 Mae'r iawn sydd ymlaen i, mae'n rhai cyllidol ar ystyried, Mr Andrew Marr. Dwi'n ddim ddim ddim yn ddigon i ei ddod. Dwi'n ddim ddod i'r rhaid i'r ysgolwad rogiol yw'r cyfnod ar ysgolwad. Felly, y wybodaeth ar y cyfnod yn ymddangos ar gyfer yma efallai ddweud yn ymddangos cyfnod yn gweithio, yn ddweud i'r ddweud y Prif Weinidog, yn gweithio, yn gyflwyno'r Prif Weinidog, adeithoedd Edmilyddiol yn ysgrifennu i gyd yn ymddangos iawn, yn ymddangos iawn, ac mae'n gweithio ar yr unrhyw, ac mae hyn yn gromit? You've had, you've had Boris being very Boris, a certain amount of problems in the past, a bit of trusted problems, all sorts of things going wrong in the past, but if you carry on talking like this, people will love you, and it's all going fantastically well, and you've had Vince Cable, who is naturally slightly funereal, but he's in a, mmm. Anyway, I was told we've had a series of absolutely superb speeches, and Andrew, tonight from you, at the end of me, would like something different. I will endeavour to oblige. What I've been asked to talk about is just to give a little bit of an overview. I am a very, very lucky bystander in my professional life. I have the privilege of watching politics in this country from a relatively close perspective, and thanks to various projects around the world, I've spent quite a lot of time recently in Washington, the United States and in China and so on, and so I thought what I'd do is talk a little bit about from my utterly inexpert bystanders perspective, the way everything seems to be fitting together or not just at the moment. So I thought I'd start by talking a little bit about domestic politics, where we have still, more than two years to run, of a rather uneasy and unhappy, but nonetheless secure coalition, a marriage that is holding together despite all the pressures, and we have in the Prime Minister a man, I would say, and I think it's very interesting, whose destiny is still really very much in his own hands, not entirely, but to a very large extent. That is what we know, Mervyn King was reminding us just a couple of days ago, we know that we are in a very odd, slow, difficult semi-recovery or a kind of flat come for a period in which the old rules of democratic politics, which I was brought up in, namely that politicians must go to the electorate and say vote for me and life will be better tomorrow. I will give you more stuff, everything will be easier, your children will have a better time too. That world is over. We are now in a very different political world, where politicians are going to have to find ways of coming to the electorate and saying well honestly it's tough, it's going to carry on being tough and we can't give you a lot of hope for a sort of materially richer short term future but stick with us and things will get better. We're only beginning to scratch the surface of the new language that is going to be required for that in politics. What we know from what we observe in the economy is that the private sector for all sorts of reasons has not been able, as some ministers optimistically hoped, to simply move in and take up all the slack. There is clearly a huge argument discussion going on inside government at the moment about a big new drive for growth. This is absolutely fascinating because if you are going to be funding a lot of new infrastructure spending, if that is the way things are going and the argument is being conducted very vigorously at the moment by Vince, by George, by all the rest of them, then clearly if it's going to happen two things need to happen first. One is you need to be able to find the language and the way to position this new strategy in a way which does not look like a U-turn or an apology for a past failure and so on. And secondly, and that is above all of course to protect the position of the Chancellor, and secondly you have to find ways of funding it. There is no funding going to be coming, no extra funding going to be coming through the traditional public sector channels, so you have to be able to persuade the banking sector frankly to help you to find new and innovative ways to raise funding for a major new growth push, which is what a lot of people inside the coalition government at the moment are talking about. And I don't know, but standing on the outside I begin to, I'm listening to the language, I'm listening to what David Cameron is saying and George Osborne is saying and the way they are talking about banking and the new rhetoric about we must at this point really stop bashing the bankers, it's time to start supporting the banking sector, standing behind the banking sector here and in Europe. And of course the banking sector does need political coverage, it does need political support very much at the moment. And so I begin to wonder whether there's the makings of some kind of grand bargain going on between the government wanting new investment infrastructure and growth and wanting new agreements and a new closeness and certainly a lot of people in the banking sector are talking to the government much more intensely than they've been doing for a while. So that's the first thing that David Cameron is going to have to be able to deliver. The next thing I think that he's going to have to be able to do is much, much harder, which is find a way through what is the sort of existential problem facing this government. Now you've had a very, very good taster of all of this I think today. You've had the Prime Minister focusing I think perhaps a surprising amount on Europe in his speech to you and then you've had Ed Miliband focusing on Europe as well and certainly I know all of us in the media are very crude in the way we drag a few messages from sophisticated and subtle speeches and put them on headlines. The media have taken out the sort of confrontationally different messages on Europe from Labour and from the Prime Minister as the story of the day so far. Now who knows what's going to happen during this week's incredibly difficult and intense arguments about freezing or even cutting which isn't going to happen or raising the EU budget. It is going to be a very, very difficult conversation because apart from anything else what we forget in this country is that tempers are really getting quite short in Berlin and indeed in Paris and we are going to be cut perhaps less slack than we thought we were. Meanwhile in this country we see the opinion polls becoming steadily really quite dramatically more Eurosceptic not just on the surface but deep down and so I think David Cameron's agonising problem is going to be squaring these circles. We thought that this was a problem that was going to be postponed for quite a long time possibly until after the next general election but I think looking at what's happened inside the Eurozone during the position of crisis it's harder and harder to see how that's going to be possible. The only obvious solution to the agonies of the Eurozone as seen from Angela Merkel's office and from Florence Holland's office of course as well is going to involve deepening we will understand that is going to involve the creation of a fully effective single economy with a single taxation system and above all a single pot of money at the centre and it is very, very hard to see what alternative to that there is for the Eurozone countries at the moment and at the same time it is really hard to see how this country given the public opinion position is going to be able to swallow that. Now that's why I say it's existential. We used to talk when I came into politics about it was going to be splitting the Tory party. Well not any longer because the Tory party is so overwhelmingly Eurosceptic it might splinter off at the edge with Ken Clark on the one side and almost everybody else on the other but it's hardly a kind of visceral split down the middle. So there are going to be some really, really serious questions. David Davis's proposal this morning for a series of demands to go to the British people in the plebiscite as the basis for negotiations so that the continent understood that there was the real threat of complete British withdrawal if we didn't get what we wanted is something that will catch fire I think on the conservative back benches and it's going to be very hard for Cameron to deal with. The people which says yes we are going to see higher taxes for people at the top in America and probably higher taxes than there would have been had the Republicans done a deal before the presidential election in return for some quite tough spending cuts in welfare and all sorts of other areas that the Obama administration will offer up that kind of deal is beginning to become plausible and talked about in Washington right at the moment. And interestingly of course it's not so different from the deal that's being negotiated inside our coalition here is it where we have old Vince and friends pressing very, very hard for a new wealth tax of some kind we read today. It's not going to be based on council tax bans which is narrowing all the time the range of possibilities which makes it more likely I suppose that it's going to be some kind of stamp duty whatever in return for a new series of freezes on welfare. It's the same politics in both countries which is that if you talk to people they do understand that we are hugely grotesly over borrowed and have a really, really serious problem to get rid of and rather reassuring the electorates in both countries seem to be able to put up with this. We haven't seen a great deal of rioting on the streets in America or in Britain but what clearly people want in return is to feel that people are paying their own, paying their whack, people at the top are paying their whack and in return they will put up with some freezes towards welfare spending and other traditional government programs. The same kind of negotiation in our very different systems. The Americans have a coalition between the Presidency and Congress and we've got a coalition between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, different coalitions but coming to the same sort of decisions. Both of them of course having to do this with the entirely supportive and enthusiastic help of the media in both countries. I thought it was once well put I was a newspaper columnist for a long time and I remember wincing when I read somebody saying that the job of a newspaper columnist in a modern democracy is to accept that political fighting is basically a series of wars and battles and to wait until the battle is over and then come down and bear net the wounded. That's my second favourite motto. My first one and we have another newspaper editor sitting on the front table there. My first one is from the great Mordant Witt and American journalist H.O. Menkin who said that the really crucial thing as a newspaper editor, your job was to separate the wheat from the chaff and then print the chaff. And there's a lot in that. Many of us spent a lot of time doing that. So those are some of the enormous problems faces. I wanted before I finished however to point out some of the things that are actually going rather well. This may seem odd coming from somebody employed by the BBC. But wait. Wait. There is method in my madness. It does seem to me that we have a sort of strange unacknowledged real constitution in this country which says that every major institution glides along rather smugly for a period of time and then is suddenly hit by the most appalling S storm. Total chaos, total meltdown appears to be on the edge of collapse, huge amounts of public vitriol and ridicule and then something else happens. And that's the case I would suggest you with the Royal Family back to the days of the death of Diana and all of that. I was a newspaper journalist that period very, very vividly. I was editing a newspaper at the time and it was an extraordinary period when the entire country completely lost its marbles. And I can remember people coming back in floods of tears in the centre of London looking. We all went near Pollerton. We had great public shrines and we all went a bit touchy-feely and it was very, very un-British. And the monarchy appeared to be wobbling a bit. I can remember going to Princess Diana's funeral and I was standing in the queue outside Westminster Abbey. And in front of me there were two members, I think of the, I'm not very good on the military, but I think it was probably the lifeguards in large leather boots with chains and straps and swords and scabbards and so on. And behind me there were two other chaps with large leather boots and chains and scabbards and so on holding hands. And I thought this has never happened in the history of Britain before. And it probably will never happen again. It was a very strange time. But what happened to the Royal Family? Actually they were able to learn some lessons and regroup and have never been in a stronger position. I'm suggesting they are now. The same thing has happened to the city. The same thing certainly has happened to the House of Commons where only two years ago it looked like the reputation of MPs couldn't possibly be lower. People being screamed at and shouted at in the streets. They were all being treated like, they thought like thieves. And some of them had been, of course. There was that. But actually what's happened, I would suggest, it may be unfashionable to say so, the House of Commons has rarely been in stronger shape than it is today. In terms of the way select committees work, in terms of the intelligence and the sharpness and the cutting edge of some of those young people who've come into politics, I think the House of Commons is in a fantastic shape at the moment actually. The same thing is going to happen, I would suggest, to the city as it goes through this rough, rough period depending on what legislation the government comes up with in the end. Again and again you see institutions which appear to be taken to pieces and battered. Then learning the lessons, regathering and coming forward again. I think it will happen to my institution too. By the way, making absolutely no political point at all because I have no political views. Never have, I have had. As I've said before, when you join the BBC, you have to present yourself to the director general of the day who was a pair of secateurs down in the basement in broadcasting house. He then says, can I see your organs of opinion please? And then he removes them with the secateurs, pops them into a jar of formaldehyde, on goes the top and he said, I'll give them back to you when you leave. Which was sort of an okay deal until we saw Nadine Dorris in the jungle. I have a nasty feeling that they're being fed to her. Very, very worrying thought indeed. At any rate, I do think what we have to understand when different institutions go through these moments of crisis actually partly because of a raucous and aggressive free press which can be extremely painful. I know extremely painful and stinging at times and the vigor of our national debate. Mostly our institutions do learn and do move forward again. And that is how the system in this country actually works. So I end up pretty optimistic. I think the coalition is going to go through a very, very rough time as the European debate gets ever more heated. I don't see how we're going to get through the next few years in this country without some kind of referendum. And I think at the moment the way the public opinion is positioned, older milliband with gromit at his side has a tough job there. But I do think that our institutions are in surprisingly strong form every single time I come across a big national issue. And I'm thinking about it and I'm wondering what to ask politicians on Sunday morning. The first thing in my mind is what is the mood of the public? What is public opinion looking like? What is the polling says? That says something. We saw a very, very vigorous democracy. We did a slightly more vigorous economy. That's your job, not mine. But thank you for being so attentive and I can say the one really, really popular thing of the evening which is that it's time for pudding. Thank you. Thank you.