That morning he left the Downing Street apartment with his wife and two children, but while they headed to the airport for a half-term holiday with friends in the Caribbean, he set out on a long day at the. Subscription Notification.
We have noticed that there is an issue with your subscription billing details. Please update your billing details here. Please update your billing information. Prime minister would like to see you. I should say before I say anything, I said nothing about this meeting. And then her team at the time went and gleefully briefed about it. And what did you think you lacked in your knowledge? But I think she was saying that in the referendum I had been too partisan, which of course other Conservatives, not least Brexit Conservatives felt.
And they sometimes come into conflict, particularly in the early regimes of Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, but then in that referendum I could see I was shredding my political capital with my colleagues the more I went on. But I actually thought as chancellor of the exchequer this is bloody close and maybe I can shift the dial a couple of per cent on the economy and the economic message. And I was sort of consciously trashing my own career, but I felt it was so important to win this contest, that leaving was such a disaster.
And anyway if we lost, that will be the end of us anyway. Did you sense that she was likely to do what she has subsequently done, which is constantly veer to that Brexit side, the ERG side of the argument? She had to get elected as a Remain-supporting MP and she had to prove she was committed to Brexit, which is what "Brexit means Brexit" meant.
Having done that, her fundamental mistake was not to do what you should do whenever you become the leader of the party, which is then move to the centre of your party to bring people together.
And she sided with the hard Brexiteers. She drew those disastrous red lines, which have cursed the country ever since and cursed her premiership, or maybe hung over the country ever since and cursed her premiership.
And even when there was a chance for a rethink, which was at the time she lost the majority in the general election, she doesn't rethink. In fact, if anything, she hardens the line. For the first year as prime minister she held open the option of staying in the customs union and that would have solved many of the problems she's got today.
I think fundamentally a prime minister who doesn't want to go is difficult to dislodge unless people are prepared to break cover and try to pull her down.
And at the moment, no one really wants to do that. By the way, there's lots of precedent in history, like Margaret Thatcher. Yes, pretty ruthless against Ted Heath and she walked away with it. And when [Thatcher] finally went it was the cabinet who brought her down. Are you surprised about how pusillanimous the [current] cabinet has been? I think they're all making all these calculations about Brexit and where they are personally and so on.
Well, maybe that's shifting, but where I am — I'm not an MP anymore — but where I have some sympathy for the MPs is that they're constantly told there have never been a such a useless bunch of MPs. And in the cabinet they are totally dishonest about that. Because they are pretending that there's something that can be done that they can support. But this can't be done without damaging ourselves.
Well, that is why they're collectively struggling, yeah. And I certainly agree with you that the country would be better led if you had people saying — and there are some very capable people in the cabinet who can do this — "This is what was promised. It's not deliverable, by the way," many of them didn't themselves promise it. Are you prepared to bear the cost of Brexit? Or do you want to rethink?
Was your very witty tweet that she should go away and spend some time getting to know her speaker a moment of coldly delivered revenge? If you think too much about the social media posting it doesn't work.
You've got to just do it. But do you sometimes sit there and think, "Oh, I can do a really, really nasty piece about her on this. It wasn't the happiest day of my life, put it that way. What I've tried to do, I mean people don't believe me, so I accept this, but I've tried to take the soap opera out of it.
I mean, I've been in politics for long enough to know there's always a soap opera. Who's up, who's down, does so and so want revenge on so and so. I try to edit this paper as a professional editor giving the newspaper character. And I think the faults we pointed out in the prime minister or in the Brexit strategy have been borne out by events. And we made calls two years ago. I said six months ago there would have to be a delay to Brexit. I would like to think the Evening Standard is calling these things first before other media outlets.
And I'm doing that as a service to my readers by trying to read politics. And if I was just sort of blinded by the sort of personal animus then it would not be a very good newspaper. And it's not that. It was perfectly pleasant! OK, yeah, yeah.
So what do you feel about her now when she comes on the TV and you see her? What do you feel about her? What are the qualities she lacks that have prevented her from being good prime minister. Any prime minister in a situation with no majority having to deliver Brexit would be in hot water. I'm saying any prime minister in this situation would be in a hole. But there are things you can do to climb out of the hole. What did we do? We went and formed an alliance with the Liberal Democrats, which everyone thought was undeliverable, would fall apart, was heavily criticised on left and right.
But it gave the country a stable majority. She has not been able to construct a broader majority. So I worked very hard I worked extremely hard with David to win the war with those people. And we did get it by the time we got re-elected. We had something I'd never thought was possible when I came to politics and Tony Blair was all the centre.
And we got a majority of gay people voting Conservative. We got almost half of Indian-origin people voting Conservative. We won in areas where we have never won before. We won back middle-class areas. I think there are a lot of people who would like to see it revived. I would call it modern, compassionate conservatism. I think there are lots of people in the Conservative Party and parliament who are really frustrated.
And you can see it kind of coming apart at the seams. There are lots of good Conservatives who want to hear more about the country as it is becoming, not the country as it was. I think you have to start with what is the job this person has got to do. This person has to reconnect the Conservative Party with modern Britain. And, to me, that is a long delay while we rethink our strategy as a country. Well, we'll see. We'll see what they've got to offer. So I'm not going to get into names. If you take the March that you were involved in on Saturday, there were hundreds of thousands of people who were not Socialist Workers carrying Socialist Workers banners and chanting about austerity and whatever.
There were hundreds of thousands of people, ordinary families, Middle England people, many of whom have been in the past Conservative supporters right up until very recently and should be in the future. And that is frankly disastrous, both for the party and the country.
Sorry to press you on this, but Boris Johnson is the ultimate He is he is the leader of that. He has been a big part of that. So why can't you just state, as I think you should have done during the referendum campaign by the way, that guy is not fit for high office? He's a liar. He's a charlatan. Why can't you say that guy should not be prime minister? Just give me that one. What was the worst thing you said about Johnson in the paper? I think we were pretty critical when he was unable to remember why Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was in Iran.
That alone! But his conduct during and since the referendum is a total disgrace and you guys should call it out. And David should have called it out during the referendum. Well, to be fair, one of the problems — and I think frankly the BBC didn't cover itself in glory in that referendum — was that the blue on blue soap opera was dominating the headlines. I remember phoning the BBC and I'm saying, "We are about to make a decision that is going to completely change the country.
I think it's because you're all a bunch of mates and you went to college together. I mean, the guy should not be allowed near high office again and you won't even tell me that you don't think he should be prime minister. I find it incredible. So will you try to get your owner to stop taking [Johnson] on his little private jet to Italy and having a nice time with them out there? Because that's a bit of a corrupt relationship in my view as well. But you're still friendly with Gove. By the way, if the headline of this interview was "Johnson could be prime minister, says Osborne" then you're OK with that?
Well, I think it's unlikely the paper is going to endorse Boris Johnson. But you'll have to wait. But you don't agree with me that he is a liar, a cheat and a charlatan, who should have been called out by his colleagues a long time ago?
So he's a liar, charlatan, who changes his mind every five minutes. What about Gove? I'm amazed you still go off to bloody see Wagner opera together. But I think first of all, as I said, I think I could let the whole thing shatter all my personal friendships.
Yeah, absolutely. He and me were the only two people arguing in the room against having a referendum. So you cannot really blame him that we had a referendum, except that we were all part of the government. And second, he made it clear all along that he had always been against EU membership. He used to write this when he was a journalist in the Nineties.
And he's been entirely consistent on that. So you also can't complain, as people do with Boris and others, that they've changed their opinion or whatever. And then finally, at the moment, he is also trying to stop the country crashing out of the EU without a deal. I didn't vote for him. Unfortunately, I voted for Theresa May. If I had my vote again, I probably would have voted for him.
And how do you feel about the Jeremy Hunts and Sajid Javids who we know are much closer to you, politically, but that are now pretending to be all Brexity. They'll have to make their own decisions. I know lots of them and worked with lots of them. They're very capable, sensible people. I guess, general advice to anyone at the top of politics is you've got to stay anchored in what you actually believe is the right thing for the country.
But, Alastair, in politics there are lots of twists and turns. Some days are up or down or whatever. And you have to be pragmatic. You can't be an ideologue. But if you're not fundamentally rooted in what you think is the right outcome for the country, your government and the government you're advising can go completely awry and I always tried to stay basically rooted in what I believed and then adjust and deal with circumstances as they were thrown at me, using that as the kind of lodestar.
So if you're running in this leadership contest promising one thing which is undeliverable — a painless Brexit, a Brexit bonus — and then you find, having won the contest the day afterwards, you will have as disastrous a premiership as Theresa May.
Yes, but they're not in the contest yet. When you get to the contest, the person who is honest with the country about Brexit, about the compromise Overall, then, this budget will arouse plenty of discussion to keep economic commentators occupied until the Autumn Statement, when we will probably have another bag of surprises amid the predictable unpleasantness.
In , the emergency budget looked positively generous compared to the Autumn Statement. We can only hope that, unlike five years ago, the economy continues to grow in the meantime. Perhaps the most ominous aspect of this budget speech was the relative optimism of the forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility OBR.
They got it badly wrong last time and, if history repeats itself, even George Osborne might not be feeling so perky when summer turns to autumn. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. It was to him that the Tory party looked to align the economic cycle with the political one.
By this stage, prosperity was supposed to be tiding the Conservatives to the clear victory that eluded them last time. Since Mr Osborne was a key architect of Tory modernisation that is another failure for which he must share blame with David Cameron.
Some Tory MPs are now muttering that the chancellor has let them down again in the budget. This was their last big opportunity to change the political weather. They were yearning for a game-changer that would break the deadlock in the polls. What they got were some low-cal sweeteners scattered at selected segments of the electorate and cash bungs thrown at marginal constituencies.
His hat had no killer rabbit. Labour was mightily relieved. Labour is genuinely surprised that the chancellor did not try to cover that vulnerable Tory flank. In trying to blunt that attack on him as a state-shrinking zealot, he ended up presenting a very strange trajectory for public spending after the election. Savage cuts early on would be followed by a surge back upwards towards the end of the next parliament.
No one thinks the next government will follow the plans for public spending laid out in the budget. Not even if Mr Osborne is chancellor again. As a result, the post-budget debate has revolved not around the goodies promised to voters but the spending cuts to come. Our Opinium poll today does have the Tories moving into a narrow lead, but I recite my usual health warning not to read too much into small twitches in the polls.
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