 can everybody hear me? okay? good afternoon, and very warm welcome to the chamber of the Scottish Parliament. My name is Angeau Ewing, and I am a Deputy Presiding Officer of the Parliament, and my job is to try to keep the politicians in good order, which is met with various degrees of success I have to confess. Of course, that is our festival of politics. This is the 19th year of the festival and it is really encouraging to see that the events are still so well subscribed. I think it is a really good formula for people to come in and listen to debates on different subjects and inform themselves and of course get to ask the questions that are important to them. I will explain in a wee while how you all can get involved in the conversation today, but I think that without further ado I should introduce our special guest this afternoon, and that of course is the right honourable Michael Partilett. What about a round of applause? Michael is probably well known to you as a former Conservative MP, but for many of you he is likely to be as equally well known as a broadcaster and journalist, with his hugely successful Great Will We Journeys of Great Britain, a TV programme that is now, I believe, in its 14th season. I think that it would be difficult to imagine anybody who has not managed to catch some of those fabulous programmes. What may be less well known is that Michael's late mother, Cora, was a linguist and a political activist. Cora was scots and healed from fife. Michael spent many happy times visiting his family and his grandparents in Cercodi. Michael's father, Luis, was a Spanish law professor who was forced to leave Spain for exile in England after the Spanish Civil War, where he had supported the Republicans. Michael Cambridge, the first class honours history graduate and sometime conservative party researcher, fought and won the Enfield Southgate by-lection in December 1984, following the murder of the sitting MP Sir Anton Berry in the bombing of the Grand Atel in Brighton during the Conservative Party conference that year. Michael was promoted to minister and then cabinet secretary and his tenure covered a number of portfolios, including transport, chief secretary to the treasury, employment and defence. Michael famously did not survive the labour landslide in 1997 but was soon back in the House of Commons in November 1999, following a by-lection in Kensington and Chelsea after the passing of Alan Clark. Michael helped that seat at the following 2001 UK general election, but he stood down at the 2005 election. Michael has continued with his prolific broadcasting output with railway journeys in other continents attracting his attention. He has a Sunday slot on GB News and many other programmes besides. Of course, his timing broadcasting included about a 15-year stint on the This Week programme hosted by Andrew Neill, a quite irreverent look at politics. Of course, a co-presenter was Diane Abbott, Labour MP. Without further ado, I will pose some questions to Michael and then throw open to the audience to put their questions. Perhaps the key question that Michael and everybody's lips is, from your perspective, what is the most epic real journey that you have experienced? First, I am delighted to be here. I love visiting parliaments. I do that both privately and as part of my railway journey. I have visited this Parliament a number of times to film and to do other things. I am perhaps a growing minority, because I have always liked the architecture of this building. I have always thought that an institution of this quality needed to have a really important building. It was likely that it was going to be an expensive building and it was likely that it was going to overrun, but in the fullness of time it seemed to be extremely important that this institution should have a really remarkable building, which is what it is. I am very thrilled to be back in here. I hope you feel excited too about being in the chamber. Perhaps you are in the chamber a lot, but I am not. I am very pleased to be here. It is very difficult for me to say what my most epic journey has been. This is the 15th year we are filming. We have filmed on five continents. We have made hundreds of programmes. We cannot even count the number of series we have made, let alone the numbers of programmes. I have just enjoyed every single one of them and every minute. This is where I normally risk great unpopularity by declaring that I do not think my programmes are about train journeys. I think they are about everything else in a way. They are about the people I meet on the way. They are about history. They are about culture. Those are the things that they are about. I must confess that, to me, the physical journey, the train journey, is secondary. The train is a vehicle, both in the metaphorical and the literal sense. It is the way I get around. My passion is about history, but since you press me, and even an ex-politician has to have an answer, I would mention perhaps that I think Georgia was a country, the one that is south of Russia, not the American state, is a country that I absolutely recommend to you. Extraordinary people, so welcoming, so hospitable, so in love with food, so in love with wine. I think every Georgian makes wine. Even if they live in a tiny flat, there will be a plastic bucket in the shower where they are making wine. The men in particular sing wonderfully. There are tea plantations and superb mountains. They have a literature of their own. They have an alphabet of their own, a language of their own. Of course, they have resisted Russia over centuries. They are an intensely Christian country in a Muslim enclave of the world. They are the most tenacious and fascinating people. Perhaps one other I would mention is Alaska. Again, it is not about the journey as much as about the people, but I suppose throughout my life trying to understand history, one of the things I have tried to understand is the American frontier, what we used to call how the West was one. If you want to understand the people and the mentality, you go now to Alaska because Alaska is full of self-selecting people who probably come from the rest of the United States. They are the sort of people who want to live two miles from the nearest human being and do not mind living in perpetual darkness during winter months and relish their next encounter with a bear. Absolutely amazing people, but if you want to understand what it was that drove the European origin settlers to the West and to tame that country, will you find that spirit still in Alaska today? It is very interesting that you say that the train is literally the vehicle. It is the embarkation point. It is where you get off your initial destination and the stories around that. I wonder if that was in your mind at all, and this is something that the audience may not know when I was doing my research. For today, I had not realised that Michael, when he was transport minister under Margaret Thatcher, saved a railway line. I have to say sadly that that is not something that many people equate with politicians these days saving things, but hopefully we will see perhaps more of that in the future. The railway line in question was the settle to Carlisle railway line. Michael, you could recall that time as transport minister and the issues you were dealing with and how you managed to win the day over British Rail because they were not minded to save it as far as I can see. When I was asked some years after I had left politics what was my greatest achievement in politics, I said without hesitation saving the settle to Carlisle railway line, which people were rather surprised about because they think we are going to say something as it were bigger, but I did not. The circumstances were that this was in the late 1980s and British Rail was nationalised and British Rail was making big losses and there was pressure from the Conservative government to which I was a member on British Rail to reduce its losses and so British Rail said ha ha, one way we can reduce our losses is by closing the loss making settles Carlisle railway line. However, Conservatives were not only in those days interested in profit and loss accounts, they were also interested in heritage so this was a conundrum. As Conservatives we wanted to see the settled Carlisle line lose less money, we want to see British Rail lose less money, on the other hand we didn't want to close what was clearly a very important part of the national heritage. So the first thing I would say is that my predecessor is the minister David Mitchell, Andrew Mitchell's father said to me as he handed over he said the one thing you have to do in this job is to save the settled Carlisle railway so my card had been marked and the way that it happened was that there was a marvellous organisation called the Friends of the settled Carlisle railway with a capital F and these people wanted to make sure that the railway was not closed and as the possibility of closure approached they sort of organised a closing down sale they said you know you must travel on the railway before it closes so suddenly the number of people travelling zoomed up to 350,000 or something and then one of the big issues was the Ribblehead fire duct needed repair and it was budgeted at 9 million and a wonderful engineer arrived who said oh no I can do it for 3 million well you know 6 million in those days was real money so between the fare box going up and the cost of repair going down I was able to say to British Rail you haven't made the case for closure and so happy outcome and all of that was about 32 years ago I think and I still go to commemoration services because amazingly the people who campaigned at the time many of them are still alive they must have been you know youths at the time and and and so yeah we continue to celebrate that I don't a word of history is that the settled Carlisle was the last of the railway lines to be built between England and Scotland so there was already an east coast main line there's already west coast main line but the um someone would know this better than I was at the midland railway operating out of the same pancreas in those days wanted to have competition so they built this extraordinarily difficult line extraordinary difficult straight through the straight through the mountains if you can call them that of northern England and so it was a spectacular line but it was always a difficult line has difficulty with snowing the winter and so on and so on but thank goodness it has been saved so it was my greatest achievement but my goodness only because I was the man who managed to sign the bit of paper that lots of other people were involved in saving it I think you were the had the honour of becoming the president of the friends of the railway line or you still are well it's good to remind you of my president because I understand that you actually insisted on commissioning your own evidence your own research and and that's important because you know as a minister you will get lots of bits of information crossing your desk and I guess if your mind did not to interrogate that very much then you really don't get very much out of it perhaps you know all this debate we have today about you know civil servants and whether they take positions and all this sort of thing so I said I have to travel on this line but of course I must travel incognito so I think I I think I traveled up overnight stay in the hotel in order to get on a train at 6 a.m. I think going from Carlisle down to settle if I recall so I arrive at the station at 6 a.m. the station is thronged with members of the public because because there's been a leak which must have come from my department so yes I tried to do my own research in a discreet way but I wasn't helped to be towards being discreet it brings to mind a quote that I noted I read a part of your book I've got the other bits to read the history of hidden Britain I think that had been a successful channel five db series looking at history and culture and developments through the lens of abandoned empty buildings and other bits of infrastructure but I think in that book you said that for a politician to be overburdened with skepticism is not necessarily a good thing but I wonder in the present day whether actually a bit more skepticism from politicians might indeed be a good thing in terms of policy delivery I don't know if you've got any thoughts perhaps first of all I should explain my remark so I read history at Cambridge and if I were asked what I learnt learning history at Cambridge I would say I learnt skepticism because the historian or at least the history student should always be asking how do we know this you know this was probably written down by someone or this was filmed by someone who who wrote it down who filmed it what was their agenda are we sure that this is a full view of the things that happened so you're constantly being skeptical about evidence and and I do indeed think that has been a most useful thing to be in life and I certainly applied it in my politics but when I say that skepticism is not useful it is that at the end of the day you have to say 20 ridiculous things before breakfast every day and pretend to believe them you know what whatever it is we are going to build 40 hospitals or you know we we are going to stop the boats and whatever it was in my days so you have to say all these things all the time knowing that it's most unlikely that that will be achieved in each case and this is not because politicians are evil in my view see the thing is that in the united kingdom to form a government you're aiming to get about 42 43 44 percent of the vote well that's a very large chunk of the population and no two people agree let alone the 44 percent who voted for you so when you when you're governing or even when you're in opposition you are handling an immense coalition of different views and what you have to do therefore to to to form a government for example or indeed to form an opposition is you have to arrive at positions in common so you know the manifesto you sign up to is a position in common it isn't what I believe wouldn't be what you believe it's what we've decided together to say in order to be coherent and I reckon if you ran a golf club it would be much the same you've got to come together to have certain policies you know about who can be members and you know what what time you can tee off even if it's not even if the position you arrive at is very much disagreed about by some people so having agreed to say these things you go off and you say these things now you don't exactly believe them but you think it is necessary and you think it is right because otherwise your party your government your golf club isn't coherent so I don't think this is wrong and I don't think it's deceitful but it's certainly a great strain now one of the reasons I left politics is I found after a while the strain of collective responsibility was not one I wanted to continue to endure. Interesting answer it's very difficult to second guess times in one's life but I'm going to seek for you to reflect a bit if you had held your seat in 1997 what what do you imagine your life would have been would there have been time for a great railway journey tv programmes would there have been time for all the additional broadcasting activity you have carried on or perhaps there wouldn't have been but perhaps in the offering might have been being UK Conservative Prime Minister would you reflect on that at all Michael? You probably won't agree sorry you probably won't believe what I'm about to say but two moments of joy in my life were when I lost my seat at Enfield Southgate and when I failed to win the Conservative leadership in 2001 how can this possibly be the case because in 1997 when I lost my seat I knew that the Conservatives were going down to a very very heavy defeat and I thought that the Conservatives would be in opposition for 10 or 15 years which of course turned out to be true it was highly predictable and so had I won my seat I would have been expected to stand for the leadership of the Conservative party I might have won and if I had I would have had the most miserable experience possible trying to trying to govern this rump of a party which had just been defeated which was of course very much divided and above all that had no credibility because when you've just been booted out of office nobody cares what you say they know you're not going to be there for the next five years probably 10 and possibly 15 years so why should anyone listen to you so when you're a government minister you have automatic credibility because you're the government minister when you're in opposition you have no credibility and that's just about bearable if you're starting out as a youngster but it's unbearable if you've been in office for 11 years as I had been you know struggling every day to have credibility so and and it's rather similar about 2001 I was persuaded to run for the leadership I'd returned in a by-election as you've heard before I was persuaded to run for the leadership it was a poor decision in my view luckily I didn't win it and when I didn't win it I gave a whoop of pleasure why because I was not a vanilla candidate and the Conservative party it has a mad electoral system and we've seen the consequences of its mad electoral system several times since so typically the person who wins the leadership of the Conservative party has the support of a third or just over a third of the members of parliament or another way of putting it is that person lacks the support of two thirds of the parliamentary party and that's at the beginning so after that you go on losing support I mean it is a miserable situation but when I might have become um leader of the opposition a little bit yes when I might have won the Conservative leadership in fact it was won by Ian Duncan Smith and after two years you know he was knifed in the back and he was out so um what was the question um oh yes it's just the road less travelled I know I'm I'm just reflect on any bit of that that you might have wanted to remain part of our year I'm just delighted by the way you're delighted absolutely no no I seriously am I can't believe how lucky I've been um you know when you're when you're a member of the UK parliament um you do worry about what you're going to do next if I can give you a simile I remember once sitting at dinner next to a bank manager and I said to him oh you know tell me about your life he said I used to be a spitfire pilot in the second world war you know when I was 20 years old I said oh yeah and he said and the rest of my life has been so dull I felt so sorry for him but this is the problem with being in parliament it is so exciting but what happened what do you do next so you know one of my friends became the president of cats society another person who'd been a member of parliament became the um the CEO of a company that organizes hoardings posters on street corner you know after being a member of parliament and I was so frightened that you know I wouldn't find anything to do after the excitement of being a member of parliament and I'm so lucky that I've you know had the this career and broadcasting which I have found just as exciting actually is there anything from your time in front line politics that you you still actively miss in particular issue no matter no well that's quite unequivocal and very refreshingly honest because of course it is yes there are many challenges to being a frontline politician I think that's fair to say looking at the the political landscape we have now in terms of in the context of the 24 hour media cycle and the double whammy of social media could you imagine yourself playing your political trade in that context because of course the challenges are just you know vastly multiplied on a daily basis as to how politicians you know get through each day really well first of all to point out the obvious that I was last in politics in 2005 when this technology simply did not exist um when I ceased to be a minister in 1997 I had never sent an email and that's how much the technology has changed so I I do find it hard to imagine I mean on the one hand I think some of the whinging is not justified because for example when I was a member of parliament I think I had I had a secretary and I had an assistant now members of parliament have you know seven or eight in their office they get an allowance of about 180 000 or I think 200 000 if they live if they're based in London or sorry if their constituency is London for which they get you know about seven members of staff and so you know on social media someone is running their social media for them fielding all the stuff that's coming in turning it around and of course social media also offers great opportunities for members of parliament to self-publicise you know my only opportunity really was to do something photogenic over the weekend and get in the two local newspapers you know hoping that this would lead to a photograph in the local newspaper now of course you know you can you can promote yourself so social media I think presents a lot of advantages for members of parliament but what I will say is this that one of the reasons I'm glad I didn't go further is that I am quite thin skinned and and I mean the horrors that people write on social media about members of parliament and about just just appalling when that the two situations in life where somehow civilization breaks down it's like Lord of the Flies is one social media and secondly um sort of road rage I mean I don't know why a windscreen between one person means that they can start screaming abuse at you as a pedestrian another motion or whatever and social media appears to be the same I mean people write the most vile thing I'm I'm not in in social media at all but I do notice that every now and again I get a rather sort of vicious email maybe about one of my programs and I write back politely and then the email comes back saying that was so lovely of you to reply yes I just the tone has changed completely but people are absolutely irresponsible on social media and I do think there are a lot of people find it wearing they find it wearing themselves they find it very wearing for their families for their for their spouse for their children horrible I hard I hardly know in fact I could hard I was struggling for a member her name you'll laugh at this I hardly know Liz Truss um but I bumped into her at a party and she was there with her husband she was there with her two lovely teenage daughters I thought oh my goodness these two girls have been through the ringer with her and I can't remember what somebody said something about politics and they basically were just like that two teenage girls well absolutely yeah no absolutely one last question before I throw yourself open to the audience so to speak um when I was doing my research I wasn't surprised to note that your mother your late mother Kora was a political activist what I have found a bit surprising to find out was that initially her political activism fell very much on the side of the Labour party and I just wondered did that lead to many heated political debates at home when you put your colours to the master of the conservative party well both my parents were very much of the left I don't mean they were communists at all but they were both very much of the left so my um my father was as you mentioned um a very staunch supporter of the republican government in Spain the republic was declared in 1931 the monarchy was got rid of and then there was a series of general elections uh in Spain um some of which were won by right of centre parties and some of which were run by left of centre parties so the democracy was functioning reasonably well but there was there was a great deal of disorder and strikes and killing and so on and in uh July of 1936 there was a military rebellion which took a long time to be successful but it led to three years of Spanish Civil War my father was involved with the government of the republic not as an elected person that is a you might say a bureaucrat and then eventually he had to walk out of Spain literally walk out of Spain over the Pyrenees in 1939 so he was certainly at the left I'll just note that he was he was a strong Catholic he was a vehemently anti-communist and he was vehemently against the death penalty which was what he dedicated himself to he was a professor of law and so during the Spanish Civil War he asked to be given the task of writing the pleas for the commutation of death sentences which being passed under the republic um you know on fascists in fact he did his work so well that in the end he fell under suspicion they said this fellow must be a fascist spy because who else would want to you know save these fascists from being um shot um my mother was you know just a student at Oxford but she was a student of Spanish so she became very interested in what was going on in Spain you know naturally she sympathized with the with the left with the republic and then she wanted to practice her Spanish but she couldn't go to Spain because the civil war was going on and some refugee children arrived from northern Spain from the vast country and some of them were sent to Oxford there are about 4 000 children arrived on a single ship some of them were sent to Oxford and my mother started making conversation with them this was in 1937 and then my father arrived in 1939 he was a university man he gravitated towards Oxford he found out about the refugee children he went there my parents met my mother proposed and they married so that's all all that is that background now so I uh so I start my life with a poster of Harold Wilson on my bedroom wall I I helped to run Labour Party committee rooms um in you know 64 and 70 and then I go to Cambridge and I start to see the world rather differently perhaps because of the people who taught me but I emerged from that a conservative what was my father's reaction to this well my father was interested in democratic politics I mean what had shattered his life was a military coup the ending of democratic politics my nothing would have pleased my father more himself than to have participated in democratic politics so I think that's the context you know my father was not so much cross that I was a conservative as delighted that I had the opportunity to participate in democratic politics and although in many ways he wasn't a particularly fair minded man he had a terrific love of language both English and Spanish and I remember in the early days my father fairly soon got Alzheimer's so it was quite a brief period of understanding what was going on but I um I'd come back from the house commons with Hansard and I was in the in the house in the very early days with Enoch Powell and Enoch made wonderful speeches in the house commons in the most glorious English and I would give these speeches by a father and he'd say but this English is just this debate this rhetoric that's you know say he loved all that um so that's the context and your mother um oh my oh yeah well my my mother was very amusing so she she moved from being Labour to being um a Liberal Democrat whatever that is and uh of course she was an enthusiast so I said you know we used to have committee rooms for the Labour Party in our house when I was a child but it moved on that she supported the Liberal Democrats with equal passion so um when I'd go to lunch there during elections you know I used to go to Sunday lunch every Sunday and I'd go there during elections her house was absolutely festooned in Liberal Democrat posters you know the garden was filled you know these boards they put up like for sale notices and they were all the way down the garden path you you couldn't see out of the bloody windows of these Liberal Democrat posters but I had to run the gauntlet of these Liberal Democrat posters but you know when I lost my seat she was so motherly and for the rest of um her life she was used to say to me but you know I know you're making I know you're making rowy programmes darling but what's your job? What do you do? Excellent okay well listen I would now like very much to invite members of our audience today to pose their questions what I would say is if you would care to ask a question please put your hand up and we have uh helpers here with microphones and please keep your hand up to the microphone if I've accepted your question at that point so the microphone reaches you and we'll keep going until we get to the allotted time slot which I think is taking us to just have us too so who would like to okay there's a gentleman there at the back okay I am very much for your talk so far I just was interested when you were talking about the Carlisle to settle line were you never involved in the Carlisle to Heuch line okay and I think what we'll do is we'll take two questions uh the lady down here please and then Michael can deal with the two questions and then we'll go back to the audience if that's okay there's a lady right down at the front here oh was it live okay thank you very much and uh for all you did in politics and your fantastic uh railway programmes um two questions so you gave a week when you were um but booted out in 97 so what made you go back and also what made you a conservative after your because obviously that wasn't your tribal background from your family okay so um one I am sort of getting confused I think that's how we'll start we might just go back to your questions but so Michael the first question was on the extension to Heuch Carlisle to Heuch no I'm afraid it's just a no I don't remember ever seeing an issue about that crossing my desk uh all those years ago um but the other one was what made me go back in 1999 um a mistake it was no it was a mistake and it was um it's the nearest I've come I think to having wasted years because I was back in the house from 99 to 2005 and I think it was um egotism in a way because I thought you know I would like to choose the moment when my parliamentary career comes to an end rather than being hoaked out by the public um so I went back in 1999 but all the things I knew really um you know that it would be miserable that it would be horrible that it would there were all absolutely true and it was it was a miserable period of my existence but from having lost the leadership in 2001 I pretty quickly decided that I was going to leave and you know fortunately I began to do things like this week program which were more or less compatible with being a member of parliament so you know I began to set a trajectory for resuming my career in television because actually I made my first let me get the chronology of this yet right yes I made my first railway program in 1998 which was um not part of the series that I now do is part of a series called great railway journeys which had a different presenter each week and I had done a program in that series in 1998 um which is railway journey across Spain telling the story of my father's experience during the Spanish Civil War and using my uncles my late father's brothers as the witnesses and this was as you can imagine a rather emotive program and made a bit of an impact and I was lucky enough that 10 years later when a different company wanted to make a series about railways and history using a branch rules guide that someone at the BBC said I remember Michael Portillo made a railway journey in Spain 10 years ago let's get him to do it and by the way this this is absolutely I know there's some distance to the question now but this is absolutely amazing of course the Spanish Civil War determined my father's life because the breakpoint between his youth he left at about age 32 or 33 and the rest of his life which was living in England trying to live in the English language and having five children by a British woman Scottish woman but the Spanish Civil War has also determined my life because if I hadn't made that program about the Spanish Civil War in 1998 I would not have been invited 10 years later to make series about railway journeys which I've been doing for the last 15 years and I find this absolutely amazing that as you go through life you can never predict which acorn is going to fall from the tree and turn into an oak tree for you you cannot predict the chances in life you know one day the telephone rings and they say would you like to make a railway journey in Spain and 10 years later the telephone rings would you like to make 15 years of series about railway journeys because you you did this 10 years ago and why was I a conservative was the other question really wasn't it um I think um initially at least and this is not a complete answer but initially I came to the view that I was a conservative at a period when I thought the labour party was very washed up um so although I'd had a poster of Harold Wilson on my bedroom wall he let me forget the chronology right he had returned to power in 74 and I thought then the labour party was looking washed up it was very in-hop to the trade unions um it uh Tony Ben was playing a very important part in it and I also felt you know now that I was a an adult I could open my eyes and make my own decisions and um and I decided to be a conservative then and and finally enough Tony Blair who's almost exactly the same age as I am I think would give you quite a similar answer but of course his conclusion would be different but you know circumstances of the time were quite important thank you could we have our next question please so I take the lady in the third role here as someone who's got direct experience of parliament perhaps like Matthew Parris sorry switch off um do you believe that the parliamentary system we have at the moment is irredeemably broken or will it I was just on a cycle where it will repair itself is it irrepreably broken irrepreably broken we're talking here about the UK aren't we I think yes um I think the UK system has extraordinary strengths and virtues and I'm I mean some of them are too obvious to state but let me tell you some of the things that I think really matter I am really attracted by the one member one constituency system I think it produces a relationship between the Member of Parliament and the constituents which is really strong and really important and the Member of Parliament really does feel that he or she has to represent all the constituents whether they voted for him or her or not and I just want to tell you how I see that translating most days there are votes in the House of Commons and you don't see this on television you don't see how this works because the camera looks at the chamber and you see people milling around and you've no idea what they're doing but what they're doing is there's a central oblong chamber and on each side of it there are narrower oblong chambers and one is for those voting yes and the other is for those voting no and so you can enter these chambers to either side of the main chamber through various doors but you all come out but you come out through one door and they point in opposite directions and there are doors at the exit which are held in that position so that only one person can pass and you declare your name and the way you're voting and you go through it's like coming out of a sheet pen why does this matter because any Member of Parliament will know that he or she can talk to a minister at the vote so if I'm a Conservative and it's a Conservative minister I look in the long oblong lobby for the minister I want to talk to and I go up to the minister and I say Mary you cannot do this I've been in my constituency this morning and you are ruining this business or that business or you're having this terrible effect on housing in my constituency and literally something that I've been told that morning in my constituency will be communicated to the minister that evening and if I'm in the if I'm you know at the moment in the Labour party I simply stand at the narrow exit of the other party and I wait for the minister to come out and even though I'm from the opposite party the minister will listen to me and it'll be the same conversation I'll still say Mary you can't do this I heard this my this is such an amazing strength to our system and and so I can't believe that the system is broken it may be going through a bad patch but most of what I find about the problems we have is a lack of leadership and a lack of belief and you know leadership and belief I think would do a lot to resolve the situation people are so timid I I went into politics to make decisions the thing I loved doing was making decisions I can't believe how many people today going to politics determined never to make a decision either by postponing it forever or by subcontracting it to a committee or an inquiry or whatever always avoiding decision making and this will be the first time but probably not the last time that we will mention Margaret Thatcher but what was so extraordinary about her and what was so extraordinary about working for her was that she never doubted what she believed on any subject if you asked me what I believe I'll probably have to think about it for a while but with her you never had to ask so we all knew what we were doing um I'll give you an example when we when we were ministers under Margaret Thatcher civil servants give you bits of paper with decisions to be taken and it's a bit like setting out a chemistry experiment at school you know they describe the methodology they describe the background and you you get to the second page and it says there are three options for ministers a b c we assume that ministers want to do a because it is consistent with government policy the day after Margaret Thatcher left and John Major came in the same bits of paper came out you know the argument and then three options a b c and now the question was what do ministers want to do because all sense of direction have been lost so I think that is a bigger problem than a systemic issue can I I'm going to go back to the lady who I was planning to pick and I would just say before I do so that of course you're all sitting at the desk that's the MSPs will sit at and you have the console there and that is where you vote in this Parliament electronically and it takes about a minute 30 seconds as opposed to perhaps 18 minutes per division in the House of Commons and if you have six votes back to back that's an awful lot of time and I remember when I was an MP during the time that Mike was there part of the time I often wondered I heard the argument about button holding ministers but I did often wonder why can't they just do it in their own time but anyway parking that issue there to the lady there hi my name is nice to meet you both thank you for having me and taking my question as an American my heart is broken with what's going on in my country and I'm just interested to know if you were a politician in America what party would you be on and how do how do you see what's happening in in that country unfolding thank you thank you Mike over to you I don't think I can give you much for an answer really if I were an American I would be in despair about the choice and it seems simply unbelievable to me that the choice can be either a very elderly president who I think is visibly losing his powers or Donald Trump and there are things that I dislike about both of them I mean as a conservative I'm not going to tell you that I'm a keen Democrat particularly as I think the Democrats have moved a long way to the left in in recent times and although Donald Trump understood and supported Brexit I'm not going to tell you that I'm a Trumpite so and also you know we I think we're quite unwise to comment too much about the politics of other countries which we will understand very little but what I will say and it's a supplement to the last answer I gave to that gentleman is there is a tragedy I think in the United States of polarization and that I don't think has happened here and we have had polarization on some subjects you know Brexit was pretty divisive but I don't think in general we are polarized you know on important matters of economic policy or social policy or immigration policy whatever it may be there's there's a range of views and I don't think we do have that polarization so that's another reason why I don't think the British system is broken because we don't have that polarization and one of the things that's happened in the United States has been the gerrymandering of congressional boundaries so that you know you ensure that you're going to win a particular seat again and again and again again that is something that hasn't happened here so we have this enormous enormous ebon flow of between one election and another you know we are seriously imagining that a conservative government with a majority of 80 is going to lose the next election big time fantastic swing so um I think these are advantages we have over the United States at the moment but more than that I don't want to be drawn okay next question please gentleman here hi Michael you seem to travel by the light in your railway programmes was that a conscious decision at the start and how many people operate behind the scenes to take all your flamboyant clothes and ensure they're so immaculate interesting question it was it was a decision at the beginning I mean there are many absurdities in television and they are well represented in my programmes so for example I get off a train and the next thing you see is me walking up the driveway of a stately home or walking into a factory that stately home or that factory could easily be 20 miles from the railway station and no account has been given about how I got from one to the other but when we thought about the luggage okay you get on the train with the luggage then you get off the train with the luggage so now it's beginning to get in the way and then what you walk up the pathway to the stately home with the luggage you walk into the factory with your luggage you never get rid of the luggage so absolutely we decided not to have luggage and of course it's madly unrealistic you even see me checking into hotels with no luggage also not having to present my credit card when I check in you know none of that here's your key Mr Portello off you go now so now the luggage is not huge I am a medium-sized suitcase takes um on a 10 day shoot five jackets five trousers and five and 10 shirts so each programme takes two days to make half hour programme takes two days to make so two shirts the jacket and the trousers if the trousers are white obviously a spare pair of trousers because they'll get dirty um and that's in a suitcase and that's in a white van and the white van is usually driven by a 21 year old who's whose job is to drive the van and also to carry the tripod and the rest of the team well we have um the director and the camera are the same person and we have sound we have a job which we normally call producer which tends to be a woman under the age of 30 who is brilliant you know fairly recent graduate will have such control over all the stories we're covering and the route we're going and she's constantly messaging the people we're going to be talking to and rearranging things and adapting the programme that is the pivotal role and then normally two runners one who drives the van and the other who you know helps out carrying the tripod around and so on and so on and that's it so how many is that i think it's six is it um so fairly like you know we get we fit into a smallish a smallish um van um a seven or or a nine seat of am with our luggage and when i say luggage of course actually some of the equipment is quite big they're quite big cases but we fit in we fit into a single van so quite light and i must say the productivity of television compared with years ago um has risen enormously and that's not all advantageous but for example when i when i work for the chancellor the exchequer and the chancellor exchequer had to do the budget broadcast the bbc sent about 15 people to film the budget broadcast and now you know we're six of us and we we make five programmes in in 10 days two and a half hours of television in 10 days so racial productivity is is rather good and the reason i say it's not all good is that the profession is being completely casualised so all the people i work with you know you say goodbye to them on a Friday um they may or not be work may or may not be working the following week they're living absolutely hand to mouth and as one of them said to me the other day i mean my producer a woman in her in her 20 she said um you know it was all right being freelance until you know in the last few months my rent has gone up by 300 pounds a month and and now it's you know much much more difficult position than it was so it's not altogether a happy industry but it is quite an efficient one okay gentlemen uh there yes you sir yes my shot and disappointed when i saw you walking him in here today following the other chap's comment uh i'd actually bet my wife of power to come in with purple trousers in the red jacket and i wondered truly there must have been something that triggered you whether you were a young person or whatever to move into that mode and are you a fashion icon or something else Michael fashion icon um well i you have to imagine the psychiatric background all of this you see for many years i was a repressed politician i was wearing a dark blue suit and dark blue time white shirt every day and uh you know once the british public gave me my sabbatical i burst free like a blossoming flower and and all these colors have come to the fore but but it may help you to know that i'm colorblind and that i dress dress in the dark um now it's it's interesting you mention purple and red my my basic clothing philosophy is to wear opposites um actually purple and yellow are opposites i know that but purple and red are pretty pretty good contrast so it's always a very sharp contrast it will be yellow with blue green with orange etc etc etc and well of course it's just become a talking point it's just one of the ways in which the in which the programme gets noticed but it's interesting i used to i used to have what i called television clothes i wouldn't dream of using wearing them my private life but actually that's how spilled over into my private life so i now dress like that all the time and why am i not why am i not dressed like that now you may not be able to see from where you are that i'm wearing a tartan suit today as well as a tartan tie so um yes um what cultural appropriation is it so um you can either be accused of cultural appropriation or i'd prefer you to think that out of respect for being in the Scottish Parliament today i've worn tartan well i think we'll we'll take the latter thank you the lady right at the back in the green top bernistardus michael um i noticed in one of the railway programmes when you were doing spain because i'm addicted to these programmes you produced a spanish passport but made me think that in 2014 when we were going through the first referendum and the conservative party in england were all raving on that bricks it wasn't going to happen and we were going to stay in europe and not to vote yes and i believe you were one of the ones that said don't vote for independence now you with a different european passport how do you feel about it now how your thoughts changed since 2014 till now michael 2014 being the um the scottish referendum correct well um i absolutely believe in um self determination so you know if the scottish people choose to vote for independence of course i will respect that in the same way as i respect the fact that the people of the united kingdom voted for brexit um that doesn't mean i don't have an opinion i mean i i very much believe in the strength of the united kingdom and i would like to see it endure but um i perfectly accept that uh from time to time that's quite a big question itself that scottish people should have the opportunity to vote on their future as as any other people would as far as my passport is concerned um well it is true of course that because i have a spanish passport i've been less affected by brexit than many people and i do spend quite a lot of time in the european union not least because i have a home there um and also i film in the european union a lot and it would be inconvenient to me if i were restricted to 90 days out of 180 in the european union i don't think i'd often exceed that but you know i might be on the cusp of it so there's no doubt that my european union passport is an advantage to me and i use it whenever i travel to the european union so my british passport has no european stamps in it at all but there we are that's a fact of life on the other hand you might be struck by the fact that even though i have two nationalities i was very much in favour of brexit and i think one of the reasons i was was that i felt i understood two nations quite well understood them so well that i thought they had that they had no um what's the word i'm looking for that that that the shape of their politics the culture of their politics was so completely different their political assumptions so completely different that the idea of trying to govern them together seemed to me horrendous and that what it would lead to in particular would be an absolute lack of accountability and an absolute lack of democracy which is why i was in favour of leaving the european union but my reason for thinking that was not that i was a little englander rather the opposite that i felt i knew europe so well that i thought the idea of europe being governed as a whole was dangerous nonsense okay well that's a very noncontroversial couple of subjects really to do is there the lady here yes yes thank you very much um i didn't used to be a fan of yours in fact i whooped as well when you lost your seat a seat up so five in the morning i think it's a watch of it however i'll qualify that by saying i'm a great fan of yours now from number of your programs and the one i'd like to remind you of is when you you live with the family in the north of england for a week and that actually is what changed my opinion of you i was so impressed by how you helped the young boy try to give him some good social values and upbringing and i just wondered your recollection of that program um thank you for all your remarks uh let me see when that was a long time ago i would think about 2001 maybe something like that so for a week um i moved into a house in the wirral and um there were four children there and i took over from their single mother parent jenny for a week um and i was living on 80 pounds for the week obviously money of the day uh and from that i had to you know feed the children for the week and so on and um i could guess what ages were the children were the children were the eldest was 12 and they were they went down every two years you know so 12 10 8 6 i think yeah maybe the youngest was seven um i'm not sure who could bake this program today by the way because no i mean it raises a lot of ethical issues because you know obviously um the mother signed the approval for the children to participate i think even the father did because the father had not altogether disappeared he didn't live in the house but he hadn't disappeared i think both parents may have given approval which is you know what you're required to do but i don't think i mean i didn't think about it much at the time but i do now i don't think the ethical issues end there and i have um from time to time i met up with the eldest girl since um she was 12 at the time so she'd now be about 30 or something maybe more and um and she she did say to me once she said what was it all about what was it all about so i i i had it slightly on my conscience actually um but it made it made an entertaining program at the time um and it a lot of it was entertainment you know for example in the very first scene we go to the supermarket for the first time uh with all four children and i think they've been put up to it by the bbc they rushed around the supermarket seizing goods and throwing them into the basket so that by the first evening i spent 28 pounds of my of my 80 for the week and um you know things like going to buy a chicken and being recognised buying chicken and a woman saying to me what are you doing here buying a chicken you know it was it was quite funny at the time but yeah i it was an interesting program to make and i'm not sure that it should be made again quite honestly uh next question and the gentleman back hi um after so many years of traveling with the brad shores do you now miss filming with a book and also um is the plan for the next 10 sorry next few years every decade moving towards currently obviously end of the question uh is the next plan for the next few years are you just doing every every decade until we get to the currently ah i see so in case people aren't too familiar with this um we started these series using a guide book called a brad shores guide and there was one to britain which was jolly useful that was about the victorian era and after a while we found one to europe which was 1913 and so um the thing the stories that we were looking at were very much conditioned by the book so in britain we were doing mainly victorian stories and europe we were doing mainly uh even the first world war stories and i must say i thought this was very helpful fantastic perspective fantastic theme to the program um secretly we used to say to ourselves if only we could get rid of the book we could make quite good programs here that and the reason was that the book was not really as good as we cracked it up to be um brad shores guides quite honestly were written in a pretty shambolic and haphazard method so that on some places you had masses of detail and another place you had almost nothing at all and so we were trying to use things in the book to be our prompt and we got down to you know using a single word my brad shores mentions crabs ah i must go and investigate fishing for crabs or you know it was getting very tenuous indeed so actually i'm quite pleased we've got rid of the book so what we've done instead is in britain we started doing coastal railway journeys and coast was quite a nice theme and i must say britain looks at its best on its coasts in my view if you're trying to film in british towns and villages and even cities you've got so much traffic so many parked cars so many white vans so much excrescent so many so much signage you try and film a beautiful building it's almost impossible the coasts by contrast are really pristine and you can make beautiful television on the coast so i've really enjoyed moving out of the cities and going to the coast and the other thing we've done is we've done a series in britain on post war history and since i have lived through most of the post war period it seemed reasonable reasonable that i should be the guide so do i miss the book no and i'm very pleased that i think we've got on making you know quite decent television yes i enjoyed your program in america last night um i wouldn't mind the one watch the second one later you were in a cowboy hat shop trying on the hats oh yes did you buy one yes um you're talking about stetsons aren't you stetsons yes yes yes i'm i mean i didn't pay for it and i and i don't know where it is now it's not in my possession the stetson i think um you know how careful one has to be about you know things that you don't pay for so i think it's somewhere in the sort of archive of the television production company but yes i i did buy a stetson and hat buying is always a very good sequence in um in these programs you know wherever you go you can you can imagine you can try lots and lots and lots and you just cut the film like that so that one hat after another appears on your head there's always quite quite entertaining next question yes the lady here and then i'll take the thank you for coming along today you mentioned that you were that it was miserable and difficult and and also mentioned some of the things that you relish such as decision making so i'm just curious what about being a a politician was miserable what was miserable about being a politician well um i mean i'm certainly going to put it the other way around and say that most of my political career i've really enjoyed but i was very lucky for most of my career i was in government and i'm not going to make any pretense to you i enjoyed being government more than anything else i enjoyed being in my department making decisions or traveling as a minister or whatever much more than i did being in the house of commons and i enjoyed it more i'm going to be very honest with you than i enjoyed my constituency work i did i enjoyed being a minister so but the miserable thing was having been in government being in opposition um i mean for example after 2001 i wasn't in opposition because i was just a back bench member of parliament i was no longer occupying a shadow position and that was not particularly miserable because um i didn't care whether i was relevant or irrelevant but when i was shallow chancellor that i did find uh very miserable so i was shallow chancellor for a couple of years running up to the 2001 election gordon brown was chancellor of the exchequer um everything was going well at the time the economy was you know zooming along um i would say that i think largely because they had stuck to the spending levels that we'd left behind but that's kind of irrelevant but the point was we had no angle on labour at all we had no way of attacking them we we we tried everything but you know things were going well and Blair was popular and you know they still remembered how much they hated us and so on so it was just it was just a it was a very unfortunate time to try to do anything in opposition Lady, yes, here's a little bit So your your your history background seems to have been very formative in who you are today and i wondered what's your perspective on some of the rhetoric we hear today against arts and humanities at universities and some of that leaning more towards maths and data and science and technology would you see that as a loss and would you encourage young people today to still pursue you know arts humanities etc given how formative epic clearly has been on you and how you think and how you contribute to society what's your point of view it's an interesting question i think my answer is that there should be many more people who understand maths and science and many fewer people like me and i really mean that i mean i've you know there are lots of people like me who have made their way through life and very successfully have acquired fame and and fortune simply by using words that's all i do i just i just used words and you know the whole television industry is full of people who you know just use words and you know and they're clever but they don't produce anything i mean they produce entertainment they produce information but you know they don't drive the gdp they don't take us to a better world they don't end pandemics they don't get us to the moon they don't solve the green crisis so no i think my answer is definitely fewer people like me and many more people not like me very honest answer yes the person is there any sort of decisions that maybe you took that you maybe regret now that you were maybe different or so when you were a man i'm not finding the pa system too easy i heard sorry was there anything that you did whilst you were in government you took maybe key decisions that now you might take different if you were in government again i i don't know specifically but i will say this i was first a minister when i was i think i was first a minister when i was 31 or something i may have got that wrong 31 and i was last a minister when i was 43 i mentioned tony Blair before tony Blair was first a minister of any kind at the age of 43 because we're born in the same month for the same year so all the time when i was in government of course not prime minister but he was in opposition the first time he was a minister was when he was prime minister at 43 if it had been the other way around if i had first become a minister at 43 and had done it for 11 years until i was 54 i believe i would have been a much better minister than i was i think quite honestly i wasn't bad but i think i would have been better but there we are um you can't you can't control these things uh and as i already mentioned i've been very lucky to go on and do other things but i think it all came to me very early so in a general way that is what i would regret not that i could have done anything differently and not that i not that i wish it away i very much enjoyed it but i think i would have done better a bit later yes i'll do you so i just wondered how you found working with the civil service are you asking that particular perspective um i used to work in whitehall i didn't hear the used to work in whitehall used to work in whitehall well um if you did work in whitehall you you may have a view about how i got on with civil servants but my view of how i got on with civil servants was i thought i got on with them very well um i valued them very much and i met some outstanding people i mean even in those days of course we were frustrated um you know that we couldn't do more we couldn't do things faster and so on but i go back to the point i made earlier about decision making i thought the job of a minister was to make a decision and um i was so lucky i was a special advisor to Nigel Lawson who i thought was an outstanding minister and so for example i used to have these huge meetings to put together a budget and you had to have a lot of people in the room because customs and exercise would have a view and internet revenue would have a view and the treasury civil servants would have a view and it would have consequences of public spending so you know you'd have 17 people in the room and Nigel would say okay i want your view on this topic should we do this or should we not do it and you go around the entire table and then one of two things would happen he'd either say well 13 of you have said this and four of you have said the other i didn't have a strong view and i'll go with the majority or he might equally say my view was such and such 13 of you have argued against me but you have not convinced me and i'm going to stick with what i thought in the first place but thank you so much for challenging my view and i thought this was such strength such intellectual self-confidence and i decided that i would imitate him when i was a minister so you know i would i always began a meeting on time i stated what the meeting was for i made everyone participate by the way if they didn't participate they weren't invited back everyone participated we would end on time with me summing up the meeting concluding points of action who was going to take the action and where we would next meet to discuss what we had agreed upon and as far as i know that's kind of all being a minister is and it's what the civil service needs i don't know whether the civil servants in the room agreed with my decision or disagree with my decision but what they needed was a decision and then they could go forward and then they would need another decision and then they could go forward so i think some of the problems are created by by poor practice actually by poor practice and i mean there was tremendous respect i don't understand too elderly but there was tremendous respect i'm going to mention Margaret Thatcher again we had when we were in office some pretty bad information officers in departments you know people who really weren't good putting across the government point of view to the press and they were civil servants they weren't political appointees Margaret Thatcher would not allow us to change our information officers because she said it was a matter for the civil service who was to be the chief information officer not a matter for government i mean how different is that from today but that was the respect that was held in those days so i think i think quite a lot has changed but i don't think that so much has changed that you couldn't have a proper working relationship between ministers and civil servants you've touched on this already actually but i just wondered if you could talk more about what it was like working with mrs Thatcher perhaps also towards the end of her premiership um what was it like working with mrs Thatcher yeah what was it like working with mrs Thatcher and towards the end of the premiership well i've told you the good bit the good bit was having a clear sense of direction um the bad bit was her sort of um day-to-day unreasonable-ness so when i went to a meeting with a prime minister when it was Margaret Thatcher i mugged up hugely i made sure that i knew everything about the subject and then i would arrive and she would ask me something which i regarded as completely out of left field something i couldn't possibly know the answer to and then when i didn't know the answer she'd say well how can we take decisions when you don't even know the answer to that and i thought oh you know that is unreasonable or um writing speeches were her you know you it always went all night and at about 3 30 in the morning she'd throw down her pens and say is there no one who can write a speech you know you just sweated the night out trying to write it is there no one get on to the telegraph get on to the times there must be someone who could write a speak so sometimes it was there was in gratitude um sometimes it was just plain comic i was a very junior minister and i was in charge of some social security changes which were very wide ranging and were going to be brought into effect and there was a group of ministers sitting around the cabinet table Margaret Thatcher there she said now we must have some information for members of parliament so that they understand how changes and i said oh well actually prime minister i prepared some information she's oh let me see she said so she took my bits of paper and blow me she took out her red pen and she began to say oh this won't do at all this won't do at all this won't do at all i said prime minister is just the first draft let let me take it back and we ended up wrestling with this bit of paper across the cabinet table and all the more senior ministers around smirking because this this smart alec junior minister was being humiliated in this way so it was it was a very it was a very very sort of thing but i was i was with her to the end i was with her on the on the day that i'll just tell this anecdote actually um she she was challenged for the leadership by Michael hezzartine and she was infuriated about being challenged by Michael hezzartine she um she thought he was showy and she thought he was well she thought the whole thing was beneath her dignity and so she decided not to campaign she decided to go on being prime ministerial so it was a very short campaign and of course only the members of parliament in those days you voted so on the friday she was in northern ireland on the monday on the tuesday she was in paris at a global summit she did no campaigning at all and um on the tuesday the result came out she hadn't got enough votes to win she came back to london she asked each member of the cabinet to see her individually and each member of the cabinet told her that it was time to go i wasn't yet in the cabinet and i went to see her and i said um i said don't uh don't quit and she said but why you know everyone else has told me to quit why would you say any differently and i said because you haven't campaigned i said because you haven't asked a single member of parliament to vote for you you haven't passed them in the corridor or picked up the phone or written them a note and i believe that even at this late stage if you were to invite some of them into your office and get them to look you in the eye they would be carried out in tears and would still support you and what was astonishing was she gave me a look that told me that she'd not even thought of this and that that was extraordinary that this woman had won three general election campaigns with huge majorities she'd never even thought of campaigning to save her job which i suppose tells you about what 11 years of power does to you lose you lose sight of the ground i think but i mean it was a it was an amazing experience did anybody else to provide the advice that you had did you find out subsequently that anybody else had actually provided that advice that you had my go or i would yeah there would have been there would have been some but i when i delivered the advice i was alone in the room and by the way the advice was probably wrong no i mean it no looking back on it it probably was wrong but it was it was what i thought at the at the moment well so the the only advice you can give is what you feel is best at the moment uh do we have any uh yes so i'll take the lady first and then the gentleman beside it thanks michael for your talk i'm the current chair of the friends of Settle and Carlisle so it's very nice to see our president here and to hear that your very complimentary remarks about us and perhaps anyone who hasn't been to Settle station should know that the letter reprieving the line is enlarged and framed and hanging in the booking hall for you all to see the question i wanted to ask was um the conservative party led the privatisation of the railways do you think that that has been a success undoubtedly um now i think it i think it was a success interestingly it didn't happen under Margaret Thatcher i don't know whether you remember that Margaret Thatcher was not particularly in favour of privatising the railways it happened under John Major and i had worked on privatisation when i was the minister but it didn't come to anything and amongst the models that we had considered and rejected was the model that eventually was implemented which was independent operating companies operating over a single nationalised track and we had said that that could never work and that was what was implemented by the major government my work hadn't been done under the Thatcher government so i was surprised but i would just like to remind people that before privatisation there were 700 million railway journeys made a year in this country and by 2019 obviously pre-pandemic there were 1.7 billion railway journeys made each year so the number of railway journeys had more than doubled it had gone up by a billion railway journeys a year from only 700 billion this was an extraordinary transformation and i remember that you know when i was doing the settled Kala railway the assumption was that the railways were in terminal decline and that you know they'd be replaced by something else and then this enormous increase in passengers came now a lot of things happened in those years but one of the things that happened was privatisation and the reason why i think that may have been contributory was that the private companies did really want to have passengers uh i mean the nationalised companies i think were fairly different to whether they had passengers or not but the private companies did go for that and the business of a railway is that again until the pandemic you filled your trains twice a day in the morning and the evening but then the art was how you got people to use the trains the rest of the day that's where the profit was and what i think the private companies did with much more imagination was to fill the trains outside the rush hours all of this is now ancient history because the rush hour is now more or less disappeared after covid and also because i think now the private companies are where british rail used to be which is that they don't care anymore whether they have any passengers or not and this happened during covid i mean they loved covid because they ran the trains all the time there were no passengers on them so no one no one blocked a doorway no one had an accident you know they they they ran the schedule they love not having passengers and unfortunately that's where the private companies have now got to so i don't say that we shouldn't reform from where we were but i'm certainly not um misty eyed about nationalisation i i was only minister for trains for two years and i had to visit one disaster after another i went to the cappam rail disaster where 32 people were killed i went to a disaster in mill guy we're about four people were killed i went to a disaster just outs pearly pearly in south london i went to three railway disasters in two years i came immediately after the king's cross fire in which you know terrible numbers of people were killed i had to fire the chairman and the chief executive of london underground because their negligence had contributed to hundreds of well it wasn't 110 scores i don't remember how many people died in the king's cross fire so i'm in no way misty eyed about nationalisation and we've now gone through a fantastic period of not having disasters on our railways so before people decide that the answer is to go back to nationalisation i think they should actually remember what things are like and i'm going to take one last question in terms of time and i think i had said the gentleman but i see that there's a gentleman very keen behind you his foot is on straight up so if i may i might take this enthusiastic questioner i was just wondering who which politicians you thought were the best at the present moment i could see he had obviously some particular question i didn't know the question i can't think of any and that might give us an opportunity that might give us an opportunity to have another question what do you think well he that was his answer so i will go back to the gentleman who had beside the lady there yes i was going to ask exactly the same question as the lady sitting next to me about railways but i will say that saving the set of the colour was very forward looking because nowadays stations even hall lines are being opened and reopened let me let me maybe go back to the previous question i'm not sure how many names are going to mention but the people i admire in politics are the people who believe something and are prepared to say it and are prepared to give some leadership and it strikes me that there aren't very many in that category but you know those few who exist they have my admiration not naming any names though i see no okay and if we could have a very last question brief question the lady back there yes yourself you need the microphone yeah thank you very much for coming up today to speak to us so you are sitting currently in the middle of what is a horseshoe shaped debating chamber which is i think designed to promote sort of consensual debate but your career was actually centred around a oppositional designed debating chamber as an ordinary member of the public it does feel like politicians spend most of their time in disagreement very publicly quite often and it can be very tiresome for us to listen to do you feel that there should be more co-operation in political debate michael yes i do by the way i observed Scottish politics from a great distance but i have not noticed that this hemisphere has produced unanimity amongst scots so i'm not i'm not sure that the shape is quite as important as it seems but no it is tiresome that one person says black and the other person says white or perhaps one should say scarlet and purple or whatever no that is tedious and actually a lot of it isn't like that i mean i remember you know periods of substantial co-operation between the parties and i very much doubt whether that is dead it's just not something that for some reason they like to advertise very much i mean for example i had a wonderful relationship with with david blanket when he was my opposite number and i was doing local government and we were constantly on the phone to each other to you know to talk about well sometimes to protect ourselves you know are you willing to accept this debate next week in burmian because the bbc have told me that you're going to be there and you know so but just stuff like that just kind of working things through together um so i think it's probably more of it than meets the eye but certainly i think um more co-operation would be beneficial i think a lot of it is maybe a bad place to end but i think a lot of it is not so much to do with the shape of the chamber as the nature of our media i remember time and again going on with people and thinking i'm going to agree with extra i'm going to agree with why and somehow being set up to disagree set up to have opposite points of view and you know of course that you know before you appear on the media they very often say to you what's your view and you say this my view oh well would it no um okay then we won't use you because it's not confrontational i'll give i'll give you a little example i was defense secretary and i had a i had a lovely flat in a building called amherty house building called amherty house and after i'd left it so um i think john prescott was in the flat and the bbc rang me up and they said john prescott is spending 80 000 pounds on doing out this flat aren't you outraged i said yes i'm outraged because it needs about 150 000 spending on it because you know it's it's got plastic avocado bars and it's got it's got these fireplaces with a bulb and a fan that goes around and this is an historic building and what we've done to it is a disgrace and much more needs to be spent on it oh yes but we won't need to hear from you mr portillo well that's it it doesn't speak the the base box office but it is something that i think all politicians should remember that we are there politicians are there to represent the constituents before views but to listen to other views and to to apply their trade with courtesy and with respect and certainly that's what i do try to foster when i'm in the chair in the chamber and as i said at the outset mostly with success but sadly not on every single occasion but i'm afraid that we have now come to the end of our discussion and i would like to thank all of you for for coming along and for posing such interesting questions i would like to thank our bsl interpreters as well and i would like to pay a special thanks to michael portillo for engaging with such good humour in what has been a very wide ranging fascinating discussion and i thank you very much indeed michael for giving up your time today thank you it's probably out of order for me to speak but i mean i thank you anabelle very much indeed for sharing the session all of you are coming and just to mention that i'm signing books can you tell them where i'm signing books yes i was i was i was i was not forgetting um so michael was kindly agreed to to sign his most recent book i believe and that will take place downstairs back in the garden lobby where there's all the nice coffee and cake available and also other features including the signing of the book by michael and there will be an opportunity to buy the book as well which is something that i'm sure you'd all like to take up the possibility of and that the various members of staff here today will assist you in getting from a to b and i would just lastly like to take this opportunity to remind everybody that the festival of politics continues for the rest of today and for tomorrow and for example later on today at five o'clock i've been asked to say that there's a discussion on the future of scotland's art and culture so that sounds very interesting panel and then also tomorrow there will be further discussions on a number of issues including ai i believe migration on scotland's music venues and many other issues so i hope that you might have a look at the programme to see if there's something that might attract you to events later today or tomorrow and lastly i would just say thank you very much for coming along and have a very enjoyable rest of your day out in Edinburgh thank you