luis Rubiales sensationally quits in a world-exclusive interview with me for this program.
He's kissed goodbye to his job, his reputation, but does he deserve to now kiss goodbye to his liberty?
Also, tonight Maury Stewart is the rarest beast in British politics.
He seems to unite right and left and people actually rather like him.
He joins me live to explain his extraordinary state of affairs.
And George Pataki was governor of New York in his darkest hour.
On 9-11, we'll ask what's happened to the unity that that tragedy inspired.
Live from the news building in London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Well, good evening from London.
Welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
It's the kiss that became a crisis.
The infamous World Cup clinch between Spain's football chief Luis Rubiales and Jenny Hamoso, the star player and captain of the Spanish team, has divided opinion across the globe.
To his critics, Rubiales is a potent symbol of sexism, of toxic masculinity.
A man of authority humiliating a woman in a scene that's evocative of the power plays they face every day.
To his supporters, though, he's a man who's losing everything over a single moment of over-exuberance, celebrating winning the World Cup.
He's now carrying the can, it appears, for bigger issues which are far beyond his control.
The Kiss That Divided the World 00:15:56
That's what his supporters say.
Well, tomorrow, you can make your own minds up.
You'll watch the full world-exclusive interview right here on Talk TV on Piers Morgan Uncensored at 8 p.m.
But 24 hours before it airs, we're already making headlines across the planet.
And this is why, despite facing a wave of attacks from colleagues, celebrities, even his own prime minister, Rubiales steadfastly refused to quit and insisted he wasn't going to.
And then, during my interview, to my surprise, he said this.
You've come under ferocious pressure for three weeks now on you, on your family.
It's been very difficult for your daughters, their young girls.
I can only imagine as a father myself, I have a daughter who's around the age of one of your girls.
Incredibly difficult.
There comes a point, perhaps, when the pressure is just so relentless that you do think about what you should do with yourself and your future.
Many people think you should resign as president.
What are you going to do?
I love so much my daughters and they love me so, so much.
I'm very happy.
I'm very proud of them.
Very, very proud of them.
They are very near to me.
About my resignation.
Yes, I'm going to do.
You're going to resign?
Yeah, I'm going to.
Yes, because I cannot continue my work for two or three or three reasons.
First of all, I have a suspension.
And this suspension is just starting and it's going to continue.
I'm sure.
Because if you can see how it was down, it's going to continue.
At the same time, I think that the Federation is not a question about if I can support or not this mediatic tsunami.
It's about to know how it's going to affect the Royal Spanish Football Federation.
And I love my country and I love football.
And I don't want damage for them.
Well, most people around the world have only seen a short clip of that kiss.
There's been a rush to judgment, which in my opinion is understandable.
It looks bad.
He shouldn't have done it.
As we've discovered, and as everybody will discover tomorrow, it's a complicated issue.
Hamerso says the kiss was not consensual, but that wasn't what she said in the immediate aftermath.
She's now filed a criminal complaint for sexual assault.
Is that what that was?
There's no denying it.
The rhetoric has changed.
First and most have downplayed it.
Unexpected, but no big deal.
And then there was this video on the team bus afterwards where she's clearly laughing about it.
They all are.
They all start chanting Bezo Bezo, which is Spanish for kiss, kiss, kiss.
And then Prezi Prezi, which is the president.
Rubiales, who then appears rather sheepishly.
And he talks about all this in my interview tomorrow.
There's no sign, is there, with this video that they all believe a terrible assault has happened that's going to become a global scandal that will cost Rubiales his job.
That's not to mean that they may not have reflected in the morning when they saw the attention it was getting, overriding all that they'd achieved, that maybe they did then think, actually, this was wrong and we've been violated.
I get that, and I can understand that could be the case.
Tomorrow's interview goes into all of this.
Rubiales is honest.
He's raw.
He's passionate.
He's definitive about some of these key questions.
And he doesn't leave anything in the locker, to use a football term.
It might change some people's minds about him.
It did mine.
What's clear is that Rubiales has kissed goodbye to his reputation.
He's kissed goodbye to what should have been the crowning moment of his career.
This is the greatest moment in Spanish football history.
The men's team had never won the World Cup.
He's now kissed goodbye to his job.
But should he kiss goodbye to his liberty too?
Is it right that Rubiales is now facing a potential criminal prosecution for that kiss?
That is a debate that I can tell you from all the conversations I've had with people in the last few days.
A lot of people have strong feelings either way.
Well, tomorrow night, right here, Rubiales, uncensored, is a fascinating, gripping watch.
You don't want to miss that.
We're drawing and discussing all this.
This daily mail columnist Sarah Vine making her uncensored debut, long overdue, I might add, especially given how uncensored you are, Ms. Vine.
Talk-to-contributor Esther Krakow.
I'm a socialist author, Grace Blakely.
Do you like being called that?
Of course I do.
I'm a proud socialist.
You know that.
You used to call me Moay Marxist, which was also quite funny.
You just don't sound like that.
You sound like the poshiest socialist ever.
Well, yeah, obviously.
That's where Moe Marxists come.
I know, I get it.
Socialism with class.
Exactly.
Thank you, Esther.
Do you want to be my main agent?
No.
Yeah, you don't want that.
You don't want that.
You're with peers all the time.
Let's get to more serious matters, ladies.
It's a great panel for this because, Sarah, let's start with you.
Louis Rubiales got carried away.
He admits it, right?
And he's very frank about this in our interview tomorrow.
And we go over everything at length.
But what followed is now being categorised as sexual assault.
Is that what we all witnessed?
Well, I mean, all I can say is I've just seen the same clip that everybody else has seen, which is him sort of overexcited, grabbing her and giving her a big smack on the lips.
And I can't say that I didn't think there was an iota of sexualness in that.
Sexualness?
Sexuality, sexiness, whatever.
I don't think it was sexual in any way.
He's just very overexcited and just wanted to give her a big kiss on the lips because she'd done so brilliantly.
I mean, everybody was kissing everybody.
They were kissing the trophy.
They were each other.
So there was just a lot of kissing going on.
It was quite kissy.
I mean, I thought it was a bit vulgar that he grabbed his testicles in front of the Queen.
And the Queen's 16-year-old daughter.
And by the way, we discussed that.
And he's very, you know, he's very open about how he feels about that.
And that may surprise people.
But in relation to Jenny Himosa, right?
She is having the best moment of her career.
But for the next three weeks after that moment of crowning glory of them winning the World Cup, all that anyone has talked about is her being grabbed by the president of her football association with both hands and snogged on the lips.
Now, to put it in perspective, if Prince William, who's the president of our football association, if when the Lionesses had won the Euros a couple of years ago, if when that had happened, William had done that to the captain of the Lionesses, I think all hell would have broken all the time.
It could be an incentive also for them to do really well in women's football.
If you look like Henry Campbell.
But obviously there's a cultural issue here, because if this wasn't the men's team and he as a male manager did that, they would have no problem because men football is a lot of fun.
And I asked him about if it had been a men's team, would he have done the same thing?
And his answer is really interesting.
So it is complicated.
It's more nuanced.
It's a cultural issue.
Exactly.
It's how men, it's kind of brought into sexual dynamics and the minefield that it now is, it's now brought it to light.
But I think what's happened is this horrible sort of wormy sort of fit me-tooy thing has got to her, hasn't it?
Because she, you saw from the bus video, she doesn't seem that upset.
They were all sort of huge.
No, what?
Okay, now you're content.
I mean, look, they clearly noticed the fact that something got wrong because they were chanting kiss, kiss, kiss.
They were all doing it in a kiss.
This is a bit weird.
It was the equivalent of the music.
Well, she's looking in that video on the bus after they've left the stadium as world champions.
They're all celebrating and drinking.
She's looking actually at a split screen on her phone.
One is Ike Cassillas, a former Spanish goalkeeper, who had a similar kiss with a woman TV reporter who turned out to be his girlfriend or wife or whatever.
And the other half is her being kissed by Ruby Alex.
And they're all laughing and joking and chanting Bezo Bezo, which is kiss, kiss, kiss.
And then Prezi, Prezi, right?
It doesn't, on the face of it, look like they're all in trauma from his assault.
Well, I mean, the point isn't whether or not they've been traumatized.
And we can throw around this word.
It's trauma as though as though all sexual assault is supposed to kind of break a human being down to their very core and they're like lying on the ground crying.
That's not how sexual assault happens.
You know, you experience it in the moment.
It's often shocking at first.
At first, you maybe don't even process what's going on.
You're a bit like, oh, someone's touched me in a strange way, but I don't want to make a fuss about it because I'm on the tube or I'm in a public space or I've just won the Women's World Cup.
So you kind of go along.
And then eventually someone's like, oh, was that a bit strange?
And you're like, yeah, maybe it was a bit weird when that happened to me, actually.
Maybe I would have liked that situation to have taken place a bit differently.
And I think that's clearly what's happened here.
Because ultimately, I just quickly want to say this before we go on.
The only thing that mattered after this happened was that he lost the support of his team and he overtook all of the publicity that had happened about this positive event.
And that's what really should have been the crux.
He should have stepped down for reason.
Well, I don't think he should have stepped down, but I think for most people watching that, the fact that he kissed all of them, basically, he didn't single her out.
If he just apologised, he just would have gone away.
And remember how he reacted initially.
So on the night, and I played this to him in the interview, you know, he, I reminded him what he said, but he calls everyone that criticises him dumbasses and blah, blah, blah.
He really goes on the attack because I think he genuinely is completely taken about anyone would have a problem with it, right?
And I think that that's sincere.
I think he just had no idea what he'd done.
I think watching it, I was trying to think this morning, you know, I was talking to my wife about it.
I was like, somebody you don't know that well.
I mean, he does know them well, so it's a complicated thing.
But if somebody came up and just kissed you on the lips, who's not your partner and not a member of your family or something.
And even then, depending on the family member, it's weird, right?
But I know people that have done that to me at parties sometimes.
And you're like, what have you just done?
Why are you kissing me on the lips?
It is whether he meant any sexual intent is one thing.
But it's what I think.
I don't think he did.
But it still has a kind of sexual element to it.
But it's not the same as someone coming up to you randomly and just kissing you on the lips.
There was an event going on.
Everybody was selling it.
But he doesn't kiss any of the others on the lips.
Well, I don't know.
Maybe he doesn't.
He just not says that.
He hugs them all and he kisses them on the lips.
You're right.
I think if he had just said, look, I'm really sorry.
I was just in the moment.
I really didn't mean anything.
He had a macho moment.
Yeah, he did have one.
Because I think he was just maybe his mother who went on hunger strike.
Which, by the way, my mother, I was with my mother at the weekend, and she affirmed in similar circumstances, she would also go on hungry.
Oh, really?
Has she not had to do that yet?
She has told her quite close.
She actually thought it was a good idea for my next inevitable scrape.
Yeah.
Did she go on immediate hunger strike?
But also, the other thing is, is there was no subterfuge to it.
I mean, I get what you say about sexual assault, but I tend to think that if people have got malicious intentions, they don't do it in the future.
They don't do it in front of you.
That's right.
That's an important point, right?
Because whether or not, you know, we can have this debate, was it sexual?
Did he mean to do something?
I don't think that he probably meant to do something overtly sexual in front of that massive crowd that he thought was going to be a good idea.
Exactly, but it's kind of not the point.
The point is about bodily autonomy.
It's about who is allowed to do that.
Grace, here's the question.
Should he have lost his job over it?
For the kiss?
Never mind the fallout.
Well, I mean, I think the moment, if he had done the kiss and the players had come out and said, we were fine with this, it was a common thing that we do all the time.
It's quite normal.
Culturally, it's appropriate and it's fine, whatever.
Then that would have been one thing.
The fact is that that wasn't what happened.
They came out eventually after, you know, a period of reflection and said, we're not comfortable with this.
We're not okay with this.
And ultimately, the only thing that matters is that he lost their confidence.
And she did say, to be fair to Jenny.
Not them.
And to be fair to Jenny Himosa, she is heard saying on the night, I didn't like it.
Yeah.
So I don't think she's, you know, I think she's probably wrestling with what this is really happening.
I'm not going to give her a special gift because she scored the goal.
Like, I think that was like, because you mentioned that you didn't kiss anyone else on the list.
Oh, you are a superstar.
I mean, you are particularly brilliant.
You know what I mean?
But let me ask you this.
So, Grace, so you think he should have lost his job?
I think when he lost the confidence of the team, then he should have stepped down the road.
Right, so 81 members of the women's team, and then the men joined in.
They weren't going to play again if he was so present.
So the position becomes rapidly untenable.
But should it now be considered a crime?
She is now pushing for him to be prosecuted.
She had 14 days to decide if she wanted to be party to him being criminally prosecuted.
And she took that option.
Now, that's where I, in this whole story, I'm like, hang on, hang on.
All right, he loses his job.
He was inappropriate and wrong.
He's admitted that.
He's not hiding it.
We all saw what happened, right?
But is this really a criminal act?
Well, look, we had the last time I was on the show when you were away discussing this topic, there was a Spanish football journalist on who was talking about the context of this.
And this is really important because Spain had recently passed a law outlining the ways in which it was and wasn't appropriate to touch women, to touch people in the context of sexual harassment.
And this was seen as coming after the passing of this law, which said you're not allowed to touch or kiss people in these ways without their consent.
And if you do, then, you know, action can be taken.
Just to be clear, just to be clear, and he refers to this in our interview, he believes that she did give consent for the kiss.
Now, she says otherwise, but he is adamant that she did.
So there's a case.
Well, that obviously is.
There's a he said, she said, right?
And it may be impossible to get to the bottom of that.
Well, it's very difficult because you're dealing with passionate moments.
People don't tend to fill in forms and triplicate asking for consent when their blood is up and when they're over.
But let's give you an example.
Look, last week, Paul Gascoigne met Prince William randomly at a homeless event down in Bournemouth where he lives.
And he just went up and kissed Prince William, right?
I don't remember him asking him if he could, right?
So in other words, this kind of interaction, you know, it did make me feel like it.
I'll be honest, it made me feel a bit uncomfortable watching what he was doing.
And I think when he looks back on it, and the crotch grabbing in front of the Queen and her 16-year-old daughter, no thanks.
This is a ridiculous way for a president of a football association to behave on the biggest stage in the world, particularly when your team's just won.
So what are you doing?
It's not about you.
But I can buy into the idea he just got completely carried away because they won the World Cup.
If Arsenal win the Premier League next season, I don't know who I may jump up and kiss randomly.
But I mean, I sincerely hope none of you are in my proximity.
Let's sort of practically assault each other on the screen.
It's not a wrong question.
Have to again like, learn to we have.
We have to separate intention from the actual and ultimately the law is done, and that's what we're talking about right now.
It's not done based on intention really, other than in certain cases notwithstanding.
I think you make some very good points, unusually I have to say, which I can almost buy into.
Uh, just in your gut, do you think he was trying to make any kind of assault on her or had any sexual motive for what you?
I don't think this was about sex and actually I don't think that a lot of sexual assault cases are about sex.
We know they're not.
They're often about power.
I knew they are.
They are about he was the president of the football association.
There, I mean, there's no doubt there is a power dynamic.
He's, he's the ultimate boss, right?
Exactly, it's about men thinking that they have some sort of hold or charge or ownership over another person's body um, and sometimes that has a sexual element to it, sometimes it doesn't, but it's often just an unthought of all.
Right, but Sarah, Sarah does it.
What, if?
Does it in a in a strange way?
Look, it may be a conversation women have to have, by the way, right with each other about this because whenever men poke their heads into this, it's a bit of a bare I do.
I've thought for a while because Me Too was so extreme in the way that sort of lacerated people.
And then it I, you felt like the pendulum swung back a little bit and it was a conversation women had to have amongst themselves about.
Well, what do we really think about this?
My question would be about this is, if we perceive what he did knowing what we know and knowing he did it all in the full glare of the world's media if we perceive that to be a sexual crime, are we diminishing what many people would see are much more serious?
Terror Man and Media Glare 00:04:43
Yes, sexual crime.
I think you are.
I think that's.
That is definitely the case.
I think a lot of these with me too.
There's, as with all these things, there's always a real grain of truth.
It always comes from somewhere.
It doesn't just happen out of nowhere, but what happens is people grab onto it and then it becomes a sort of crazy thing and then even the tiniest thing is not allowed.
It does seem like it has just gone too far.
Yeah, I think it's a bit like the Trans thing.
You know there's a.
There's a really serious issue there.
That's very important for a very small number of people, but then it turns into a kind of massive row and culture wars and it's a disaster.
I think that you know there's an element in which there's uh, there's a parallel in the sense that most of the time the boundary is fairly clear, right in terms of what is and isn't sexual assault, and yet we often see the situation where the media picks up and goes with for a very, very long time a kind of an edge case, a fringe case, a case where you're like, oh, was this or wasn't this?
And then that's used to undermine the processes and systems that are used to, let's say, support trans people or prosecute sexual assault.
And now we live in a country, bear in mind, where 99 of rape cases just there's.
There's no justice for the victims whatsoever, and that's partly because of the way our legal system.
The unusual thing here is, we all saw what happened.
Yeah right, so there's nothing that we need, there's nothing more to see really.
I mean, there's a bit of interaction.
He says from some slightly different angles, where he says that she lifted him up and he says, can I give you a peck?
And she says yes, and maybe she didn't hear that, maybe she misunderstood him, maybe it's just a complete breakdown of communication, but certainly if you look at the events afterwards in the dressing room, where they're all parting on the bus, What they're all partying, you just don't get a sense that anyone thinks something really bad's gone down here.
But in a way, this is a microcosm of what happens in a lot of these cases, which is that, you know, he doesn't think he's done anything wrong.
He's misread the signals, clearly.
She, because she says she's a victim, we now have to say you are a victim.
But I don't think she's a victim.
I think maybe other people don't.
So then we get to this awful thing where everybody is like, well, you can't say she's not a victim because she is a victim because she says she's a victim.
But you said, but I see, I saw what happened to sexual assault on.
And I...
Well, look, talking of victims, I do want to just take a bit of time out for Mr. Bay.
It's been a great debate, by the way.
Just to mention, my heart goes out to this guy.
He's a guy called Martin Daubney.
He's a GB News presenter.
It's another network, apparently.
I don't watch it.
He's a former Brexit Party MEP.
And he recently tweeted a few months ago some thoughts about me in relation to COVID.
I'd said that once the science changed about COVID and it was revealed that the vaccine didn't stop you transmitting the virus.
I changed my view about punishing people who wouldn't have it by removing some of their rights.
And I look back and had to rethink about some of it, which I think is the right way to approach things in a democratic society.
You're not always right about everything, much as I tend to have a very high percentage.
But he said this: Morgan blindly regurgitated propaganda and utterly failed as a journalist.
We can imagine how hurt I was to read this, to be called a journalistic failure by Martin Daubney.
But the great thing is, he had a chance at the weekend to show me what journalism really is, because Martin happened to be in the GB News hot seat when we had the terror suspect was caught, I think.
And he had the job of just bringing the very simple task because the easiest thing in this job is breaking news.
You just basically people talk in your ear and you repeat it on there and you just keep calm and you just do your thing.
This is what Martin, who is my journalistic tutor, this is what he did.
We're going straight to me.
This is breaking news.
It's fast happening.
Because as we just said, the terror man.
It's all gone wrong.
It's here.
Chip Chapman.
We have him coming up soon on the arrest of the terror suspect.
He escaped from Wandsworth prison and he's been apprehended.
It's all coming up in GB News.
We've got a first guest.
Here it is.
Police of Escape have arrested prisoner Daniel Calif.
Beg your pardon, we're getting the author in the right place.
This story is just happening.
Join me now for the latest.
It's GB News Home Security Editor, Mark White.
Are you there, Mark?
It's Chip Chapman.
We have Chip Chapman, Army for the Army Anger, former head of counter-terrorism, Major General Chip Chapman.
Well, I can quite see why Martin views himself as a journalistic scholar.
Who else could bring Terror Man into a subject like that?
A brilliant masterclass, I think, in journalism and how to cover breaking news from Martin Daubany.
I will try better, Martin.
Rory Stewart on Political Failure 00:11:05
You're right.
I am a failure and I will try better.
I will watch that video.
Actually, I will watch that video every day, probably for the rest of my natural life, as a template in how to cover breaking news.
Because you, my friend, you are the master.
So thank you.
Thank you to my pack.
Don't leave us along next time.
I dropped the dead donkey, wasn't it?
Yes, it was.
If you were doing a parody.
If you were doing a parody of somebody cocking up breaking news, old Daubers, he would win the Parody of the Euro award.
Thank you to my pack.
Tomorrow night, you're going to watch it, the Ruby Allison interview.
Yeah, definitely.
It is very interesting.
And I think it's a really interesting debate about all these issues.
It's kind of a debate of our times.
But thank you, Pac.
Good to see you all.
Uncensored next, Rory Stewart's sensational new memoir is making headlines for exposing the inner omni-shambolic workings of Westminster and Whitehall.
Join me off the break and he'll be live here in the studio.
Under the previous employment section of his CV, my next guest lists Soldier, diplomat, charity CEO, award-winning travel writer, Harvard professor, and most recently Britain's top podcaster.
Mr. Role's politician is the subject of his new book, Politics on the Edge, which records in full, uncensored fashion the complete omni-shambles at the heart of our British political system.
Well, making his uncensored debut, I am genuinely delighted to have probably the most liked politician in Britain.
But the bar is low, Rory Stewart.
The bar is very low.
Let's start with that, because you've got out of politics.
Many people, a lot of my family, wish you hadn't, wish you were right in the front line of the thing.
Why did you eventually just say, I'm just done with this?
I met the end with Boris Johnson.
I mean, that was the end for me.
And I'd, you know, put in a good nine years.
I'd been a cabinet minister.
I liked Theresa May.
I thought she was trying to do the right thing.
But I really thought that Boris Johnson was a dangerous thing.
I thought he was a shambolic clown.
I thought he was going to be very damaging for our constitution.
And he was.
And I felt he was, yeah.
I mean, that's exactly how he turned out to be.
I mean, you were very prescient in your assessment of him, which led you to leave.
I guess the problem is, if people like you don't want to stay in our system, it's never going to improve.
It's a difficult balance, isn't it, Pittsburgh?
A really difficult balance.
You put up with a lot, you work out how much you can put up with, and at some point you have to be like, enough's enough.
I mean, you're quite direct about some of our former leaders.
Of Theresa May, she had some of a monarch's stiff authority.
Not necessarily a negative, I guess.
David Cameron, later in Kabul, you rightly came across like a host at a pheasant shoot, rented only for the day, courteously presiding without any particular desire to know about the detail of the soil on which he was standing or about the professionals whose job it was to drive the game.
I mean, a real picture of superficiality there from that Prime Minister.
Yeah, I thought that when I came in, that one of the things that struck me first, and it's probably something you see a lot in the public seats a lot, is fundamentally a lack of seriousness.
It really has become like a massive campaigning communications game.
And there isn't any time really to talk about policy.
You would have thought that secretly they might take their masks off and they get around the cabinet table and they're like, okay, enough with going out to the media.
What do we really think about this?
But it happens so rarely.
I mean, the worst by miles of all your stories, it might be the worst thing I've read in a long time.
Liz Truss, and you write this, back in London, Liz Truss asked me how my weekend had been.
I explained that my father had died.
She paused for a moment, nodded, and asked when my 25-year environment plan would be ready.
I read that and I thought, I can't believe I'm reading that.
And then I thought, actually, yes, actually, I can believe I'm reading that.
Because Liz Truss always exuded an air to me of somebody who probably would behave like that.
Without a shred of decency or basic humanity.
No, no, I mean, I think she's a very unique human being.
I worked for Liz Truss.
I worked for Pretty Patel.
I worked for Boris Johnson.
And it was a real education.
But that moment.
Yeah.
Well, that was very sad for me.
I mean, obviously, I love my father deeply.
Of course.
But I think that's a good idea.
That's more awkwardness.
I think she's somebody who...
But that's not awkward.
That's just a total lack of basic humanity and manners.
I think she's somebody who doesn't relate very easily to other people.
And maybe I'm psychologizing too much, but yeah.
Rishi Sunak, you call Machiavelli, why do you call him that?
I think probably because I sensed, I used to sit next to him in the library in the House of Commons, a big kind of wooden library, and he was my library partner.
So I was quite fond of him.
But I didn't quite get why he'd suddenly gone hard for Brexit.
And particularly, even when I got around that, and I understand many of my friends voted Brexit, I couldn't get round him getting in behind Boris Johnson so hard.
Because he'd seemed to me quite a sort of thoughtful, serious.
He seems the kind of serious guy you're talking about.
Yeah, he does.
But if I was talking to him, which I do occasionally, the Brexit thing, I didn't understand why he would be that supportive.
And I agree about Boris.
I guess if Boris is the leader, you either fall in behind or you do what you did and just get out of it, right?
But he fell in behind pretty quickly.
The reason I found it difficult is that it was the MPs who made it possible for Boris.
Because if you remember in this leadership contest, you needed the MPs to vote for him first.
And basically, there were a whole middle group of MPs, and you'd say to them, we know him very well.
We've worked with him.
I'd worked with him in the Foreign Office.
We know that he doesn't really pay attention.
We know he's pretty careless about a lot of stuff.
You don't really think he'd be a good prime minister, do you?
And they'd say, no.
So why are you supporting him?
And they'd say, because he's going to win.
But hasn't politics always been full of charlatans and unprincipled people?
And if we accept that that's a bitter reality, not all.
I've met some very decent people in politics, actually.
But it's not entirely surprising that people like Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, and others, in a televisual age, the ones who can crack a joke and make people laugh, have a little bit less of the robot about them than people thought Theresa May was robotic.
It's not entirely surprising that they rise to the top and have a constituent that will support that.
No, it's not surprising.
Politics always had charlatans and bluffers.
And I think we, people like me from the kind of center ground of politics, have a lot to answer for.
I think the 2008 financial crisis showed that we'd mismanaged the economy.
I think Iraq and Afghanistan were horrible foreign policy humiliations.
And so I think people like Trump or Johnson are responding to a genuine public anger.
These guys screwed up.
They didn't know what they were doing.
The problem is what people are choosing to do is throw them like a hand grenade at the system.
But I mean, in Trump's case, it's effective.
He just tears up any rules that have gone before.
He doesn't care.
And he has a constituent audience that don't really care what he does or what he says.
Yeah, I think it's true for both of them.
But I think that to counter that, there's always going to be people like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson around.
What's lacking is the seriousness in the kind of middle ranks of politics.
And that's why I think the system feels so broken.
What do we do about it?
How do we fix it?
I think we have to decentralise.
We have to take power out of Westminster.
I'm very excited by the Mayor of Manchester, Mayor of West Midlands, and Maddie Street.
And I think we've got to get out of this Victorian idea that a bunch of amateurs sitting in Parliament are going to be able to micromanage the country.
You were a tutor to Prince William and Prince Harry.
So what do you feel about what's happened with those two?
So I don't talk about that.
It's the one thing.
I know, that's why I've asked you.
It's the one thing.
So no, the show's called uncensored Rory.
Come on here and start self-censoring.
What's the matter with you, ma'am?
I think if I'm teaching them, I owe them to them.
But just on a human level.
Owe them confidentially.
I like them both very much.
They have a lovely boy.
Do you feel sad about what's happened?
They now hate each other so much, they don't even talk to each other.
I definitely feel sad, yeah.
As far as you're going to go.
As far as I'm going to go.
Who was the brighter?
As far as I go.
You were their tutor.
As far as I'm going to go, that's not my job.
From a military perspective, when I watch Harry doing his Invictus Games thing, I think good on you.
When I think about his service to his country, I think good on him.
My brother-in-law taught them both at Sandhurst, actually.
I thought they were both good soldiers.
When I see him, the other half of him, running around the world trashing his family and the monarch and everything, I can't stand it.
Yeah, I sympathize with a lot of what you're saying.
I'm a big supporter of the king.
I'm a big supporter of the Prince of Wales.
I'm very proud of the royal family, and I think that's very, very sad.
Should he stick to stuff like the Invictus Games and just shut up trashing the royals?
I'm staying out of this one picture.
You effectively just said you agree.
No, I agree with a lot of things he said.
As his former tutor.
It's dragging me too deep.
You'll sell some books here, Rory.
Come on.
Bit of uncensored honesty.
Let's take a break.
I want to talk to you after the break.
It's 9-11 anniversary today.
And I want to ask where you were when it happened, but also it prompted you to go on this extraordinary two-year walk through Afghanistan and other countries.
I want to know why you did that, what you learned, what we should all learn perhaps from that period.
That's after the break.
Welcome back to Piersborg and Uncensored.
That's my new eight-part crime documentary series, which airs in America on Fox Nation.
Interesting stories, some very dangerous people sitting, well, unnervingly close to me at times, but well worth watching if you're in the States.
I'm back with Rory Stewart here, the uniquely popular and liked British political figure.
Louis Rubialis, I wanted to ask you about that because everyone's talking about this, this guy.
And you've managed to get an interview with him.
Yes, so I've got a big interview with him airing tomorrow night.
We got the first interview, and he was very interesting.
He was very open, very frank about it.
He said, look, I was an idiot.
I shouldn't have done it.
What do you feel, though, about him potentially facing a criminal prosecution now for the kiss?
I actually quite sympathise for the lady at the end there who was saying that it's quite possible that the woman at the time might not really have felt very much, but that afterwards you can feel very, very disturbed.
I mean, look, it's very difficult to judge.
Spain, different mores, different cultures, but I think you've got to be pretty careful about that kind of thing.
Walking Through Taliban Winter 00:03:12
Yeah, it's an interesting sign of the time that it's created such a feor, actually.
9-11, it's the 22nd anniversary today of 9-11.
I remember where I was.
I was lying on a sofa recovering from back surgery and was supposed to be lying there for three weeks.
It was about eight days in.
I got a call from the Daily Mirror newsroom.
I was the editor.
I got straight in my car and drove to Canary Wharf, not even thinking that that might be a target itself.
It was the most extraordinary day of my career and obviously horrendous in so many ways.
Where were you when it happened?
I was walking across Asia.
I'd been walking for about a year and a bit and I didn't understand what had happened.
I met a guy sort of probably a couple of days after 9-11.
And he started trying to explain to me in Nepali.
He says, you know, it's this tower in America and this plane hit it.
I thought this guy was crazy.
Literally.
You had no awareness of it at all.
I was processing these words, but I was like, it's like he's telling me there's been some sci-fi attack in Europe.
So it wasn't until the 18th of September I was arrested and accused of being an al-Qaeda activist up on the Tibetan Nepali.
You are the least likely al-Qaeda activist I probably ever met.
So this is what I said.
I said to the policeman, I said, I'm not a very likely al-Qaeda activist.
And he said, that's exactly what I think you are.
It was like Inspector Cluzo.
The walk that you were on, and you carried on for a long time, you did two years in the end.
It's an extraordinary thing to do, to just walk and walk and walk and walk.
What was the motivation for that?
I had been briefly a British soldier, then I was a diplomat.
And I felt that I was locked behind these embassy walls.
And we were getting involved in these other countries.
We had no idea what was happening.
So I walked across Afghanistan just after 9-11.
I walked through the winter of December, January, February, March.
Just the Taliban government fell.
And it changed my life.
Changed me as a politician, changed me as a diplomat, because I saw the gap between these villages I was in where women had not been more than two hours a walk from their village in their lives, where I could see drugs being traded, people with guns.
And then I turn up in Afghanistan, in Kabul, and I hear the British government and the American government saying, every Afghan wants a gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic, centralized state based on democracy, human rights, the rule of law.
And I thought, I can't even translate that into language they understand.
So my life was changed.
I mean, 9-11 was a horrible event, but it defined the next 10 years of my life.
I was in Afghanistan.
I was in Iraq.
I was working to advise the US government.
And I was trying to stand up against what I saw as the madness of how people were responding.
When you see what's going on in Afghanistan now with the Taliban just obviously taking back full control and oppressing women again and their millions, terrible poverty.
What is the answer?
I mean, Tobias Elberg got into hot water for a very clumsy video he put out, but the central message that we should start engaging again with the Taliban.
Did you have some sympathy with that?
I did have sympathy with that because the truth is that when we sanction people like the Taliban, we don't change their behavior.
They're not trying to go shopping in Harris.
All you end up doing is punishing the Afghan people.
These are some of the poorest people in the world.
Constituents vs Political Divide 00:09:56
Very, very difficult to feed themselves over the winter.
People selling their own organs to feed themselves.
So I think we can find ways of providing assistance to the Afghans without going through the government.
And sanctioning the government just makes the area poorer and more unstable.
And when you look at Ukraine, there's a sort of growing sentiment amongst some Republicans, to my surprise in America, that America should yank the support, spend it at home, not on this latest foreign conflict.
What's your view of what's happening there?
I mean, do you think Ukraine can win?
Is it incumbent on the West to ensure they can win?
How far do we get involved?
I fear that Ukraine is getting like the Iran-Iraq war, which dragged on for eight years.
I think we're underestimating Russia's depth and strength and the nationalistic sentiment.
I think it's going to be very difficult for Ukraine to break through the front lines.
And even if they do, I don't think Russia is going away.
And I think the threat to Putin isn't from the left, it's from the right.
You tell a story in your book of how as an MP you thought about killing yourself or of a story of your constituents' trousers that went viral.
You gave an interview where he says some of the farmers in the more remote parts of his constituency hold their trousers up with twine.
He got picked up and he's accused of being a posh, you are, of being a posh Tory who thinks his voters are country bumpkins.
Yeah.
It's a strange thing looking back at it over 12 years.
I can see now that I was completely overreacting.
What I'm trying to be honest about, I suppose, is as a new MP coming in, you feel a very special relationship with your constituents.
I was very proud of Cumbria.
I was very proud of the work I was doing.
I said a stupid thing to a journalist and suddenly it looks like I'm slagging off my own constituents and I really felt everything had ended.
I sort of felt...
It's extraordinary that you would feel it so deeply.
I mean how close did you come to acting on that impulse?
It's the only time in my life I have felt like that.
I was walking down the street and I saw a lamppost and I thought maybe I should hang myself in this lamppost.
Are you serious?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's the only time in my life but it was and I think it shows some...
Because you felt you'd broken that bond of trust with the constituents?
Probably, you know, I think a lot of this is about the way that you exaggerate relationships in people.
But I felt that an MP with their constituents is like a priest or a doctor.
You have a very special relationship and that if you break it, you're breaking your vocation.
You know, I mean, I read it.
It was a startling thing to read.
I have to say, though, in the context of the point you're trying to make, I do want more politicians to feel that seriousness about that bond of trust with the electorate.
Because if you don't have that, if you treat the electorate with the kind of casual triviality that Boris Johnson did, or the recklessness that Liz Trust did or whatever, I think if you do that, democracy slowly starts to die.
And if we don't have a strong democracy in this country, I don't know what we're left with.
Thank you.
And I think what I'm trying to do in the book in Politics on the Edge is to show, yes, a bit of humor, but above all, to demonstrate that there is a big, big problem, that this is no way to run a government and that we need to reform.
We need to reform our electoral system.
We need to reform ministers going in and out every couple of months out of their jobs to have a serious country.
And you know what else we need, Rory?
We need you back in the game.
You may not want to do it, but actually I think you should.
Thank you.
You going to?
I think about it.
Has this made you think about it?
No, it has made me think about it more.
And it's made me think that probably the way back in maybe is more local.
As I say, I'm very envious of Mayors.
I thought about running to be an independent mayor of London.
And that's still something I think about a lot.
Politics on the Edge.
It's a fascinating, it's actually a pretty scary book, actually, because you lift the lid off what we all fear is lying underneath in our parliamentary system.
And it's got to evolve and it's got to change.
We need more people with your intellect and seriousness, I think, than we currently have.
And that would help enormously.
Rory Struitt, thank you.
Thank you.
I'm being uncensored.
Well, it says the next is George Pataki, who was a governor of New York City during 9-11.
I'll be asking him, is today's divided America betrays the legacy of the people who died that day?
Well, the events of 9-11 brought the U.S. together like never before in modern history.
It was a tragedy that seemed to unite politicians of both parties, as well as people from every part of the country, in a spirit of patriotism and togetherness.
Today, however, exactly 22 years since that fateful day, the nation remains arguably more divided than ever.
So what happened?
And can the disuniting of the United States be reversed?
Well, here to discuss this is a man who was governor of New York on September 11th, 2001, George Pataki.
Governor, great to have you on the program, especially today.
Thank you, Pierre.
It's nice being on with you.
It must bring back so many evocative memories for you that awful day.
Awful day is the right word.
You know, when I go down the ground zero, as I approach it, you just have this tremendous sense of loss.
You know, the friends and people you worked with, the firefighters who died that day, and we'll never be able to bring them back.
And it's just really a sad day in that sense.
But also, you can't help but appreciate the courage how New Yorkers and Americans responded that day in the weeks and months thereafter.
And when I go down there as well, I see the life, the excitement, the vibrancy of lower Manhattan.
And that makes me proud that for all the horror, we've come back stronger than ever in Lower Manhattan.
That is indisputably true.
I'm in Manhattan a lot and it's been remarkable to see how that city.
But it doesn't surprise me.
New York's an incredible city with incredible people.
It has that spirit about it.
It reminded me of London after the Blitz and so on in World War II.
But what's happened to the unity?
When America came together off 9-11, I'd never seen anything quite like that.
I remember George Bush.
I think we've got a clip of George W. Bush, the president, throwing the first pitch at the Yankee Stadium.
And this was what happened.
So this was the president of the time, George W. Bush, being unanimously cheered by a roaring Yankee stadium.
And Governor, when you see that, that couldn't happen anymore.
Things are so toxic now, so tribal, so partisan, that whoever's president, no one's going to get that kind of response.
And the latest poll shows 65% of Americans believe America's never been so divided.
Do you feel that?
And if so, what is the answer?
Piers, absolutely I feel that.
And that's the second tragedy of September 11th.
One was who we lost that day, but the second is how a country that was the most unified in my lifetime is now the most divided I've ever seen in my lifetime.
And I think I don't mean to be overly simplistic, but it comes down to leadership.
You need to have a leader, leaders who look to inspire the people with a common destiny going forward.
And instead, for years now, we've had just partisan division aimed at my party winning more than the other party.
And instead of bringing us together from the top down, it's been about divide for political benefit.
And I think that is a tragedy that has hurt this country.
But I don't think it's irreversible.
You know, the spirit of the American people is still there.
The belief in the future of this country is still there.
We just need the right leader.
I mean, you talk about the right leader.
You know, President Biden is not in America on 9-11.
He's in Alaska on his way back from his foreign travels.
I've just seen reports that Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is at ground zero, that Carmela Harris is there, but not the president of the United States.
Does that surprise you?
It's disappointing more than surprising.
And, you know, I don't think President Biden wants to have anything to do with September 11th.
You know, first of all, it resulted in the Afghanistan war.
And how that ended under Biden's watch was a catastrophe that we're going to be paying for for years to come.
And the terrorists came to America, and now we have an open border.
And we know that hundreds of people on the terror watch list have crossed the southern border.
And I fear that because of this absence of leadership, something will happen again.
So it's disappointing Biden was there.
It doesn't surprise me.
I think he wants to distance himself from this as much as possible, but he can't.
He's the president of the United States.
We need him as a leader.
A lot of people around the world are looking at the next American election and thinking, is it really going to be Biden-Trump again?
Is that the best America can offer?
One guy's got nearly 100 criminal charges that he's facing.
The other one barely looks like he knows what day it is.
Do you share that sort of disquiet that this is the best of the best in America?
Absolutely.
I share that disquiet.
But I'm an outlier, Piers, in the sense that I don't think either one of them is going to be the nominee.
I think the Democratic leadership that helped Biden basically put Biden in in 2020 because they knew Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris were all losers and they were behind Biden.
We've run out of time.
I'm sorry, Governor.
We've run out of time.
I'd love to get you back because I'm really enjoying this conversation.
Please come back another time.
It's been great having you on Censored.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Piers.
Take care.
Export Selection