[crowd chanting]

David Remnick: On the 4th of July, while we're watching the parades and the fireworks, and drinking a couple billion dollars worth of beer, over in the United Kingdom, citizens will go to the polls. If predictions are correct, they're going to vote the current government out of power. The Conservative Party has run the UK for most of the past 14 years, an era of steep economic decline. Four years after Britain left the EU, some of Brexit's biggest advocates acknowledge that it's been a disaster. In soccer terms, an own goal on a historic scale.

Rory Stewart: The economy has sort of flatlined basically since 2010. Brexit is a disaster. We've staggered out of COVID and Ukraine war, the health service is in bits, the education is in bits, and everybody is genuinely fed up.

David Remnick: Rory Stewart is uniquely placed to enlighten us about what's happened in Britain and what's about to happen. He spent nine years as a Conservative member of parliament, and he quit the government before Brexit took place. Now, Rory Stewart co-hosts The Rest is Politics, one of the most popular podcasts in the UK. Rory, the Prime Minister of Britain, Rishi Sunak, has called an election, which his party, the Conservatives, are expected to lose, and maybe lose badly to the Labour Party.

Everything about that sentence is completely confusing to an American. We have elections at fixed times. Why does the prime minister call an election? If you're Rishi Sunak, why would you call an election if your party is almost bound to lose?

Rory Stewart: Well, good questions. First on the constitutional point. In Britain, as in places like France, there are no fixed terms or they're not effective fixed terms. In Britain, formally, what happens is you request that the king dissolves parliament. In this case, he needed to do it within five years, and people were expecting him to push it as long as possible because as you say, he was a long way behind in the polls.

The logic for pushing it long would be maybe something would turn up, maybe the Labour leader would slip on a banana skin, maybe the economy would turn a corner, who knows? Instead of which he did something that it's not just for American and international listeners, but for British listeners, it's completely incomprehensible, which is that he triggered an election when, as you say, he's been 20 points behind in the polls for a couple of years.

At the moment at which he triggered it, I'm a former member of parliament and a cabinet minister, so my phone was full of current Conservative members texting me either saying I have literally no idea what he's doing or coming up with different kinds of theories. The formal answer, so to play Rishi Sunak's hand for him that he gives is to say that he'd got some positive economic news, inflation was down, the economy was growing. This was the moment to surprise the opposition by triggering an election when they weren't expecting it. It doesn't quite make sense because the positive economic news was very, very recent, it had come in a couple of days before.

Certainly, nobody has experienced it in their pocketbook. If he had any confidence in the economic performance of his government, you would have thought he'd push it out six, nine months to see whether it was going to result in doing anything that anyone noticed.

David Remnick: What's the alternative explanation? He's tired of the job?

Rory Stewart: Yes, that's my best guess.

David Remnick: Really?

Rory Stewart: My best guess is that he's basically given up.

David Remnick: He just wants to walk away.

Rory Stewart: Well, it's a combination probably of two things. I think at a subconscious level, it's going beyond my remit to get into analyzing his soul. There's an odd combination of two things, which I feel as ex-politician, a recovering politician often go together, a sense of despair and a pretense of boldness. What he will be telling himself is that he's being radical, he's bold, he's taking a decision, he's taking the initiative.

The other person who's just done this, as we're recording, is President Macron in France, who has just come out of a situation in which the far-right party, Marine Le Pen's party, has taken twice the number of votes that he's done, and he's responded by triggering an election for the National Assembly.

David Remnick: Also possibly a Thelma & Louise type solution?

Rory Stewart: Possibly, David. I think they've got a lot more in common though. Again, you notice this very odd thing, which is that his prime minister begged him not to do it. His cabinet is totally thrown off balance. Essentially, what I think is in common is that these are young men who, in some strange isolated moment in their offices decide they're going to be bold and radical. Maybe Thelma & Louise is the correct analogy.

David Remnick: There are some politicians who, you get the sense hate the job once they're in it. Then there are some politicians who cannot imagine life without it.

Rory Stewart: Joe Biden seems to be in the latter category.

David Remnick: That's possible too. Where does Sunak fall?

Rory Stewart: No, I think Sunak will never tell us. This may only because I hated the job. I may be reading too much into this. My assumption is that he absolutely detests the job.

David Remnick: Why would he detest it?

Rory Stewart: Well, firstly, I think being a politician is a very miserable existence in any country. Some of it will be familiar to American listeners, so there's the relentless fundraising. Remember that it's a pretty soul-destroying activity. It's not just a time, it's the kind of people you have to ring, and the kind of promises you have to make to those people to get the money. The second thing is the impossibility of the job.

Obviously, anybody's sane told that they're going to be taking over a budget of a trillion dollars, be responsible for 70 million people, and running 25 government departments that no human being could possibly get their head around would say, "Please, don't give me that job. That's ridiculous. I don't have that knowledge. I don't have that competence." It's not imposter syndrome, you are literally an imposter, and you're literally on television all the time claiming to understand things you don't understand, and claiming to control things you don't control.

Then there's the brutality of social media. There is the treachery of your colleagues. There is a sense, if you're Rishi Sunak, that he is somebody who-- this is maybe being a little unfair, but friends of his will say this. He's somebody who's won at everything in his life. He was a head boy of his school, got his first-class degree at Oxford, went off to Stanford business school, made a lot of money. This is the first thing he's ever failed at.

It must feel very, very odd to have come in, reached this position, and be 20 points behind in the polls. He is very diligent. He sits at the cabinet table scrutinizing details and doing what he thinks the right thing and the public don't like him. Because I've been in for 14 years, it is almost impossible to think of anything they've done, anything they've achieved. Now, let me just put a brief pause to defend my old party for a second. There's one thing that's--

David Remnick: We should tell listeners that you became a Conservative, you left and became an independent.

Rory Stewart: That's right. I became an independent and I ran against Boris Johnson. When I failed to stop him become a leader, I left. In the Conservative's favor, I think one thing that has been interesting is it's a much, much more diverse parliament in cabinet than anything we've ever seen before. We have a situation in which we've had home secretaries from minority ethnic backgrounds, a foreign secretary who was Black, a prime minister who's a Hindu, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's been an incredibly interesting diverse group, completely unimaginable in the Conservative Party 15 years ago.

Unfortunately, a lot of these people from diverse minority ethnic backgrounds have turned out to be unbelievably right-wing, which is another strange thing. I struggle to understand that and struggle to communicate it to my Yale students who naturally assume that if somebody comes from a poorer diverse background, they're going to be progressive. Boy, is that not the case with the Conservative Party.

David Remnick: How are the people that more liberal urban Southern Britain, that constituency, are they feeling some sense of relief that the Labour Party is coming? I must tell you, I sense not a whit of excitement about this election any more than there's a whit of excitement about ours.

Rory Stewart: There'll be very relieved the Conservatives are being booted out, but they are completely underwhelmed and sad about Labour because there's no optimism, there's no sense of the future.

David Remnick: Sunak's opponent in this, the presumed next Prime Minister, is Keir Starmer. As the head of the Labour Party, Rory, what is Starmer's strategy?

Rory Stewart: Keir Starmer is a man who was a very senior lawyer in the British system. He became a member of parliament at what in British terms is a pretty advanced age. I think he came in age of 55. The tradition of British politics to make it to top, you've got to be in parliament before you're 35. People like Rishi Sunak and David Cameron become prime ministers, Tony Blair, when they're in their early 40s.

David Remnick: We like them over 75.

Rory Stewart: If you go for the gerontocracy instead, yes.

David Remnick: Exactly.

Rory Stewart: Keir Starmer comes in, he's only in 2015, so not very long ago. He is somebody who nobody knows very much about apart from the fact he's meant to have been a good lawyer. His father as he keeps reminding everybody was a toolmaker, so he comes from a working-class background. He controversially cozied up to Jeremy Corbyn, who was this radical Bernie Sanders plus left-wing figure who took over the British Labour Party and became one of his cabinet ministers, which made him very unpopular with a lot of the moderate center of the Labour Party.

Of course, it worked out for Starmer because it meant he was established, increased his national profile, and when Corbyn went, he was able to stand for leadership. Stood for the leadership, again, by appealing to the party he left, making a series of commitments which as soon as he came in, in fine American primary fashion, he immediately reneged on and tacked back to the center. He's also backed off his big green promises. He had an idea of spending £28 billion a year on green initiatives, and that's now been abandoned. He's dropped all opposition to Conservative policies on welfare, tax, et cetera.

If you're from the progressive left, you're thinking for goodness sake, and above all, the most dramatic thing is people will be enraged that he is not prepared to do anything about the European Union. People like me say, "Okay, maybe we can't rejoin, but we could at least join the customs union. We could at least get much closer to Europe again." If you really want to turn around the British economy, let's some signal to get some business confidence. Now he's been running a strategy, which is called a Ming Vase Strategy. The idea is that you carrying this very expensive piece of Chinese porcelain across a polished floor, and you just walk very, very slowly to get to the other side and you take no risk at all.

David Remnick: Is there any chance in the world that he can screw it up?

Rory Stewart: I think it's going to be very difficult.

[crosstalk]

David Remnick: In other words, if a cardboard box was the head of the Labour Party, it would win.

Rory Stewart: Yes, provided the cardboard box was very disciplined about not letting a flap fall down or not letting itself get stuck in the rain. The cardboard box basically just has to remain a cardboard box to the election and it's fine.

David Remnick: It's been a long time since this party has been in office, 14 years. What shoe is dropping in Britain when it comes to the Conservative Party?

Rory Stewart: David, that is a piece of American rhetoric that I don't understand. What is what shoe is dropping?

David Remnick: The other shoe drops, do you know this expression?

Rory Stewart: No, you have to help me.

David Remnick: Really?

Rory Stewart: Reframe it in another way for me.

David Remnick: Disaster has come, the ultimate conclusion of the story has occurred. The other shoe has dropped.

Rory Stewart: Your question is, what's the narrative of this tragedy?

David Remnick: There you go. You're good at this.

[laughter]

Rory Stewart: I think basically they lost the Conservatives. My party lost this election a long time ago. From my point of view, they lost the election when they voted for an incompetent, dishonest buffoon to be prime minister in the form of Boris Johnson. Then they doubly lost it when they brought in this imprudent, reckless, unqualified, personalist trust to be prime minister. The reason those two things are important is that the brand of the Conservative Party in Britain was always to suggest that Labour were nice, liberal, compassionate people, but they weren't careful with your money.

The Conservatives were supposed to be boring, dignified, slightly stiff, fiscally prudent. If they were being pompous, they present themselves like the grownups in the room. The Boris Johnson list trust choices destroyed those two things completely. They destroyed any sense of moral integrity or character by bringing in Boris Johnson and any sense of performance or ability or competence by bringing in this woman to this trust. She succeeded in announcing a mini-budget that terrified the markets, was completely unfunded, and led to an immediate collapse in the currency, rise in interest rates, and the next government had to come and reverse everything she did.

This is very personal for me. I've written a book called How Not To Be A Politician, which is trying to look at how this happened. I was there for nine and a half years, watching the Conservative Party go from the party which I joined, which was supposed to be a party of the center ground. The majority of my colleagues believed in remaining in the European Union and of course, I left a party that had, as far as I was concerned, completely taken leave of its senses. Now, slightly different--

[crosstalk]

David Remnick: Forgive me for interrupting. Was part of the act of taking leave of one's senses Brexit itself?

Rory Stewart: Yes. Brexit was catastrophic because the Conservative Party responded to it by tracking ever further to the right. The referendum should never have happened. Obviously, I'm saying that with the benefit of hindsight, but it's clear, obviously, to everybody in Britain now that referenda are a very bad idea. We end up with very bad results. Even after it happened, it was a very narrow victory, 52% to leave, 48% to remain. The natural response would have been to say, "Okay, you've chosen to leave, but we'll go for a soft Brexit. We'll try to remain very close to the European Union politically and economically. We'll stay in a customs union or whatever."

What the Conservative Party did was instead of taking that opportunity of building bridges, working for the center ground, it instead decided to latch for ever harder versions of Brexit under Boris Johnson, essentially saying we want no more relationship with Europe than we have with Thailand. David, you'd also understand that it was a catastrophic geopolitical bet because a lot of it was about saying we're going to get much closer to fast-growing economies like China. Europe is stagnant. The European economies are doing poorly so the big strategic bet is we'll ally ourselves with these Asian economies that are growing at 8%. Totally failing to take into account the national security implications.

David Remnick: Rejoining is out of the question.

Rory Stewart: There is not a single party going to this election pushing for rejoining, partly because the referendum was such a bruising experience. What's striking about Keir Starmer is he's unnecessarily ruled out even the intermediate steps. He's ruled out a single market customs union.

David Remnick: What's the degree to which the population feels, "You know what, this was a colossal mistake that we must undo?"

Rory Stewart: The majority of people now think it was a mistake, over 60%, which is what gives encouragement to people like me to say, "Why are these people not speaking about Brexit?" The problem is the same polls suggest that far fewer people want to rerun the referendum. I think their sense is this was a terrible mistake, but we don't want to go through this again.

David Remnick: What's been the statistical and spiritual result of Brexit now that it's pretty entrenched?

Rory Stewart: The economic impacts of Brexit are negative. They've been completely overshadowed by the economic impacts of COVID and the Ukraine-Russia war. The UK COVID response led to the largest recession in 300 years. The spiritual consequence I think is profound because it created incredible polarization in society between people who voted Remain and people who voted Brexit. In 2016, 50% of people who voted Remain wouldn't contemplate their child marrying someone who voted for Brexit and vice versa.

Destroyed, emptied out the center ground, provided the opportunity for Boris Johnson to essentially do a very familiar thing, which is to turn a center-right party, which was the party I joined and this book is about.

It's about how a party that was socially liberal and fiscally conservative, in other words, so in favor of balancing the budget but also in favor of gay marriage, for example, transformed itself into a party that became socially conservative, anti-immigration, fighting against transgender and stuff like that on the one hand. On the other hand, economically was much more about borrowing money, spending large amounts of money on large social programs.

This was Boris Johnson's new coalition which allowed him to win a big election by bringing largely less educated working class, older voters in the North East of England who traditionally voted Labour over to the Conservatives because he was appealing to their socially Conservative anti-immigrant views. That won him the 2019 election but I think has destroyed the future of the Conservative Party.

David Remnick: Rory, now what is the Labour Party and its standard bearer, Keir Starmer offering in place of the Conservatives? It seems pretty clear that they're going to win and you're going to have a new Prime Minister. What's the program?

Rory Stewart: This is the problem, you basically can't put a cigarette paper between them. The center of their strategy is to say that they're not going to deviate from the Conservatives' fiscal plans in any way. The Conservatives say that they're going to reduce debt as a ratio to GDP within five years, Labour signed up the same thing. Both parties are going into this election profoundly dishonest. Profoundly dishonest because there's no way they can meet this fiscal target without either brutally cutting spending or raising taxes. They've all ruled out raising taxes and Labour has ruled out kind of austerity and brutally cutting spending.

David Remnick: Well, you've already had some ideology of austerity and which has taken a deep toll on your institution's, healthcare, police, roads, courts, youth services. They've all seen, unless I'm getting this wrong, some very wide and deep declines. Did the Conservative government not foresee those consequences after years and years of cuts? Does the party regret it?

Rory Stewart: The fundamental problem is that the British economy hasn't grown. That's one problem. The second problem is, unlike the United States, we're not the world's reserve currency, so we can't really borrow. The question of austerity is playing around the edges. In this election, and indeed even in 2010, '11, the gap between the Labour and the Conservative parties on these is tiny. This is partly because Britain is very constrained. It's not in a position the markets don't allow it to do what Joe Biden has done, which is borrow huge amounts of money to pursue big industrial strategies.

It's locked into this neoliberal Reagan-Thatcher consensus, which is, it's locked into a world where there's a limit to how much it can borrow, how much deficit it can run. At the same time, the cost of public services in Britain are soaring through the roof. Our NHS, which we're very proud of--

David Remnick: That's the National Health Service.

Rory Stewart: Yes, is completely free, totally free treatment to people of every sort from the most minor ailment to the most advanced medical treatment. The result is that every year spending on the NHS increases about 3%, 4% above inflation. Fundamentally, our country is getting older. Our welfare state is costing more and more. There's no appetite to actually reform these things from any of these parties. We have become an economy almost entirely dependent on cheap migrant labor, which has now become politically controversial. Britain took 700,000 people in this year. 700,000 people in last year.

Now, to put that in context, traditionally British governments would try to have taken in the tens of thousands. We seem to be stuck in a hole. There are other things we can talk about. People complain about the fact that we have a lot of science and innovation in Britain, good universities, but we never seem to be able to turn them into companies. That's partly about the way that our financing system works. Basically, smart people at Oxford, Cambridge invent stuff and then they head off to the Silicon Valley to set up their companies.

David Remnick: It does seem that it's been a very, very hard period for Britain. You're not alone in that, but it's been a very hard period for Britain, and it's a time that demands serious leadership. Do you think you'll get it?

Rory Stewart: No, we won't get it unfortunately, because one thing I've learned as a working politician is that parties that don't tell you before an election what they're going to do, very rarely succeed in doing it after the election because you simply haven't built the support that you need. If you try to conceal your policies and then do something radical after election you face a wall of problems.

David Remnick: Rory Stewart is a former member of Parliament and he co-hosts the podcast, The Rest Is Politics. We'll continue in a moment.

[music]

David Remnick: This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I've been speaking with the English writer and politician, Rory Stewart. Now, as a young man, Stewart was a diplomat, and then he was a adventurer and travel writer. In fact, he spent 18 months walking across Asia, an experience that he turned into a book. In 2010, he was elected to the British Parliament as a Conservative, a member of the Tory party, representing a rural district in the north of England. He served in Parliament for nine years, and he left just before Brexit took place. He then wrote a book about his time in government, and it's not the political memoir that we're accustomed to.

It's not chatty, it's definitely not self-admiring. Instead, it's a searing, even self-loathing account of how much he hated being a politician, how much he hated parliament. The book is called How Not to Be a Politician, and it was a bestseller in Britain. You've written a book where you describe the soul-destroying aspects of being a politician. I would imagine that a lot of people look at the evidence of what it is to be a politician and say, "No, thank you. I'd rather not."

Rory Stewart: David, this book is called How Not to Be a Politician but it's really about the inside of what it's like. I'm trying to be as brutally honest. I'm destroying my career in the process but I'm trying to bring alive just how much incompetence, careerism, [unintelligible 00:25:39], strange compromise, game-playing, ignorance is implicit in me. The important thing is I'm not just chucking rocks at colleagues, I'm also trying to explain how my own character was deformed by the experience. How many things I did that I was profoundly ashamed of? I would--

David Remnick: Give me an example.

Rory Stewart: One example is that I begin by sticking up my principles and rebelling against the government. Then I'm told that I'm going to be left on the back benches for five years and not made a minister. Within four years, I'm sending creepy texts to David Cameron, congratulating him on speeches that I really didn't admire at all in order to try to get myself promoted. I begin voting for all the government legislation. Ultimately when I'm running to be mayor of London, I'm going out, trying to fundraise from people that I often despise, signaling that I might be agreeing with them when I really don't agree with them.

I felt that I was getting-- that it was bad for my mind, my body, and my soul. I think we become in politics cardboard cutouts. We lose humility, we lose nuance, we lose complexity. We lose critical thinking. There is a problem with structure, economic structures, constitutional structures, party structures but there is also a problem of character.

David Remnick: You see any exceptions in your experience in parliament or on American shores or elsewhere?

Rory Stewart: Yes, I--

David Remnick: Let the record note, there was a long pause.

Rory Stewart: Long pause, yes. The problem is that the people that I can think of are not household names. There were definitely members of parliament. There was a guy called David Gauke who was the Secretary of State for Justice, who remarkably was able to, I think, keep his soul intact, make some pretty difficult decisions, and remain a human being.

David Remnick: You're saying you didn't keep your soul in touch.

Rory Stewart: I didn't, no. I felt-

David Remnick: What was the worst thing you felt you did?

Rory Stewart: I think I became vain, insecure, obsessed with social media, checking how many likes I get on Twitter. I would go out on stages. I was running for leadership, running to be Prime Minister, and I would do these huge rallies and I would get enormous applause, and I would feel totally fraudulent as though I was the cheap magician, conning the public.

David Remnick: If you had prevailed, if you had won, would you have ever come to this realization?

Rory Stewart: This ist is a very good question, David. I think that I must have been conscious of some of these problems under the surface, and it probably would've made me a very very unhappy prime minister. I probably would've in office been acutely conscious of. There's so many aspects, one aspect, David, is I was the foreign office minister, and I'm standing up in Parliament and I'm expected to speak fluently about 43 countries in Africa. It's complete nonsense. Then I'm moved to run the entire prison system in England, and Wales. I can visit half these prisons and yet I'm supposed to be saying this is what's happening in Liverpool prison, this is what's happening in Birmingham.

When I'm standing up and saying the way to bring peace to Burundi is to respect the Arusha Accords, I call on the previous Prime Minister of Tanzania. I don't even know where Arusha is. I don't know who the previous prime minister of Tanzania is. I don't know which countries have a land border with Burundi.

David Remnick: Do you suppose the politicians of the past, the statesmen of the past that you admire, suffered from the same sense of self-doubt and even self-loathing?

Rory Stewart: Well, I met Lincoln and I imagined I did, Gladston, certainly did, Churchill was wrecked by bouts of profound oppression.

David Remnick: What's been the reaction to your former colleagues in Parliament and elsewhere in the British political scene about letting the cat out of the bag in this book by being so blunt about what it is to be a politician. Have you gotten some pushback and is it also self canceling about your future?

Rory Stewart: I've got some people very, very angry, understandably, but there are other colleagues who've written in to say that they found it very helpful. That they found Parliament very depressing. That they struggled with mental health issues and this is the first time they've seen somebody actually describe honestly, why we all feel like frauds and why we all feel that it's degrading us.

David Remnick: You feel like frauds but at the same time there's the lure of power. Can you describe that? Because you wanted it. You wanted to be the head of the party, you would've liked to been prime minister, you ran for Parliament obviously. Talk about the lust for power, the desire for power.

Rory Stewart: I think it's a mixture of different things. There is the sense of competition and game. A lot of politicians, including me, went to fancy schools and we're tops of our class, and so it's just an extension of being head of whatever club they were head of at Oxford University and now they're showing off rights, I'm Prime Minister. There's that bit of it. There's the Liz Truss approach to power, which is, it's a game that she's played since she was a student. It says very much about the party, and she just wants to be famous. There's the type of power that I told myself I was interested in.

I told myself that what I wanted to do is stop things like the Iraq and Afghan wars happening again, and that if I could get my hands on the lever of power, because on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan we're always told it's the politicians who've made the decision, so maybe if I'm a politician, I can stop these decisions being made. Then I was a civil servant. I was a soldier, a civil servant and I thought this is a way of being an administrator. Another type of liking power is the sense that I like running things. I like solving problems. I loved managing things. I like managing people.

I like making decisions, but of course all of this is concealed because what we say to the public is that we're there to serve, we're there to make their lives better, but we're not spending much time thinking hard about the granular details, the nuances, the incongruities, the complexity of making their lives better. I remember Mitt Romney saying to me, I was teaching at Harvard, and he came to see me in 2009 and he said, "Get all your thinking done now because you're not going to be able to think when you're a politician."

I think that is true in American and British politics, that there's very, very little space to really sit back and say, "Does this economic policy really work?" Above all, most difficult thing of all, "Can I reverse?" I've said Afghanistan's an existential threat to global security. I've spent $1 trillion here. I've lost all these lives.

Can I now say, "Maybe I got that wrong? Maybe it isn't an existential threat to global security."

David Remnick: Would you ever reenter politics?

Rory Stewart: It's so difficult.

David Remnick: Let the record show a pained expression has come over your face. [laughs]

Rory Stewart: It's very difficult because I feel deep, deep sense of obligation and responsibility and love of country and a belief that there are things that I do reasonably well. I think I was a reasonably good minister, and I think I learned stuff. 10 years taught me a lot about government and how to run government, and I think if somebody brought me in and gave me a department, I'd probably do a better job this time than I did last time and I'd be very proud of it. On the other hand, it is the most unpleasant job I've ever had in my life. It's exhausting and it's terrible for your family and it's terrible for your character and it will drive you into an early grave, unless you're an American politician, in which case, it gives you long life.

David Remnick: Rory Stewart, thank you so much.

Rory Stewart: Thank you, David, very much.

David Remnick: Rory Stewart is the co-host of The Rest Is Politics. His memoir of serving in Parliament for nine years is called, How Not to Be a Politician. Let's talk about something extremely important, The Royal Family. How do people take on the rift between Harry and William?

Rory Stewart: We're now moving into difficult ground, David, because I was their tutor. I was their teacher. I was Prince Harry and Prince William's teacher, so slightly stay off getting into the detail of my students in this way.

David Remnick: Oh, I'm not going to let you go on that. No, no, no. You're really going to say nothing about this on the basis of having taught them math 25 years ago.

Rory Stewart: I am being a friend of the King's. I'm not an objective observer. I'm a passionate monarchist and a strong friend of the King's.

David Remnick: In a moment I'll talk movies, very bad movies. In fact, the very worst movies with comedian, Paul Scheer.

 

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