Ken Clarke on the Budget from hell

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Next week will be a big political week. The budget, perhaps the biggest political moment of the year. Much ress economically, perhaps much more rest politically. For the futures of the Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who perhaps Incredibly. feel as if they are hanging by the most slender of threads. One man who has seen his share of budgets, including his own, come and go.

Is Lord Ken Clark? Chancellor of the Exchequer for John Major in the 90s, Health Secretary, Education Secretary for Margaret Thatcher in the 80s, Justice Secretary for David Cameron in the 2010s. His was a political career spanning half a century, becoming an MP in 1970. Today he enjoys his perch in the Lords, but few can claim his political longevity, nor now his experience of political history.

as Reeves faces what could be a make or break budget. We've come to Nottingham, in the county that Clark represented in the Commons for all those years, to speak to the man himself about the political moments in which we are in And all the many more that he has lived through. Welcome to the news agents.

The news agents. Lord Clarke, Ken Clarke, thank you so much for inviting us into your home in Nottingham. For people who are Listening rather than uh watching, you are smoking one of your vinegar cigars which you were just telling us about. So you tie on me. I don't mind at all. I'm getting too laid back in my old age. No, that's absolutely fine. I was particularly intrigued that you said that you smoked one on the way back from the health centre this morning.

Uh absolutely. Is cigars the um your remaining advice? A decent brandy in the evening uh but uh I actually don't can't think of any I I generally don't think I've got any other vices. I mean you're a politician who was always famed for having many interests. Yes, well the media used to get frightfully excited about the fact I used to go to Ronnie Scott's uh jazz club and I was a bird watcher and uh all these kinds of things.

Well, I I think you know, I'm I'm actually obsessively interested in politics. I have been since I was a little boy in short trousers. But f but y you you you've become too obsessive. It's absurd. You've got to You've got to take part in real life. And uh you know, I I'm almost as keen on f uh on football as I am on politics and cricket um and uh so I motorate but m Formula One motor racing I follow quite straight closely. Well

We wan I wanna talk a a lot about contemporary politics and get the benefit of your uh experience on that. But since you mentioned your your childhood, I mean you have had an extraordinarily long political career. Um very few politicians have had as many jobs as you've had. and seen as many governments sort of come and go. Just wonder if you could just sort of compare the political world of your your childhood and also when you first entered the house compared to today, when you left the house.

So, you know, as a little boy I was following the Attlee government, which is one of our great uh uh governments of my lifetime, I think. It created the welfare state. But you were born in nineteen forty, so I was born in nineteen forty. By the time I was seven or eight I was reading my dad's newspaper.

following Stafford Cripp's budgets. Th the the world in which I lived then, th the you know, the the near bankrupt austerity of post war England uh and the political exchanges were it just quite totally different to the actual f style of politics, the content of politics. Indeed, I was first elected in nineteen seventy as one of the seats that we gained from Labour that gave Ted Heath

uh his majority. An election that few thought the Conservatives would win. No, they didn't. Uh it was a bit of a bit of a surprise. We were even behind in the polls uh at one point in the campaign. Uh but in the end uh we we didn't have much of a majority, but we we we won it. And uh the House of Commons then. Political exchanges in the newspapers.

uh although you still had tabloid newspapers and you know lots of gossipy stuff and all the rest of it, actually earnest reporting of policy issues and debates uh was there. If you took the times the House of Commons debate every day was reported. There was a page of uh the House of Commons and the speeches had been made in the Chamber the day before. The most helpful MP to me was the coal miner,

uh who had beaten me at Mansfield the election before. Don Concannon, who became a very good minister, uh, was one of about thirty odd miners. Don had finished his last shift uh in the middle of his election campaign when he got elected and beat me in sixty six. And our side had real Knights of the Shire. N not idiots all of them. Uh s some of them may may have the style of tweedy Knights of the Shire, but were pretty shrewd men.

Did you ever feel out of place? I was one of a whole lot of people like me had come in. I was one of the first of the eleven plus boys who came in on the conservative side. Uh and so the be so I think my My intake this was all beginning to change on both sides of the house. yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n

You know, in recent years I I think more and more, uh everything's obsessed by the media. And day by day we get so v you know, half a dozen opinion polls every week. a lots of young men are hired in number ten to follow them and try to glue themselves to see if they can glue the government to improving a position in the opinion polls. It has changed.

I mean they're all graduates now, almost or most of them, and and the ones who are unlucky enough not to become graduates are are, you know, educated people and and and uh It's not the full cross section of the population.

that it was when uh I first arrived. Were you always political? What was your earliest political memory? Uh uh well, uh I as I w said a moment ago, uh I just started reading my dad's newspaper. and was hooked on the politics. I don't make it up. I mean I've told the story many times before. I in my primary school, this was in a pit village in Derbyshire, in my primary school I was a couple of us were asked to come out in front of the class, say what we were going to do when we grew up.

and my mate who was called up, he said he was going to be a lorry driver or something, you know, perfectly reasonable. And uh I said I was going to be an MP, rather to the amazement of my teacher, let alone the class, because I was f following politics and got hooked in it and never wavered. You can't be certain they're gonna be an MP just'cause you want to be.

Ond rwy'n rhaid wedi'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i Do you do you think that you were I mean, you hinted at it, you you didn't come from a very conventional conservative background. You were part of a new generation of conservative background. A generation of eleven plus boys. Indeed. Do you think that you ever

suffered in your political career at any point from snobbery towards you? Within the Conservative Party or more wide? No, no. I I was never aware of that. No. No, I I I can say that but i I don't remember anybody rebuffing me in in any I mean, obviously, there were some people who fitted more naturally into what in those days was very much the

It was rather like a St James Club, the atmosphere of the s you know the smoking room and and in and around the House of Commons. I can't see why you fit in. Yes, precisely with that. In those days there were no no problems in smoking anywhere you want until uh the campaigning began. Quite rightly the campaigning began. But uh th there was never any resistance. Why why did you become a conservative?'Cause again with that background, you know, you can easily become a labor.

uh hadn't decided which party was gonna have the privilege of having me as a member. I was uh t taking part in the union, but I wasn't uh particularly In my first year uh I became uh uh Cambridge University Conservative ma uh association guy. The reason was if you think uh back to those days, I'm in the late fifties now.

The Conservative Party was the party that was modernizing, was taking us on from the post world world. Butler and his followers, my great hero Ian MacLeod, Ted Heath, Reggie Maudling, they were beginning to get the country to take off in the nineteen fifties. The the Labour Party was the party that was absolutely rooted in the Attlee years. They hadn't moved on from uh

And I I just thought that the Conservative Party was the party that wanted to change things. Harold Macmillan, who was the leader when I was uh first actively involved in the Conservative Party, put on this air of war Whoa, whoa, I've got all that and the country gentleman, and he was a country gentleman, I suppose, by background, but he was quite radical and quite reforming. And he'd even lost a whip before the war for being too left wing and and uh anti appeasement.

And so it was an actively reforming, improving party.

And the Labour Party had got itself a bit stuck in its the world of the nineteen forties. You uh allude to just how many governments you've um seen come and go, some of which of course you b were a member of. How would you assess The current government's performance so far in the sixteen months or so it's been in office, eighteen months. accepted. It it took over, as several governments have in my lifetime, a really dreadful situation.

I mean, you know, if trying to be a bit balanced. Uh the governments of Boris Johnson and Liz Trust And did great harm, particularly to the economy. and and in some cases the standards of public life. Uh and Rishi wasn't making much progress in in Rishi's doing his best, washi was okay.

but he was really getting nowhere. Uh a a and th l th the Labour Party uh was also unpopular but because of the protest votes being cast for other parties and the way the Mae'r bobl yn ffragmented wedi'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'

Um and uh I I hoped I had high high high hopes of them. I hoped they would begin to sort things out because I am a patriot. Just because they're not my political party, uh I don't want the British economy to be wrecked. Uh, I want the British economy to succeed. I would like to see living standards rising again, not falling, as they are for many people at the moment. And I I think uh a political opponent like me even

ha has b been disappointed, badly disappointed by their performance so far. And why do you think that is? Why do you think they've struggled? they don't have Clear, medium term, long term visions. I was always rather cognitive and r reforming politician. I was always controversial in most of my jobs'cause I kept changing things and the public don't like change. But but it was always I had a n I did have a kind of agenda I knew where I was hoping to put relevant bits of my portfolio.

in two or three years time. Now you might be right you might be wrong as if you're wrong you're in terrible trouble if it you make a Holix and it you're making things worse. Uh but if th things go right However unpopular you were in the first place, uh you will wind up popular and supported. The public will forget that they were opposed to what you did.

Um I mean Blair just carried on with all the Thatcher reforms of uh uh uh of he was an admirer of Thatcher, and he carried on with the health and education reforms'cause they'd worked.

uh and it to i uh actually carried on with what had been our successful economic policy in the end. This government has made a dreadful start and h Rachel Reeves, I used to get into trouble before the election, cu with some of my colleagues, I used to say nice things about Rachel Reeves, who I thought looked quite promising as Shadow Chancellor. Her first budget was absolutely disastrous.

and she's thrashing about. And now she's made things worse, a little bit worse, by conducting an absurd debate, trying things out in public and floating things, so that Her special advisors can see how it plays in the opinion polls and announcing things and then dropping them again, creating an even gloomier atmosphere. Mae'n rhaid i'n rhaid i'n rhaid i'n rhaid i'n rhaid i'n rhaid i'n.

They've got to raise taxes, they've got to cut pub strain the growth of public spending, cut public spending. They've got to begin to get this huge burden of debt off our back and they've got to concentrate on doing things actually make us attractive to investors, improve the performance of our industries and our services.

As far as I can see for the last month they're faffing about again. What would you do if you were Chancellor now? You know what the budget process is? I think I would raise well you have to raise taxation, obviously. If you'd told me as recently as when I was Chancellor that I was going to live to see Britain with a burden of debt of about a hundred percent of our GDP almost.

would cost the taxpayer more every year, more than the entire budget for defence, the army, the navy, the air force, the whole lot put together I wouldn't have believed you. Uh and it makes us at constant risk of a financial crisis if uh the people we're hoping will lend us money suddenly get bit worried that we might default. Uh not far from that a at all. But the argument is is that the we're over taxed. Some people argue that we're over taxed already. The people's cost of living pressures are

enormous and that therefore increasing income tax on national insurance. We we are over taxed because because again the state has expanded. I mean in real terms, this government is now spending far more than the Blair government ever did. M many of our public services are in terrible trouble. There are lots and lots of lobbies now, big organized lobby groups

who put forward on every subject you know known to man, all kinds of quite compelling, quite good arguments about things you might improve. The only remedy they have is you spend more money on it. And and it's no good imagining that if you just let the state keep expanding each year, borrow more money to do so, that isn't all g going to end in tears. B politics is tough.

You don't get easy options. What did you have to react to events? What did you And right now she has to raise taxes, cut public spending, resist these lobbies and s and do it. She's decided that this is in the best national interest. This is what the British economy needs to be put back on its feet. She might be amazed, she might have repeat, if she'd done that, she's wasted one budget already.

But if she'd done that, she might be able to relive for the Labour Party the experience of Margaret Thatcher in her first term, where we were hated halfway through.

'Cause we'd done all the right things, including Geoffrey Howe's nineteen eighty one budget, which raised taxes and cut public spending, it worked. Things started getting better. Nineteen eighty three we had a decent majority. Do you think that she has Her argument uh today has been she did an interview with the Times where she said that she is sick.

of hearing men in particular, perhaps men like yourself, Lord Clark, mansplaining to her how to be Chancellor. I'm an ardent feminist. One of the amazing things that's happened in my political lifetime is the number of women in politics. I have served under three women leaders of my party. I have served in cabinets with lots of women. I think when I look I think the House of Commons and one way to which it's improved when I look round is it's not quite fifty fifty. We're nearly there.

is one of the great things that's happened in my lifetime. The triumph of feminism. It's no good thinking that she's being criticized because she's a woman. That is deceiving herself. She's being criticized because her first budget All she did was borrow billions more, and then the tax she chose to raise was the worst possible tax to choose, a tax on employment and on employers.

This year's school leavers, this year's graduates from universities, find that the jobs market's completely dried up for large numbers of them. Why? Because her choice of tax was catastrophic. to think that putting up employers' national insurance was the right thing to do. Income tax, and the ones they stupidly ruled out in their manifesto, is the fairest tax. The more you earn, the more you pay.

and the h the rate's higher the more you earn. It's the basic tax. I don't I never liked putting it up. I I reduced it from the mad levels that used to exist before before me. But right now the straightforward thing is to raise income tax, probably by a couple of pence, uh which was slightly deflationary'cause it takes demand. Well she said she was going to do that or indicated she was going to do that. She changed her mind. She's she tried it out.

I mean we used to have a thing again in my day and it only started dying out in the Blair government really. We silly name gave it was budget perder. What it meant was that everybody connected with the Treasury, Chancellor, all the way to the doorkeeper, went silent before a budget.

You upset the market, you could actually cause a bit of a panic, you could people start trying to make money g if you started hinting what you were going to do and so on. Well Hugh Dalton famously resigned as just since to to leak any part of the budget. Well she she's presided over not a very well organized debate.

But sh keeps floating things and trying them out. Well do you think that I mean let's um let's be brutal, Lord Clark, do you think that she's up to for being up to being Chancellor? If she makes uh uh any more frightful messes so far, I regret to say Uh I but she's a nice woman. I'm sorry to be ps you know, I ha probably been quite strong in my criticisms of her. I tell if she ever by chance were to watch this she doesn't get upset but

The oldest truth is I don't think she is up to it. No. But the t two catastrophic things she's done are to make the wrong choice of taxation in the budget, to make no attempt to cut public spending, and now to to run this absolute debate. Sensible investors in most areas of life have not been investing for the last month or two because so much uncertainty and doubt and gloom has now de sa has descended on a

talking about our economy and the Chancellor's been leading all that. Do you think that Starmer I mean you've again you've seen Prime Ministers come and go, What do you make of Starmer as a Prime Minister? He's an unusual figure in the U.S. He's nice he's a very nice guy, he's an intelligent guy. Rachel's a very intelligent woman. uh he he he's perfectly uh he's he's got all the uh the abilities, intellectual abilities

He has absolutely no political skills whatever. He he had a very successful career. He's a very distinguished lawyer. You think it's that bad? He has no political skills whatsoever? Well, I just don't think he c he could sell an overcoat to an Eskimo. I don't think he could have done much advocacy when he was a lawyer, even though he was a DPP. He must have done some. I mean, they don't even take credit for the things that they've done.

Unfortunately, uh I say he's a very nice man, he's perfectly all right. He's he's a nice, intelligent, decent guy. Uh but he doesn't have a big personality. Charisma i is not his big thing, is it? Well I was gonna say is that

Is one of their problems both their problems perhaps both Starmer a and Reeves. There are clearly lots of structural problems which afflict them, many of which are not their fault. Oh inheritance, dreadful inheritance. But nonetheless, isn't it something about them that we're in this era of big personalities in politics. We're in this era of noise, content, all of this sort of stuff.

And there's something about them that struggles to break through in a way that probably if you b if you'd been a young politician now, you were very well and you were quite a personality led politician in a lot of ways, you would have been quite successful in this era, don't you think? Mae'n ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud

to be really successful in politics. I mean there were big personalities in my day, you know, Harold Macmillan, Tony Ben, uh Thatcher was a big person. Enoch Powell Thatcher, Thatcher was a larger than my f personality.

i it is something in politics that you need. The present mood's different. It's w what's happened now is the public are angry. I have never known it hasn't happened since the First World War. Both the major parties are deeply unpopular. People are rejecting Orthodox centre left, centre right politics. We had such bad government. ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl. are worse off probably. And th GDP per person is negative.

the little growth we have is because huge number of immigrants coming in and the population expanding so rapidly. But G B D P per person is is declining. And so what people are voting for it larger than life, abusing, angry, big personalities, simple solutions, expressing their rage at the political class, promising sort of extraordinary things. best presentational politicians are one on the the the f the far right, Nigel Farage, one on the the far left, Zach Belansky,

and they have an enormous following in the polls. Uh and people vote for them not because of their policies or because they think they could really run a government they vote for them to express their anger Their protests at the Conservative and Labour parties. Now this is uh w the most dangerous situation I've ever seen, a real threat to our democracy. Well I wanna talk about that but b just before we do, just while we're on the economy and the budget. Um

Is one of Rachel Reeves' problems, the OBR. I.e., that budgets have become in a way which was not true in in your day, because the OBR did not exist. Uh an attempt for Chancellors to almost be chasing their tail the entire time, sort of looking at five year time horizons. Not the OBR's fault, it's what they've been asked to do, but that actually the OBR has become more of a hindrance to Chancellors than we've done.

Because of the populism of president politics and the fact that people keep you know, we keep having governments chasing opinion balls, we probably do need it. I mean, you know, Liz Truss demonstrated that if there's no public constraint. Some sort of discipline needs to be imposed on the political class So you don't occasionally have some idiot who turns up this is not Rachel Reeves, just doing totally populist things, but but if you don't have the OBR

What the ABR is doing needs to be done properly inside the Treasury. You need economic forecasts. You need a good objective look. uh the state of the public finances you need fiscal discipline. And OBR has become a slightly peculiar organization, uh which is now given this institutional role, which it didn't exist, as you say, in my day. We'll be back with more from Lord Clark just after this. Here in Edinburgh. Reporting from the heart. Listen on. Or the new LBC app.

Leading Britain's conversation.

The news agents. Look, you said something interesting just now. Um good. Lots of interesting things. In between cigar smoking. Um w you said something interesting, which is that you You thought that we've never had such a dangerous moment as we're in now, politically. You think this is a deeply dangerous moment. Why do you think it's dangerous? What's dangerous about it? What could happen? Well, we're not going to have a sensible government if people just pass protest votes.

uh for polarized people with rather h hard right, hard left views. But if the centre isn't providing what the people need and require and want, then is it any surprise? I think people are voting'cause of what they're against, not what they're for. That's why I'm not I don't think it's far too soon to say Farage's gonna win an election and so on. They vote for Farage to s to stuff it to the Conservatives and the Labour Party. What sort of Prime Minister do you think he'd be?

He's gonna try and be a serious one. He's quite obviously now trying to be statesmanlike and he's trying to think about policies which he hasn't bothered about before. Does it scare you the prospect of his being private? It does a bit'cause I think he's n he hasn't come up with anything very sensible yet at all. What do you think it could mean for British democracy if he were Prime Minister? W well it's it

It's far too soon to speculate about the next election. Anybody starts talking about what an election's gonna do in three years time is uh often uh useless. You know, we don't even know what it'll be about. If it was an election now It would produce a continental type. hung Parliament with four or five parties finding it very, very difficult uh to find a majority with based on a coalition between any two of them. We would have more deadlock and, you know, frequent elections and

We might even have more frequent changes of Prime Minister. That's uh I don't think this country is ever going to take uh uh start g going for some strong man dictator. Do you think he'd last as Prime Minister if he were elected? I I don't think you'll be elected prime minister. I I hope. I s f firstly th three years time, politics won't look as it is now. We w th th very dangerous things happening in the world.

a lot of which will have a knock on effect on us. We don't even know what the main subjects will be. Uh now Farage gets his support at the moment because he expresses the anger sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n And they find him we don't know whether the situation of the general public will be improving or be worse or anything like that. But people will

Is he really a prime minister? Could this man run any organisation left alone one as important as the government of the United Kingdom? Nonetheless, he's the most influential figure on the British right since Thatcher, isn't he? uh absurd decision of David Cameron to put the whole thing to an opinion poll. Uh the EU referendum. It was an anti establishment, anti immigration. Uh or maybe people just wanted to leave, Lord Clark. Maybe they just wanted to leave.

of foreigners coming to work in this country and uh all this what they thought were these bureaucrats in Brussels, so they had no idea what the bureaucrats did. They didn't, for example, vote to leave the single market. and the currency uh union. You still blame I'm not be I'm I'm probably being patronizing, but I suspect the majority of the population didn't know what the single market was. You still blame David Cameron for all of that?

I do, man. I've sat David. David was a good prime minister, but I was... the one catastrophic error he had, and we had a great row about it when I read in the newspapers, despite the fact that I was in his cabinet, uh that I hadn't previously known he was proposing to do this. What did you say to him? I said to you you know b what uh went on you uh pre European than my but everything he was putting in peril about our role whole role in the world, our political influence and uh

the health of our economy. George Osborne was also against holding the referendum. How did he respond to you when you said that i the reason he called the referendum was because he's like John Major before him, he'd having such trouble with his Brexiteers on the backbenches and i in his cabinet. And it was to shut the get the sh Brexiteers to shut up.

He took the view he got an election to fight, and if he promised them a referendum after the election, they'd all shut up and they'd get in behind him. The idea we might lose, well I raised it. He laughed at. He thought it was inconceivable that we l we never get to lose. It was as absurd. He's always denied. That of course was the view of others. When when we did lose

on Brexit election night, Farage had gone to bed and and had to be woken up to be told he'd won. He said I mean Cameron has said since that he always thought he might lose that that's a mischaracterization of the He dismissed the idea of losing. And if that's the case, I mean that's a gross complacency, isn't it? Oh it turned out to be. I mean I don't think I thought we were going to lose either. But you accepted it was a risk.

Opinion polls are no way of running anything, let alone a government. I I wouldn't run a welk stool use a corny old phrase I always use. ymwneud â'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn

Do you think it will ever be reversed? Do you think we will rejoin the yeah? because it was Brexit uh uh views Euroscepticism that brought all the anger and nastiness into politics which started after the fall fall of Margaret. And a to and to try to reverse the referendum now. would I think in the present mood of anger, public protest would make that even worse. I think you could join the single market or the customs union now, because the b majority of the public realise

The the country's poorer than it otherwise would have been. It's doing great damage to our economic prospects. Are you still a conservative? I'm a somewhat discontented conservative, as I'm a mainstream conservative. For now, I'm a Conservative. I I got thrown out of the parliamentary party. Boris took the whip away from me.

Uh, but I never supported Boris anyway, so that wasn't too surprising. Well I w got on very well with him personally. He's a man very amusing, very nice chap, very intelligent chap, but I never supported him as Prime Minister. So he took the whip away from me. in the House of Lords now.

though I only take the conservative bit when I turn up there. Uh and don't always they they know if I'm listening to the debate they're in trouble and I might not vote for them. I I am still uh i i i i i if I had a vote in the general election Which you don't measure up here. With the Rushcliffe Conservative Association where I s have so many friends still. I would vote Conservative here.

What about if you were in, say, Swela Braverman's constituency or someone like that? Uh depends on whether the party had done anything extraordinary. Uh uh well yes, I but let's not get into personalities. Uh but uh I probably would vote Conservative anywhere else. But the truth isn't it looks like that's I can conceive of myself as a good old fashioned I'm an old codger, so

I could c at the moment conceivably be an Orpington man, uh to use the old phrase, and vote Liberal Democrat. But that only as a protest. I am a conservative, I'm a mainstream conservative. But in a way And Kemi I support. Do you think she's doing a good job?

Uh yes, she is in an impossible situation. Yes. Uh I would stick with Kemi. Kemi Kemi's okay. She's m more right wing than me, but she's not a nasty right winger. She's a perfectly nice pleasant woman. And people have to uns instead of the party indulging in its usual hobby of getting rid of the leader, which is why we had so many prime ministers in the last few years.

They should stick with their leader and and accept Byddwn yn unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw. That it's it's bound to be a year or two before anybody starts listening to it. So all those people suggesting that Robert Jenrick would be doing a better job. and going f what will be the take some time. the process of winning back our reputation as the most competent of the parties, and the one that's safe with the money

and can run the economy and you know, middle England can trust and rely on But there's no energy is there, Lookler. Are you c say that you're a mainstream conservative? The truth is you're actually quite a I suppose these days a bit of a fringe conservative because the centre of conservative politics has moved so much. Mia, most modern conservatives, including young MPs, are much more aligned to Nigel Farage than they are to you.

Well, that it could could be the case. Well, it's probably about time I had that. I mean our our our two party system is based on two very broad pre packed coalitions. i in a PR system, in a continental system The con the Conservative Party and the Labour Party would never have existed. Left to right in both parties is very wide. And what traditional parties involved was presenting these two pre packed coalitions to the public seeing who preferred it. Now you're quite right.

I've am a Conservative. Throughout my career I've been in the majority faction in the Conservative Party. And it may be I don't know, I don't know enough of the new MPs. It could be I'm in the minority, but Quite a lot of my perfectly reasonable, more right-wing friends have had to put up that for the entire career. And the Conservative Party hasn't dropped me off the edge yet. Uh uh on on its left hand there. What do you think Margaret Thatcher would make of the Conservative Party today?

Uh Well, I I think she'd be fairly horrified about uh the state we've got ourselves into, and uh uh she would have very strong views, as she usually did. And uh but You know, I w I was a th I was on Thatcher's front bench, Shadow Minister and Minister. uh in her cabinet of uh for a long time, uh from the beginning of her reign to the end. Mae'r prif yw'r prif yw'r prif yw'r prif yw'r prif. What has to be done to get this country back on its feet again? What is going to make things better?

And and she took no notice of opinion polls and she Berna could never get her to read a newspaper. And she just knew what in her opinion needed to be done to get the country Right. She is lionized today by the Conservative Party, many elements of the Conservative Party and and many beyond it. What do as someone who knew her, who worked for her? What does that lionization forget? What does that mean?

Cliche forgets about what I'm a great fan. I had great rows with her. Uh you I have described her in my time as a bloody difficult woman. I guess she was trying to but uh you you could have ferocious rows with her. Nothing she enjoyed more than a good political argument. And you only got into trouble uh if you didn't know your brief. Uh'cause she would have read every blasted word she'd been given about the subject she was about to argue with you on.

But if you could hold your own and you knew you were as top of the subject as she was, all the rest of it, you could win sometimes. You could change her mind. My my health reforms.

yw'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r hyn sy'n mynd i'r

But but but what she did was give us all the courage of her convictions. Government had a sense of purpose. I keep going on about the national interest, but it's it's not just a a post. The two best governments of my lifetime were the Attlee government, and the Thatcher government. You could not have two more contrasting sets of people, contrasting sets of policy. But they're both governments.

left the country in a much better state than th they finished than they had when they started. Was she a good boss, Thatcher? You enjoyed working for her? I enjoyed working for her. She was stimulating. Uh I mean th but looking back Even more so, you know. She's escaped. She could be very rude actually. L she was the boss, so she was allowed to be rude. We weren't allowed to be rude really.

Nigel Lawson used to have terrible rows with her, but Nigel was a key ally. She she went off the rails at the end. She went off people claim she would be a b a Brexiteer today. Do you think that's true? Uh D she sh she was a Eurosceptic. Her view was that sh she was saw the European Union as an economic thing. She believed I do free trade. Open free trade. She was the author of the single market. I mean she wasn't the author of it, but uh of the European leaders, it was her

It it wasn't uh coal, it wasn't Delore, it was the Continentals were quite resistant to it. There were protectionists, you know, their farmers, all this. The single market was her biggest single achievement in the Europe. The moment it started becoming a political union, she switched off.

What she wanted was a European economic union, a free trade area, which she thought would strengthen all of us in the global economy and keep us all rich. What do you think what do you think should make some of us a great um As a great fan of the Anglo American Alliance. What do you think should make of President Trump? Whether she

uh d handling people she could handle people, she could be disarming. She suddenly relaxed and say, Now come on, come on, Ken, for heaven's sake, you know the the And she how she'd have handled Trump I've no idea.

Because Keir going with just comparing her with Keir, Keir's one success, quite amazingly, is he's rather good at foreign policy. uh a subject he's n not publicly taken the faintest interest in before he became a lot of criticism for take spending too much time out of the country.

Kier is very good w amongst other things at handling Trump. He's actually very good at foreign policy. He's found a new interest late in his life. He gets a lot of criticism for spending too much time out of the country. They call him Never Hear Kia. I just guess it's a yeah, that's a lot it's most unfair. Uh th th th th th not only is the country in a frightful mess and in danger of decline. The global political scene is more dangerous than at any time since the Second World War.

Uh, we are no longer a great power. We've been declining as a power. Brexit had a lot to do with that, but it's not the only thing. uh, th that did that. But but uh insofar as we we need to keep s influence but a lot of our interests are at stake in this dangerous world. So to have a Prime Minister who's good at foreign policy and gives Britain a bigger voice than it might otherwise have

I'd I'd give him a big tick for that. Just finally, Lord Clark. I w just to go to the point of your life that you're in now. We know you go to the Lords and so on. Observer of events, indeed, after a very long political career. We're in the house that you shared you were saying before we started for thirty years with your your late wife. You live alone now, you're facing your you're in your ninth decade. Just wonder if is there anything that you've learned in recent years?

about life, about living alone, about being older. That you'd wished you'd known when you were younger now. Not my scene really. Uh I I I just wish to see out my days. living independently in familiar surroundings in my house. Whether I am managed or I'm very disabled Uh all right when I'm sitting down. I get very irritated by my disability, the aches and pains of old age, and my reaction to them is annoyance, and they do affect the quality of my life.

uh but I'm reasonably content. It's it's a strange way, which I don't think many uh of people listening or looking or watching us will be able to follow, so to wind into a sort of two based way of life with a couple of days in the House of Lords. Not many people can do that, but it's a it's a reasonable way of seeing out my time. I I look back on my life And uh m my career I was so lucky. I mean, it was just I I I did so many things. Do you ever still regret not becoming Prime Minister?

Of course. Every MP, uh everybody gets elected Parliament privately w is very ambitious and wishes to get Prime Minister. Did you ever used to think about what you'd say? Well, more my friends. I had a lot of friends who campaigned very hard for me. I drove them up the wall.

I never campaigned hard enough in the campaign. I used to take the view as surely everybody knows the candidates, they've made their minds up already. Um, which they used to say was me being lazy, but that was I just couldn't get out of I couldn't see much point in all this. And the reason which most of my friends and supporters agree with me, the real reason I never became leader, I tell myself,

was I was too pro European. And my friends did used to, several of them, press me in m more than one campaign, Make a Eurosceptic speech start sounding doubtful a and as any of'em would tell you, I always refused to do so. I w was very pro European. There was pro me my Michael Ezzeldein had the same problem.

uh th our party was pro European in those days, wasn't quite as pro European as me and Michael. And you don't regret that. You don't regret just bending a little bit. Well I I would have felt such a sense of guilt. getting up making some you know that really would have been I don't belie I think most b politicians are extremely honourable. It's the public are quite mistaken in believing they're all a band of rogues or an idiot for what they get out of it on all sides.

But if I'd ever given that speech I'd have thought, Clark, you're behaving like a scurrulous politician and you're saying things you don't believe actually and uh just for your own ambition. So perhaps I should have done. You never know.

'Cause I'd have liked to have been Prime Minister. If you were a young man, would you do it all again? Go into politics again? Oh well i I'd do it all again, yeah. And and the chances of my being so lucky in being able to fulfil my ambitions and you know, I Yeah. I I I I I spent uh uh uh twenty-five continuous years as a shadow mi minister or a minister, and under four prime ministers, beginning with Heath.

wound up having an another four years in c th the coalition cabinet of David Cameron. Now, if you told me when I graduated from university in started as a lawyer and started looking for a constituency to fight to get some experience.

That I was going to have a career like that, I I would never have imagined it. I'd have settled for two or three years as a parliamentary under secretary of state, which is what you normally get. So no I sound getting boastful, but I'm not getting boastful, but I'm getting grateful. I hope I did some good in some of my jobs, but uh I look back on my career with i intense pleasure. Lord Clark, thank you so much for inviting us into your home today. Pleasure.

The news agents. Well, the team and I have just about got our breath back after all of that. Literally, through the thick cigar smoke of the Ken Clark living room. But though our lungs

may not have enjoyed it, we all, as you could probably tell, really did. I'd say that they don't make'em like that any more, but in a weird way, The thing I kept thinking as I watched Ken Clark reclined in his armchair, a vinegar cigar in his hand, reflecting on the past, gleefully talking about our political present, with all the charm and joie de Vives at his disposal.

is how ahead of his time he might have been, not behind it. He would have been completely at home with the big political personalities of our time, the spirit of our time, sat so comfortably in the content age, exuding as he does, so much of that most precious modern political commodity. Authenticity. In a weird way, the blokey, stick-it-to-em, authentic clerk has a fair bit in common in his style with Nigel Farage and not just the smoking.

But he embodies a completely different politics. One which seems, like the man himself, to be in its twilight. One thing is for sure. Like Farage, like Johnson, Clark just loves politics and loved being in politics. he just always appears to enjoy himself, which cannot always be said for the current occupants of numbers ten and eleven Downing Street, which is perhaps a big part of their problem.

Right, we are done in Nottingham. A big thanks as ever to our production team. On the news agents, Shane Fennelly, Anna Georgievich, Michaela Walters, Arvin Badawell, Natalie Inns, Jess Williamson, and Mikey Baggs. Our executive producer is Louis Dagenhart. Our editor is Tom Hughes. It's presented by Emily Maitless, John Sopel, and me Lewis. Goodall. We will be back on Monday for that big political week ahead. Have a lovely weekend. This has been a Global Player original production.