Podcast

Rory, is the UK in rapid decline?

No. No, it's not. I think we've got ourselves in a hysterical fit. The UK has been in moments of rapid decline. I mean, during the Second World War, our economy contracted by 45%. We were about half as rich in 1945 as we were in 1939. Where the UK is, is it's been through a phase of kind of 10, 12 years of being pretty stagnant at a moment where the US has been growing fast. And that makes us feel uncomfortable and awkward. But I think a couple of things to say there. One is that I'm a bit skeptical about US growth and how long it will continue and what that model is. So before we get overly excited that America's cracked everything. And the second is that a lot of the troubles we're facing are to do with the fact we're growing older, that we expect a very high level of public services that they don't expect in the U.S. for example, public health systems and stuff. And also that we're generally pretty impatient and grumpy because we're in a world where we're used to kind of instant stuff. We're in the world obviously of Uber and Deliveroo and instant apps, and we're dealing with government, which is at the best of times a pretty slow moving beast.

So do you think we've had it good for a long time and now we're hitting some realism? Because I sometimes wonder if we were out at the end of the Second World War rebuilding our nation, we'd be very grateful for where we are now. But at the same time, inflation is compounding up a lot, it seems. Energy prices are going up a lot. Everyone's disposable income or affordability does seem to be a lot lower. So back to your point of maybe we're impatient, but is our quality of life going down? Many, many people suggest it might be as low as it was in the second, just after the Second World War. In terms of our disposable income, our affordability, how high house prices are now compared to wages. Is this all compounding up? What do you think?

Yeah, I think though this has been a much longer problem. I mean, we seem to have woken up to it a lot in the last year. But the truth is that things started going badly wrong. And the kind of things you're talking about, really from the late 80s onwards, the median incomes, the kind of income that somebody on an average wage is on, hasn't really increased very much in real terms in the US In Fact for many people hasn't really increased much in real terms since the 1970s. So you'll come across people in the US who, let's say they were working a car factory in Detroit, they're making $15 an hour in 1978, and their daughter or even granddaughters now making $15 an hour working in Walmart. This point about inequality to do with who's got a house and who isn't, began to become a real problem under Blair. So that's the late 90s. And inequality of wealth has slightly decreased over the last 14, 15 years. So I think one of the strange things that we're struggling with is the fundamentals are terrible. I mean, fundamentally we're in a very, very unequal Society. And CEOs are now paid 100 times what an average worker is, when in the 70s they would have been paid 20 or 30 times. Some even were paid 300, 400 times. And the gap between the 60% that own a house and the 40% who don't, which is also the gap between the older people and the younger people is brutal. So I think it's very, very, very, very tough for people. And I think people are really struggling. I think though that this has been a long term consequence and those things are, I mean, again, interesting. I mean, I can see your shows called Disruptor. So often when I talk to people interested in disruption, I'm talking to people in Silicon Valley who are very proud of what America does in this. Truth is those things in the United States are much worse than they are in Britain. You would not want to be poor in the United States. The inequality there is off the chart. The top three people in the us, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, their wealth is equivalent to the bottom 50% of the entire American population. They now have more money than 160 million American people. Thank God we haven't reached those levels yet.

So I really want to talk about this point. You've opened up at least 3 points I want to go into, but this first one is about inequality because is it the fault of the billionaires, their greed, their power, their, their creation of controlling governments and policies with their great wealth? Or is it the fault of the government? After all, the governments are supposed to govern and that they're supposed to create, you know, anti monopolies and they're supposed to manage this. So this vast inequality of wealth, who's at fault? Therefore, how do we change it?

Yeah, well, I think the first thing is that this goes back to Margaret Thatcher And Ronald Reagan. So they came along and they thought that in the 1970s we were in a pretty pickle. And what we needed to do is put much more reliance on capitalism and the private market. And there was a lot of good in that because basically government is pretty inefficient and you bring in more competition and things work better. But there are two things that you need when you're dealing with free markets. You need to stop monopolies, as you've just pointed out, and you need to regulate. So in some ways the, you know, selling off British Telecom made things much better. In 1970s, I think you had to wait two weeks to get your telephone installed. But all of us now dealing with, let's say the water companies, dealing with Thames Water, for example, it used to be public, used to be government, now private can see the other end of it, which is some US hedge fund or Irish hedge fund comes in, buys up a public utility, has us over a barrel, doesn't invest in our water services, let sewerage in all over the place. Now, what are those two things about Monopoly, right? We've got no other choice where we're getting our water from. Live in London, you get Thames water, you live in the north, you get Northumberland water. Second thing is regulation. And that's where the rubber hits the road. Because of course, what happens is that I was the Water Minister, so this is kind of something I know about a little bit. When you go to regulate them and you say, listen, this is ridiculous, there's poo all over our beaches and there's. They say, well, unfortunately, it's going to cost us 20 billion pounds to invest in upgrading our water services and we're not going to do it. So you say, okay, you've got to do it. And then they say, oh, well, we're going to declare bankruptcy or our shareholders are going to riot. And then you basically are pushed into a situation. Do you renationalize? Does the government just come in and say, oh, screw it, we'll take it back? And then we return to the good old problems, the 1970s of civil servants running things in a pretty inefficient way. So the problem in America and Britain is we never seem to get the balance right. And boy, has the balance gone wrong with the billionaires. Because, yeah, of course, fine, they want to make a lot of money, but they have created virtual monopolies. Think about Google, it got us all over a barrel. All the advertising, I don't know, half the advertising in the world seems to flow through Google. At the moment, all of us are on Gmail and even when we're not on Gmail, our apparent Internet accounts are just Google accounts with a fake name in front of them.

And they own YouTube and they're on.

You and they own YouTube. Yeah. So they can now turn around whenever they want. I mean, they're not yet doing it, but their potential to turn around and say, oh, by the way, we're going to charge you 10 times as much for your service as you paid in the past. Pretty soon you'll be like, well, fuck, I've got no alternatives, there's nowhere I can go. That's what a monopoly is. Right. That's why we don't like monopolies.

So therefore then, is it government mismanagement? That's the biggest cup of tea I've ever seen anyone drink in my life. You're just trying to prove how British you are, are you?

Look at that, look at the size of that.

Yeah, because governments are often inefficient, not the best, most efficient deployers of capital, whereas entrepreneurs maybe are more efficient. And I love the concept of a free market. I just don't see anywhere where, where we actually have one where the compet fair and free. So are our governments taking enough responsibility to manage and regulate properly?

I think we're probably not. But let's think about what happened in the last election. So obviously we went into the last election in Britain with the National Health Service in bits. The education system creaking, our trains not running on time, all these people on strike. And it was clear that almost certainly there needed to be a bit more investment. Tories have been in for 14 years, been austerity, everything's creaking. So how are you going to get that? Well, you're going to get that money either by raising taxes or by borrowing. Not a single political party was prepared to say that they would do it. Because part of what's broken isn't government, it's democracy. It's that the voters want to be lied to, in a way. And what do I mean by that? What I mean is that if you were to be straight, or this is what the parties calculated, I kept saying to them, what are you doing all of you know, looking at your spending plans, that you're going to have to put up taxes and borrow more money because you've got a 70 billion pound black hole. And all of them denied it all the way through the election. And then after the election, because labor madly said they weren't going to put up income Tax, they weren't going to put up national insurance, weren't going to put up corporations tax. They put up the worst kind of tax. Employers, national insurance, stupid kind of tax. So when I say to them, you are completely mad, why did you hem yourself in before the election and not give yourself any flexibility to do the sensible thing? Their response was, because we would have lost. That's how Neil Kinnock lost in 1992. If Labour ever says they're going to put up taxes, they lose the election. So that then raises a bigger question. What's going on with the public? Why are we, as voters, so inclined to believe people who say, you can have great public services and it's not going to cost you any money? Now, that's not the case in France or Sweden, they pay much more tax for their public services. In the us, they pay less tax, but they have rubbish public services. Uk, we've managed to create a system where the government feels that in order to get elected, it has to claim that it can do something it can't do. And most of the problems we're talking about follow from that fundamental problem, which is that any attempt to be honest with the public seems to be punished beyond imagining.

We've already created a lot of moral dilemmas and paradoxes here because, you know, I'm an entrepreneur and I fundamentally believe if you want to instill more broad change, you take responsibility yourself and you change yourself first. So you're saying maybe the public aren't taking enough responsibility for either questioning what isn't true or whatever holding to account. But isn't our political system, in a way broken and doesn't allow us to be able to make change?

So I think we should be much more radical. I think this whole system of going to an election once every five years and saying a few superficial sound bites and getting people to vote for you is a daft way to run anything. You couldn't run your company like that. Very, very weird if. If the only way you ran your company is once every five years you went to your shareholders, produced three or four meaningless soundbites and had a little beauty contest between you and someone else, and on the basis of knowing nothing about you or the other person, they randomly chose one of you and it's just mad. So I think that we need to find ways of making things more democratic. And making things more democratic basically means getting power closer to people and giving people more of a chance to understand decisions and make decisions. There's something a little bit, yeah. Infantilizing. Making people into children about our system, because the pretense is that there's some kind of big leader, doesn't matter. Keir Starmer, Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak. And they're going to sort everything out and all we've got to do is just put a tick in a box and they're going to sort it out. And then obviously we find out within about two minutes that they're not sorting everything out, and then we get very angry. But nobody can be bothered to sit down and think about 99% of people. If you were to ask them what the deficit is now, they wouldn't know. 60% of people in the country, what's the difference in deficit and the debt? They don't know. But for you, as a businessman, it's completely fundamental. How much money has the government borrowed and how much extra is it borrowing every year and what's the interest rate it's paying? These things are so fundamental to whether you can have an ambulance on time, whether your hospital works, and yet nobody knows this stuff. So what does it mean when we're voting? Let's say people are voting for Donald Trump or they're voting for Kamala Harris. Well, they actually know about how things work, whether this person is a reasonable person to run the country. They don't really. They spend. Most people, I think, because they're probably quite sane and have other things to do in their lives, spend about 15 minutes a week thinking about politics. But if that's all that you do, then you shouldn't be surprised that the people that you've put in who you know nothing about, turn out to be not very good at their jobs.

So is the problem the democratic system, or is the problem fundamentally our education system and not learning about our country and how it works early enough? Because, you know, my personal mission is to help as many people on this planet get better financial knowledge. And I was actually speaking at one of your schools, Eton, recently. I don't think people are taught enough about personal finances and how wider global or national economics trickle down to you personally. But if we're all taught how to build personal wealth, then that would push the GDP up, if we're managing our own GDP well. So are you saying it's the same with politics?

I think it's true that we'd benefit a lot from better financial education. And I think you're doing a very important thing, very fundamental for people's lives. But I also think we need to be realistic, which is that government is enormous. The Prime Minister is dealing with a trillion pounds a year. It's a thousand billion pounds a year. It's huge. The NHS alone is 1.2 million employees. There are 365 million GP appointments a year. I mean, you're running something on a scale so much beyond what any normal businessman could ever imagine. And the complexity of it is so extreme that you can't expect an ordinary person to get that. I mean, if you talk to an ordinary person, they will be able to talk about their own experience in their own GP clinic or their own hospital, obviously. But you can't expect them, in the end to have a very detailed view of the £4½ billion of NHS procurement and how those procurement contracts are managed, or exactly where ambulance hubs should be, or how you prioritise cancer care against vaccination or any of this of kind, that stuff. So that's a way of saying that, unfortunately, a lot of government is very specialized and requires an enormous amount of knowledge and an enormous amount of experience that normal people are never going to get right. I mean, take me, I'm a. I specialized a lot in foreign affairs, so I have spent, I guess, 10, 15 years living in other countries. I speak a number of other languages, I've written books about these countries. I. So when I'm talking about Afghanistan, it's because I've spent three years living there and I've walked across the country and I speak Dari and I've managed nonprofit there. When a voter is being asked to decide what our policy should be in Afghanistan, that's not what they're coming from, right? So you need a system which connects voters to the stuff they really know about better. So, for example, in my experience in. In Cumbria, voters were very, very good at making decisions about local planning. They were very good about getting behind local energy projects or local broadband. Parents are very good at engaging with their school and getting better conditions for their. Their own kids in that school. But there's other stuff which you have to accept is a very, very specialized technical thing. And because we don't like being honest with people, because this is a very uncomfortable conversation, because it can sound very elitist, we pretend that isn't the case. We pretend that government is simple and we pretend that if somebody else suddenly. I don't know, if Martin Lewis was suddenly Prime Minister, the whole world would suddenly become much easier. And the truth is, it's not like that. It's a very, very. You are responsible for 70 million lives and you're responsible for so many aspects of their lives and you're dealing with unions and you're dealing with employees and you're dealing with the law and you're dealing with the fact you never have enough money and you're dealing with the fact you're being attacked in the media and you're dealing with being attacked in social media. I mean, it's a very, very weird business. And so I'm talking a lot. But part of the problem of this whole system is how do you get the right connection between the voter and government in a way that's helpful rather than damaging.

So I acknowledge that government is hugely complex. Business is a smaller but also hugely complex model and generally business owners, as I'm sure you'll know, we'll create a vision and then we'll have some values and then maybe we'll have three main goals and then maybe we'll have a three line strategy and we take the very complicated and we simplify it. I acknowledge how complex government is. But if we don't do the same in government and create some vision and values and simplicity and the complexity, surely we're never going to solve anything.

Yeah. So you've put your finger on probably the most important skill in a really good politician, which is the ability to reduce the complex to something clear that you can express. You ought to be able to express your vision. And if you can't, you can't lead. Public don't understand what you're doing, your civil servants don't understand what you're doing. You've got no way of judging it. I learned this very slowly in government. I was the prisons minister and if you look at prisons, they're a mess in every way. Drugs, filth, reoffending, windows broken, violence. And there were hundreds of things that you could be concentrating on if you were the minister. Building new prisons, fixing old ones, sorting out the maintenance contract, training prison officers, training prison governors, putting in education programs to stop people reoffending, working with charities. It took me six months to realize that the fundamental problem in prisons was violence, that the number of people being assaulted had tripled in five years. And to say to prison officers and the public and prisoners, I will resign in 12 months unless violence comes down. You better be pretty sure that you've identified what the big problem is. Right, because you're laying yourself on. But I had, at the age end of six months, I think, decided that a lot of the other things, problems in education, problems with drugs, problems with kindness, came out of violence. And if I could deal with violence, I could deal with yourself. And you're Completely right. Once I got there, things became much, much easier for me because everybody understood where we were going. And I think one of the problems that the current Labour government has is it's not letting us see what its big idea is so that we should be in a position where everything they do we say, I get why they're doing that. They're doing it because it connects to this big idea.

And now you've mentioned Labor. How do you think they're getting on? How are Labour doing?

Well, they're lacking in clarity. Their message is confused, it doesn't make sense. Nobody can tell you what their mission is, nobody can tell you what their vision is. And the weird thing about it, Rob, is that they have missions and visions coming out of their eyeballs. Every time I talk to them, they're like, oh, but did you not just see the Prime Minister's speech where he laid out his five missions or he laid out his seven values? Or do you not remember the speech to Chancellor where she said it's all about growth or whatever it happens to be? Fact is, it's not cutting through. And why is it not cutting through? Because actually the public may not know a huge amount about Afghanistan or exactly where you locate an ambulance, but they can detect when people aren't confident and clear and they're detecting that. Keir Starmer basically thinks that the job of government is to sort of tidy up and fix things around the edges. If you actually push him on this, I know friends of his, when I say, where's the big idea? They'd say, well, if you spoke to him, he'd say, I'm not a big ideas person. I don't believe in that. I think that's all bullshit. I'm just here to make things better. But that's not quite good enough. In leadership, that's fine, maybe three or four layers down. I'm sure you'd have people in your companies who you'd like to make things better, but the leader needs to be able to tell you. Not just that, well, you know, what am I doing? I'm going to try to make things a bit better rather than worse. Tell you how, why?

So I understand that I may live in a algorithm fed reality. I try and get myself balanced and neutral and see things, you know, more broadly. But you know, I'm on X and I probably have a more, more right leaning view being an entrepreneur and so I realize I'm probably getting fed a lot of that. But everyone I seem to see and speak to who's entrepreneurial who's growth focused, believes Trump does have this clarity. He does have the strong leadership. He is decisive. We know what he wants to do. Whether you even people who are critics of him, saying at least he has some leadership skills, would you agree with that?

I'd agree absolutely with the way that you feel it and the fact that many, many people feel that. I think you've put your finger again on probably the biggest split now in the world. And it's a split between people like Trump who present themselves as decisive and energetic, and the old world of government, which is made to feel kind of indecisive, weak, bureaucratic, and slow. But let me try to put it in business terms to explain what it is Trump's actually doing and why it's so dangerous. So the US has spent 70 years building itself up as the world's indispensable power, and it's done very, very well out of. It became the largest economy in the world, and it remains the largest economy in the world by a large margin. And along the way, it went to the world and said, we're nice, fair people, we're pretty generous. You can trust us. Broadly speaking, within rules, we'll tell you what those rules are. Broadly speaking, we want you to be a US Ally, we want you to be a democracy. We want you to support free trade and human rights and whatever. And in return, we will do lots of stuff. We will sell you weapons, we will give you a lot of money. We will protect your borders, we'll create international institutions. I mean, the US Created NATO, the UN World Health Organization. And all this stuff comes out the imf, the World bank, the US Created all this stuff. And they signed contracts with lots and lots of big international nonprofits. And they said, don't worry, we'll take responsibility for feeding people in Africa, and we'll. So then Trump comes along and what's Trump done? Well, Trump, first thing he's done is he's cut all US International development spin immediately. It's all stopped. Very decisive. But in practice, what does that really mean? It means that Jordan, for example, country in the Middle east signed a contract over six years in which the US was giving them $10 billion to invest in health and education, that the entire government budget for health and education comes from the United States, and it stopped three days ago. Now, from Trump's point of view and his supporter's point of view, why not? It's American money. Fuck them. But he's forgetting that Jordan hosts one of the largest US Military bases in the region, that Jordan is absolutely critical to the security of Israel, that Jordan is hosting one and a half million refugees that have come out of Syria. Again, he picks up the phone to Denmark and he spends 45 minutes with the Danish Prime Minister, telling the Danish Prime Minister to give him Greenland. He doesn't say, I have a moral reason to have Greenland or a legal reason to have Greenland. He basically just says, I have a lot of money and I have some troops, so if I were you, I'd give me Greenland. Next thing he does, he sends people back to Colombia, the Colombian government, which has an international trade agreement with the United States going back over many decades, carefully negotiated by US trade negotiators, all the businesses operating everything, a predictable world system. And he says, if you don't take this plane, I'm putting up tariffs up to 25% and they'll be up at 50% within two days. So it's a complete contravention of international law, total contravention of the treaties he signed. Now, fast forward, what does that mean for anybody that is dealing with the United States in the next 10, 20 years? He's basically a businessman who's a monopoly gouger. He's got you by the throat. He's using the fact that America, over 70 years, because people trusted them, got inside every country and everybody became dependent on them. And now he's blackmailing and extorting in order to get stuff for the U.S. but do you think in the future when the U.S. says to a country, we're going to sign a $10 billion contract over six years to cover all your health and education, people are going to take it? No, they'll go to China and Russia to balance. When I was chair of the Defence Select Committee in the uk, I was saying, why don't we just buy American defense equipment, much cheaper than British defense equipment, pretty reliable nowadays. I'd be insane to say that because I know perfectly well that if Trump thought that the British government was doing something he wouldn't like, he'd do what they've just done to Afghanistan, which is not send the software engineers and disable every US plane and helicopter in the country so he gets a fantastic short term boost. I mean, you can do that as a business if you're in a monopoly position and you've infiltrated yourself into everything. But the long term consequences for the credit of the United States, the soft power of the United States, the influence of the United States is catastrophic because he's become unpredictable, chaotic, he's breaking every and most of these things he's doing have no legal basis. I mean, that's another problem. They're illegal. So he's stopped $32 billion worth of USAID contracts. He's done the same within the U.S. so every homeless charity in the U.S. that was receiving U.S. government money stopped. Right. They've hired all their staff, they've got all their offices, they're running out their stuff. There's no money coming in. So I think businessmen like you should try to tell me what kind of business that is that he's running and what you would think about a businessman like that. And he's a businessman who famously, when he built those buildings, never paid his suppliers, fucked over every small contractor, drove him to the wall because he thought he could get away with not paying them. And that's the way he's treating the world now.

Wow. So, I mean, I imagine a lot of people who don't have experience in politics don't know the extent of all of this. What do you think the consequences of all this will be?

Well, I'm afraid that if you were treated like that by another country or another business, the obvious thing is you would de risk your resilience would require you to find other partners. So you would no longer be buying 80% of your defense equipment from the United States in the future. You'd buy a bit from China, you'd buy a bit from Russia, you'd buy a bit from India. You would no longer create an entire NATO system in Europe that was dependent on the United States defending your borders. If you were Jordan, you wouldn't take international development assistance. And therefore, if the United States turned up in five years time and said, this is what I think you should be doing with Israel or Palestine, they wouldn't have any leverage because nobody would be listening to them. You wouldn't sign a trade deal with them, you wouldn't lend them money. This is the more fundamental thing. Would you lend someone like that money? Obviously not, because he's going to turn around whenever it suits him and says, I'm not going to pay you back unless you do X, Y or Z. It's the world's largest debtor, sort of. What's the world's largest debtor nation? They have more debt than anyone else in the world. They can bring down the international system by refusing to pay their debts. I wouldn't be lending them any more money.

Wow. So I want to go back to something you said because I think there's a third element that I don't think gets Discussed. So you said, you know, we either need to increase the taxes or increase the borrowing. But what about if we created target to increase the GDP by bringing in overseas money, allowing exiled millionaires, billionaires back and overall increased the money flow, therefore a higher volume of money, a higher volume of taxes, even if those taxes were lower. No one seems to talk or understand about that as another way of, of increasing the economy.

No, you're right, Rob, and you're right. And as a businessman, you're completely right. If Britain could create what I would call a good ecosystem for growth, if we had a country where some combination of our taxes, our regulations, our planning system made it a place where people wanted to invest, build and grow businesses, that is by far the best solution for things. But governments are unbelievably bad at doing it. And the reasons why are that if you ask businesses what the best ecosystem is for growth, often the businesses will just tell you what's best for their own bottom line. So if you're a monopoly, they're not going to tell you to regulate monopolies. If you're a company that thinks, well, actually maybe the way I can make some money in Britain is to massively pollute the waterways, you'll say, get rid of the environmental regulations. It's just a way of explaining the problem. So what you'd really need is a very smart, determined government that understood that you need a good ecosystem for growth, but also wasn't gullible in dealing with businesses or you get ripped off. There's a lot of terrible, terrible. I mean, just return to these water companies, right? These are private companies. They came to the government saying, we're the answer to your water problems. We can deliver water for one pound in, one pound out. And Mrs. Thatcher, of course, who loved business, thought, great, you know, these are businesses, of course we can trust them. Of course, you can't trust businesses anymore. You can trust anyone else. Understandably. What they'll tell you is what matters for their shareholders. So how do you build a vision that says difficult things? How do you balance small business against big business? How do you balance the high street against Amazon? And what sort of investment do you want in the country? Do you want Amazon coming in, building huge warehouses, getting the stuff up? Or are you trying to save the high street? Are you trying to build huge, big agricultural businesses or are you trying to save small family farms? Are you prepared to have very wealthy non doms living in Britain not paying any tax because you want wealthy people to set up businesses here? Well, maybe, but Maybe you've also got to deal with the fact that you've got a lot of people in Britain who are pretty angry about the fact that they're paying a lot of tax. And here's some wealthy foreigner living in the United Kingdom making a fortune and not paying any tax. So I think you're right and I think we need people like you to describe what that ecosystem is. But the problem in practice is if I were to put you in charge of this and you get a group of your friends together and you try to work your way through it, and many governments have tried to do that. It's not as though they haven't often reached out to famous business people and put them in the House of Lords and given them the task of trying to do this stuff. Something seems to go wrong in practice and a lot of it is that the trade offs are very, very complicated. But it can be done. I mean, obviously we know it can be done because some countries are better at it than others. Singapore is obviously better at it. In the United Kingdom, small countries tend to be better at it than big countries.

Right. Because yeah, I've been quite vocal on social media that there may be needs to be more direct experience in growing a real business because a business is an economy and economies are complicated. And you know, many people in senior leadership positions in labor haven't run a business. I get the moral paradox, but you know, there are people, for example Ray Dalio in America, I just pick him out. Built great businesses in the third stage of his life, moving now towards philanthropy, probably got a more noble global mission as opposed to a self interest. Would that not be a smart move?

Yeah, I mean, I think there are business people like that. But I remember I ran to be the leader of the Conservative Party and Jeremy Hunt, for example, who was running against me, pointed out that he'd built a very successful business. He's an entrepreneur, made many millions. Sajid Javid made a lot of money, I mean admittedly in banking, but I don't know, he would probably say that's a type of business and he made a lot of money doing it. Nadim Zahawi made an enormous amount of money launching a business, managing a business, knew how to grow it. And all those three people I've mentioned became Chancellor of the Exchequer. They were in charge of our economy and it didn't really work out. And this is one of the problems, Right? It's a problem in the US too. They often appoint us the Treasury Secretary. Some famous billionaire who comes in to Run the US treasury and it doesn't quite work out. And so I guess, Rob, until you persuade a government to make you a minister, you won't quite realize why it doesn't work out. I tried to write a whole book describing why it doesn't work, but something goes wrong and it's quite complicated. But you arrive, you're a business person, you know how businesses work, and then you're dumped in government. You're basically being dumped in an alien universe. It's like being dropped on Mars. None of the rules work in the same way. You can't breathe the air in the same way, you can't manage people in the same way. And it's very frustrating. It's why many, many business people are very, very bad. Politicians.

Yes. So my fans are lovely and thousands of them tell me I should be running for Prime Minister and people are calling me the People's Chancellor on GB News and, yeah, not very good. I am completely aware of everything I don't know. And therefore I'll just. I'll stick to my business. Because. Because there probably is a collaboration somewhere, though, isn't there? Someone with deep political experience and someone with deep business experience respecting each other and working together. Surely that's a solution.

Maybe, yeah, of course it is. Make a huge difference. And a lot of what we do, obviously, is ridiculous. I mean, that's one of the reasons why Trump is popular, because people sense that a lot of what government does is completely blatantly against common sense and that there's a huge amount of waste and inefficiency in the system. I mean, if you spend any time sitting, I don't know, in a. In an emergency room, or if you spend any time watching how a school's run, you can quite quickly think of 10 things that you'd do better. So all of us feel this all the time I was in the army. The army is probably the best run institution in the British government. I wasn't in for very long, but during the time when I was in the British army, back in the glory days of the British army In the early 1990s, we had 20 blank rounds per man to last us for three months. We couldn't fire our rifles. We spent our entire time marching up and down parade grounds or picking up bits of rubbish on the parade ground because there wasn't any money for us to go and exercise. We weren't training as fighting soldiers most of the time. And that's the army. The army is one of the more focused, better run bits of the British government. And it needs to be, because in the end you go and get killed. Imagine what it's like in other bits of British government. Completely mad. So then the question is, what's the solution to that? Now, Trump's solution to that is grind the whole system to a halt, smash the whole thing up and turn it into an extortion racket, a kind of protection racket on the world, and hope that he can hoover in some money for the United States by doing it. But probably the answer is closer to what you're talking about, Rob, which is somewhere in between. But if he wants to stop giving money to Jordan, give him a bit of notice, tell him what his problem is, give him a bit of a glide path, give him a chance to find some other funding source and explain what his problem is, not just break the contract in a day. It's a completely childish way of thinking about running anything. I mean, you wouldn't listen if you were in, I don't know, I don't understand enough about your business, but there'll be many things about your business that irritates you, but very rarely is the answer for you to come in and say, okay, as of this minute, I'm stopping all funding for this entire department and you're all gone tomorrow. As opposed to, I'd like to cut it by 20% or I need a new CEO or we're going to transition out of this business. I mean, the shock therapy stuff is very, very weird as a, as a style of management.

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Yeah, you're looking pretty crisp from here.

Thank you very much, Rory. Okay, slightly off topic here, but not is I follow Keir Starmer, Labor, Rachel Reeves on social media. I follow Nigel Farage, Richard Tice, Rupert Lowe on social media. And quite frankly, Labour's social media, essentially their marketing is terrible. No post they ever say has any content or context. It is just, you know, we are putting business back in Britain. I can't help feeling they do themselves a lot of favors if they got a better media and PR department. And maybe that's why people like Nigel have come high in popularity and Donald, they're better marketers, they're better with media and the modern politician. Labour just seemed to be backward in this area. What are your thoughts?

Yeah, you're absolutely right. Labour are terrible, terrible at communication. They should probably bring back my colleague Alastair Campbell, who actually made Tony Beguil pretty good at communication. They've got a gaping hole in the middle of their system. And you're right, Nigel Farage is a fantastically accomplished communicator and obviously so is Donald Trump. One of the other things that the insurgent politicians, populist politicians, this is true of Boris Johnson too, have that other normal politicians don't is they tend to be funnier. I mean, basically, what is Boris Johnson? He's basically a clown. He's funny and that's why people like him. I mean, it's weird because again, if you were hiring someone to manage your pizza restaurant, you wouldn't hire Boris Johnson, obviously. I mean, it's clear to anyone voting for him that he's got the attention span of a 3 year old and he can't do detail and he's not interested and he's going to change his mind every day. But he's funny and people like that and it wakes them up. And he's a great communicator and he can say things like I'm backing, go, I'm backing Britain. Go on, let's get this done. And it sounds terrific. The problem with the system though, is that these guys are incredibly bad at running things. So the skills that allow them to get elected, which a lot of which are about showmanship, bluff, bullshit, promising stuff they can't deliver, which of course is part of the secret of their communication. One of the reasons that the insurgent communicates better than the government is the insurgent can always say, if you vote for me, you know, I'm going to cut your taxes, I'm going to stop all the immigrants, I'm going to grow the economy. And most of all, what they can say, which is brilliant. You know, I ran as an independent. I realized this very quickly. The, the simplest thing you can say is this lot are rubbish. You know, let me give you my pitch on, you know, being mayor of London. I mean, like the signaling on the Piccadilly line has not been fixed since the 1970s. The 1970s, for God's sake. What's wrong with this guy? Keir Starmer, right? It's very easy to do this. Whereas he has to go like, well, you know, it's a problem on the data center and the, you know, I'm having a problem on the signaling and it's not all about signaling and it's on carriages I bought. So of course they sound boring. But the problem is that the person who's really good at doing that is usually very, very bad at governing because they have a very. They're not interested in detail, they're not awfully interested in the truth, they're not interested in complexity, they're not interested in listening to anyone else. So when they actually have to manage a team, they're loners, you know, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, they're one man teams. I mean, there's nobody else with them that massive entertainers, they're celebrities, basically, but they're a particular type of celebrity. I'm sure Kim Kardashian or the Rock would do very well in politics. Arnold Schwarzenegger did very well in politics. And what is Donald Trump above all? He's a celebrity. It's not actually that he's the best businessman in the world. If you drill down into the details of how he runs his businesses, how he built his businesses, the number of times he went bankrupt, where he raised his money from. There are many, many other people in the United States who are much, much, much better business people. But what he's better at than any of them is celebrity. The Apprentice, television communication.

Yeah, that interesting you say about Those that are good, that are getting enough, often aren't good at running. But what's the solution, then?

Well, the solution, I think, is to be very radical. I think we need to break this entire system. We need to get rid of our political parties, we need to break the stranglehold that media's got. We need to get rid of this old creaking model. And some of the most effective things that we're now seeing around the world at a grassroots level, bizarrely, and it's going to sound mad, are when instead of an election, you do a random choice of people in the way that you select a jury in a. In a trial. So if you model the whole population and just randomly select 300 people, put them on a. A body and get them to look at. How are we going to sort out the third Runway at Heathrow? Or how are we going to sort out the road network? We can do the nhs. More and more evidence from around the world shows that they come up. These are ordinary people, all ranges of different educations, areas, et cetera, come up with much better results than professionals. And the other thing the evidence shows is the public sort of gets it and trusts it in the same way they trust a jury. You might disagree with the decision a jury's made on whether someone's guilty or not, but you sort of understand what a jury is. It's us, randomly selected, making a decision. So I'd like to get much more to that system, away from the current system that believes that the answer is, do you want Keir Starmer or do you want Donald Trump? You don't want either of them, they're both poor choices. But much more of our stuff should be done locally, much more of our stuff should be done with random collections of citizens and the practice of that. Imagine you're one of those 300 people talking about whether there should be a third Runway at Heathrow. You might be a plumber, you might be a soldier, you might be a lawyer, you might be a teacher. Doesn't matter. Businessman. You're going to learn a hell of a lot during the two week process about the reality of Heathrow. How many passengers, what's the infrastructure requirement? How much is it going to cost? What are the risks? How do you get the trains in and out? But the great thing is you're going to make a decision, not on a party, political basis, not making a decision in order to get followers on Twitter. You're not making a decision in order to beat up your opponent. The mere fact that you're actually making a decision relatively cleanly and objectively usually means it's a much better decision than someone who's apparently more educated or more professional.

Wow. I mean, that's not a great advert for the professionals, is it? That you could pick random people and make a better decision?

Well, because the random people are much more open minded, the professionals know much more, but they have a vested interest.

I sometimes wonder if that's one of the challenges of politics and running a country and a government is how do you equally balance the selfish and the selfless motive? For example, I think a Prime Minister is way underpaid on their salary, but I think they're way overpaid on taking a bit of this and taking a bit of that and taking a bit of the other. But the work that they have to do for, I don't know, not even 150 grand or whatever it is. So how do we get this selfish, selfless motive balance? Because we're all inherently selfish, we need to be for survival. But in order to do good for society, we also need to tap into the selfless.

Yeah, well, you're right, it's a problem because what it means is the kind of people who want to be a politician have to be either fanatics, right? Jeremy Corbyn, for example, he's pretty fanatical and he lives a very, very austere life. It's not interested in material stuff. You can see what you see what you get wobbles around a cardigan or you get rich people who don't care about the income. But that's not good. You're not getting normal people. Normal people are not going to want to be abused day in, day out on social media, receive death threats, be working in London when their family's up in a constituency hours away, be putting in a thankless task of being abused by your constituents, abused by the newspapers for, I don't know what they get now, MP, 80, 85,000 pounds. Most people don't want to do that. So you end up with a very, very weird gene pool of people who want to do it and who their parties have allowed to do it. So, yeah, you've put your finger on another big, big problem. But I think my solution to this, again is more radical. My solution is to let ordinary people make a lot of the basic decisions of government on short term. My third Runway thing is you're signed up, like being signed up for a jury, and you do it for a few weeks and that means that you're much less likely to end up with a conflict of interest. You're much less likely to end up being corrupt. You're much less likely to get in a muddle. You're just trying to do your duty as a citizen and you could do it Rob as a wealthy person and someone else could do it. He's on low income. But I just think the open mindedness is what's lacking. Our systems create a weird world where you have to be in America, you basically have to be either a multimillionaire or you have to be backed by a multimillionaire in order to be a politician.

So you've been in politics for decades. Could you in five minutes or less tell us what you've learned in decades being in politics?

So, first thing I've learned is that being a minister is not about trying to discuss ideas and convince civil servants. You're never going to be able to do that. It's much more about setting a single very clear priority and putting everything behind it. Second thing I've learned in politics is that the public is extremely angry, but is resisting. Most of the things that you would need to do to make people's lives better, most of the things that could actually improve society and generate growth, the public don't want to hear about. And if you talk about them openly, you're likely to lose. Third thing I've learned, government. Government is fantastically inefficient, but often when it thinks it can fix the problem by privatizing or giving the job to a business, they just get ripped off. I found this in prisons. We gave all the maintenance contracts to a bunch of companies who said they could do it more cheaply. Sounded beautiful. We were spending, I think 150 million a year maintaining the prisons. They said, we'll do it for 40. We gave them the contract, they stopped maintaining the prisons. We tried to hold them to their contract and they declared bankruptcy. We then end up with a whole series of prisons with no maintenance people. And we then ended up spending 130 million a year again. Final thing I think I learned in government is that we are entering a very dangerous world where people no longer understand why law matters, why it matters that Donald Trump should not be behaving like a medieval king. Why the rule of law matters, why human rights matter, why it's not okay to say, I'm just going to help myself to Greenland. And the reason that's not okay is that that's the beginning of a world where people say, might is right. I'm stronger than you are. I'M richer than you are. I'm going to have that, thank you very much. And we know where that leads. That leads to conflict, leads to war. It leads to people getting killed. That the reason why many of the things that make government infuriating and slow existence is because it's the lesser evil compared to having a bunch of despotic dictators doing whatever occurs to them on a Sunday afternoon.

Who really controls the government? Who really runs the country? Who really has the power? Because it's obviously not the Prime Minister.

Well, the answer is there's no power anywhere. That's the weird thing that you find in government. Business people think the politicians have the power, the politicians think the media have the power. The media think the business people have the power. Other people think the civil servants have the power, the judges have the power. Dead people who wrote laws have the power. But the truth is, almost nobody's able to get anything done because the whole thing is such an elaborate system of checks and balances. And so it's not that there's some evil force kind of hiding behind the Prime Minister, whispering in his ear. What in fact is happening is he is waking up every day worrying about what the markets say, you know, can I borrow this much? Or interest rates going to go, worrying about what the newspapers are saying, worrying about what Elon Musk is saying, worrying about what his backbenchers are saying, worrying about whether some of the Minister is going to stab him in the back, worried about what his civil servants are saying. He's worrying about everybody all the time. I mean, that's what it's so difficult to get across. To a business person, it would be as though you were running a public company, but you were doing a AGM with your shareholders every 10 minutes, not every six months or every 12 months. Literally every 10 minutes, they're trying to bring you down. And so part of the problem with power, you can see, let's say you wanted. Somebody wanted to build something. I don't know where you live. Do you live in the country or in London? Where do you live?

In Peterborough.

You live in Peterborough. Okay, so let's say somebody wanted to build some big bit of, I don't know, affordable housing in Peterborough. Young people can't get houses. 1500 affordable houses for young people, and they want to build it bang in your backyard. The first thing that you would discover is, my goodness, there would be a lot of incredibly competent, efficient people in Peterborough making arguments against that. I cannot tell you how many retired accountants, lawyers, planning specialists, environmental specialists, will come out of the woodwork and start organizing a lovely little group down in the town hall explaining why this building development is completely unacceptable. It's going to kill the bats. It's breaking the law. It's no good for renewable energy. It's too expensive. It's in the wrong place. There isn't the demand for it. The costing's gone wrong. They've got the wrong contractor. Our whole country is full of millions and millions of people who are very, very, very clever at explaining why exactly whatever the government wants to do is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Rory will reform, win the next election.

I think they got a chance. They got a chance. I think the world is changing very quickly. I think these kind of populist parties powered up with the support. If Musk put money in, if X got behind them. I think these things. Things could happen. I think it's going to be difficult, though. It's going to be a reach for them because our electoral system makes it tough. And these political parties, useless though they are, have been around for 100 years and more, and they know what they're doing. So maybe. But I'm also pretty sure that despite your great enthusiasm at the moment, for those people, Rob, after they've been in government for five years, you'd be much less enthusiastic.

But isn't that just how it always works?

Yeah.

Does the popularity decline as soon as they come into power?

Yeah. Well, the unusual people, I guess, before we give up completely on politicians, are to ask yourself, you know, what is it that made Margaret Thatcher able to bring change? And the answer was, she did it very, very carefully. She planned very hard. We remember her as this kind of iron lady who made radical decisions, but she made those radical decisions when she'd done all the planning. She only went to war with the National Union of Miners after she'd spent three years stockpiling coal, and she'd worked out her entire media strategy and she'd worked out how to divide them, how to keep her party together. She. Her privatizations were very, very carefully planned and staged. So I think let's look at the politicians who are successful, FDR in the United States, maybe Thatcher in Britain, and realize that these were pretty serious people who planned very carefully, thought very carefully, built great teams around them. They were not blowhards who turn up in a pair of red trousers and say something amusing every week.

So what do you think of the new bruv party that Andrew Tate has launched, announcing he's going to be Prime Minister?

Well, everything I've Seen about Andrew Tate, I find very disturbing. I think there's something going on with the way that young men are thinking about the world. A lot of that is our fault. A lot of it is because a lot of things are going wrong in their lives. But I think the solution to that is not for men to strut around. I mean, I've just come from Davos, which is big kind of meeting of international business, and you'd go into meetings there with all these CEOs, and they'd all say, yeah, brilliant, diversity's gone too far. Brilliant. Trump's come in, we can push the thing back. Go back the good old days, the 1980s working culture, get rid of all this diversity. It's gone too far. You look around the room, 93% of them are white men, barely a woman in the room, and they're all like, diversity's gone too far. And what the hell do they mean they want to go back to 1980s work culture? What are they missing? The ability to grab people? I mean, what's their fantasy?

So, Andrew Tate, running for government, what is your thoughts?

Well, I think he is entirely unqualified. I think he hasn't shown me at any time any understanding of what government is about. I don't think he's demonstrated a commitment to public safety service. I don't think he's demonstrated altruism. I don't think I can see clear moral principles. I don't trust him to look after women. I don't trust him to. Which are 50% of the population in the United Kingdom. I don't trust him to look after a lot of minority groups in the United Kingdom. And I don't trust him not to break the law and enrich himself.

And why have people like Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, become so popular?

Well, I mean, that's the billion dollar question, isn't it? I think the answer. We talked about a lot of it, but here are some more things, partly because we really screwed up between about 2004, 2014, global financial crisis, a disaster, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, $3 trillion catastrophes. So that's part of it. We screwed up. Second thing is the rise of social media. Social media has changed everything, but it suddenly provides platforms for people to create echo chambers, to polarize, to divide, to mobilize in ways that haven't been true in the whole of human history. The next thing I think is the rise of China. As China has roared to prominence, the west has lost its confidence. You know, it had been. You know, we've had a very comfortable 300 years where we felt, you know, white Europeans were on top of the world, and suddenly here's this country which becomes bigger than the Italian, French, British, German, Japanese. Economy, economy almost overnight. Finally, I think they've become. They've discovered something, a secret source in politics that nobody's tried since the 1930s, which is total shamelessness. They don't care about lying, they don't care about being caught out lying, they don't care about behaving like an extorting gangster. Doesn't matter what scandal hits them, because they are entirely shameless. And shamelessness turns out to be a superpower in the modern world.

Wow. I've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. More questions, Rory.

All right, let's do them quickly and get them through in five minutes.

I was going to turn this into the quick fire round, so let's make it quick fire, but thanks for showing me your desire to leave. Fiat currency and national debt. Is it a race to zero? Do we have a problem with fiat currency and global national debt which can never be paid off? Do we need a new monetary system?

I think the debt is a huge problem, one of the biggest problems we've got, and I think so many of our problems in government are based either on the fact that we've got too much debt and we're paying too much interest, or we're terrified about the fact we can't afford stuff. So, yes, I don't know about the fiat currency stuff, but there's absolutely no doubt that the debt situation is mad.

And I know we don't have a lot of time, but I mean, how do you reverse trillions of debt? I mean, you're going to be very unpopular, aren't you, if you come in.

And start paying it all, Ultimately, the answer is you default. It's how people reverse trillions of dollars a debt.

Has London become lawless and should Sadiq Khan resign?

I don't think London is lawless, but I definitely think I would be a much better mayor than Sadiq Khan.

Very good. Quick answer, very politically answered. What one thing is most broken in politics that you would love to fix if you had a magic wand?

Morality, the ability to try to remind people why truth matters, why being thoughtful matters, why being compassionate matters?

What one thing to the public is most misunderstood about politics and government?

I think they misunderstand that many of the people, if they were to meet them one on one, meet them in a constituency surgery, you would find that many of them are actually quite decent Hard working people, they're not as stupid as you think. They've thought of many of the problems and that if they're not getting things done, it's much more to do with our culture, society, media and structures than it is the individuals.

Lots of people say that we should stop funding wars overseas when we have our own problems here. You have a lot of experience in this area. What would you say?

I'd say that the lesson that we picked up in the Second World War is that peace needs to be paid for. And to keep your own country peaceful and out of a war, you do have to actively get involved in other people's countries. Sometimes that involves giving them money, sometimes that involves funding their arms. But the lesson of the rise of Hitler was that America and Britain thought, this is none of our business. We don't care about Czech Republic, we don't care about Poll Poland. And pretty soon the bombs were falling on London.

Does corruption exist in UK politics? And if so, how deep does it run?

Corruption definitely exists. There's definitely corruption, particularly around planning, but a lot of it is quite small scale compared to the UK stuff. It's people who are not being honest about conflicts of interest. And the one I'm most worried about is the revolving door, which is the way that senior people from the civil service or the military or politics can go into a company as soon as they leave government, because that means that when they're there doing their job, I mean, let's say I was the water Minister and I was thinking, well, I can get a nice, well paid job with Thames Water when I leave, am I going to regulate them as hard as I should? Am I going to call them out in public in the way that I should? If I'm hoping for that nice board position when I leave?

Joe Rogan said, I'm not a Democrat or a Republican, I'm an American. What do you think about that?

Fine. I mean, but it doesn't tell you very much about who Joe Rogan is or isn't. I mean, we knew he was an American already.

Rory, what's your biggest failure or regret?

Biggest failure, I guess, was failing to become Prime Minister. I let Boris Johnson beat me and I was not good enough. I wasn't smart enough in communicating. I didn't organize my team well enough, I didn't make my arguments well enough and I was thoroughly beaten. I wasn't a good enough politician to beat Boris Johnson. So that's probably my biggest failure. And the regrets that follow from that are I think the country has become considerably worse Since Brexit, since 2016, and since Boris Johnson came in. I think it's become poorer, less moral, less clear. Our politics has degraded. And what I'm hoping is that I can get the. The confidence and the skill back to get back into the arena and do better next time.

So do you have aspirations to be the Prime Minister one day?

I don't know whether I. I'd go for Prime Minister again, but I definitely like to look at doing something for the country. You know, if somebody said, you know, to come in and try to improve the nhs, or would you, you know, could I be a mayor of a kind of small county in Britain and get my hands dirty doing stuff? I'd love to do it. Yeah. I think there's no job in government and no job in the world more interesting than government that touches lives more directly, that's more complicated, more difficult to do, and that makes a more tangible difference in daily lives.

So when you said you let Boris Johnson win, what do you mean by those words?

Well, partly in the. A lot of it came down to our BBC TV debate. I totally misplayed him. I thought I could expose him for knowing nothing about Brexit. He did know nothing about Brexit. I knew that because I worked with him closely, but I hadn't thought through the way he would respond, the way he'd be able to laugh it off. Bluff. I didn't handle Emily Maitlis, who was the interviewer, well enough. I should have said no. Emily, give me two minutes here. I've got to explain why this is going to screw up the Northern Irish border. And I should have kept my temper under control. I needed to be calmer, cheerier. Nobody likes to see some grim, pedantic, angry person saying, everybody's talking nonsense. You're all going to hell on a handcart. Listen to me. I'm the only person who knows what's going on. It's not a nice look.

This show is called disruptors. What does the word disruptive mean to you, Rory?

Well, I think it means breaking an old system. And I think the only message I'd have to people listening to the show is that breaking disruption can be incredibly powerful if it's done with immense intellectual rigor, with a very strong moral compass and a very clear idea about what you're going to replace the old broken system with. But disruption for the sake of disruption is a toddler throwing over their toys.

So, Rory, I don't think I've said this on a show of mine. Before, and we've done over 1200 episodes. But my wife is a great fan of yours. She listens to your show and we often have debates. And, you know, I am probably slightly more right, although I don't like to label myself. And she, you know, she always presents the other side. And she was so excited that I was doing this episode with you. And I've had many great guests on, and my wife's like, I don't like that person. But she loves you and she thinks you're doing great work. So I wanted to thank you on her behalf and mine.

Thank you, Rob. Thank you for your time and great to talk to you and very good luck with Eric.

Thank you. You. This episode was brought to you by Disruptive Media, helping bold entrepreneurs stand out through podcasting, video and social content. Visit disruptive media.co.uk to learn more.