 Helo. Can everybody hear me? Okay? Good afternoon and a very warm welcome to the chamber of the Scottish Parliament. My name is Anwar 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 varying degrees of success I have to confess. Aberthys is our festival politics. This is the ninth year of the festival. It's really encouraging to see that the events are still so well subscribed. I think it's a really good formula for people to come in and listen to debates on different subjects and inform themself and of course get to ask the questions that are important to them. I will explain in a wee file how you all can get involved in the conversation today but I think without further ado I should introduce our special guest this afternoon and that of course is the right honourable Michael Portillo, what about a round of applause? Michael Portillo 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 so I think 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 hailed from Fife and of course 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 First Class Honours history graduate and some time 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, or perhaps infamously, 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. Michael held 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 time in broadcasting included about a 15-year stint on the this week programme hosted by Andrew Neo, a quite irreverent look at politics. Of course, a co-presenter was Diane Abbott, Labour MP. Without further ado, what I will do is perhaps pose some questions to Michael and then throw open to the audience to put their questions. Perhaps the key question, Michael, on everybody's lips is, from your perspective, what is the most epic real journey that you have experienced? First of all, may I say that I'm delighted to be here. I love visiting parliaments and I do that both privately and as part of my railway journey and I've visited this parliament a number of times to film and to do other things. I am in perhaps a growing minority because I've always liked the architecture of this building. I've always thought that an institution of this quality needed to have a really important building and 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'm very thrilled to be back in here and I hope you feel excited too about being in the chamber. Perhaps you're in the chamber a lot, but I am not and I'm very pleased to be here. It's very difficult for me to say what my most epic journey has been. This is the 15th year we're filming and we have filmed on five continents and we've made hundreds of programmes. We can't even count the number of series we've made, let alone the numbers of programmes and I have just enjoyed every single one of them and every minute. This is where I normally risk great unpopularity by declaring that I don't think my programmes are about train journeys. I think they're about everything else in a way. They're about the people I meet on the way. They're about history. They're about culture. Those are the things that they're about. I must confess that to me the journey, 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's 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're 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've resisted Russia over centuries. They're an intensely Christian country and a Muslim enclave of the world. They're the most tenacious and fascinating people. Perhaps the one other I would mention is Alaska. Again, it's not about the journey as much as about the people. I suppose throughout my life trying to understand history, one of the things that I've 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're the sort of people who want to live two miles from the nearest human being and don't 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? I mean it's very interesting that you say that the train is kind of literally the vehicle. It's the embarkation point. It's 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 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's government, that he actually saved a railway line. I have to say sadly that that's not something that many people equate with politicians these days actually saving things, but hopefully we'll see perhaps more of that in the future. The railway line in question was the settle to Carlisle railway line and perhaps 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 weren't minded to save it as far as I can see. Well 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 were 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 haha 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 wanted 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 line. 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 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 and 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 so yeah we continue to celebrate that. 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 and there was already a west coast main line. But someone would know this better than I was at the midland railway operating out of St Pancras 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 as difficulty with snow in 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 honour of becoming the president of the friends of the railway line. Yes, I mean I still am. Oh you still are, well that's good to remind you of your various obligations. My presidential duties are not onerous. It's interesting because I understand that you actually insisted on commissioning your own evidence, your own research 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 civil servants and whether they take positions or 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 travelled up overnight to stay in the hotel in order to get on a train at 6am I think going from Carlisle down to Settled if I recall. So I arrive at the station at 6am, the station is thronged with members of the public 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 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 5, TV 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 scepticism is not necessarily a good thing. But I wonder in the present day whether actually a bit more scepticism 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 remarks. I read History of Cambridge and if I were asked what I learnt learning history of Cambridge I would say I learnt scepticism because the historian or at least the history student should always be asking how do we know this? This was probably written down by someone or this was filmed by someone. 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 sceptical about evidence 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 scepticism 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. Whatever it is we are going to build 40 hospitals or 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. This is not because politicians are evil in my view. The thing is that in the United Kingdom to form a government you're aiming to get about 42, 43, 44% of the vote. That's a very large chunk of the population and no two people agree let alone the 44% who voted for you. So 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 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 about who can be members and what time you can tee off. 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. 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 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. Do you reflect on that at all, Michael? 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 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 struggling every day to have credibility. 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. Then 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 and 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. When I might have become leader of the opposition, yes, but I might have won the Conservative leadership. In fact it was won by Ian Duncan Smith and after two years he was knifed in the back and he was out. So what was the question? Well yes it's just the road less travelled. Do you reflect on any bit of that that you might have wanted to remain part of? I'm just delighted with the way you put it. I seriously am, I can't believe how lucky I've been. When you're a member of the UK Parliament you do worry about what you're going to do next. If I can give you a similar, I remember once sitting at dinner next to a bank manager and I said to him, tell me about your life and he said, I used to be a spitfire pilot in the Second World War when I was 20 years old. I said, and he said, 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 what you do next. One of my friends became the president of the Cats Society. Another person who has been a member of parliament became the CEO of a company that organises hoardings, posters on street corners after being a member of parliament. I was so frightened that I wouldn't find anything to do after the excitement of being a member of parliament. I'm so lucky that I've had this career in broadcasting which I have found just as exciting. Is there anything from your time in front line politics that you still actively miss in particular matters? No. That's quite unequivocal and very refreshingly honest because of course it is. Yes, there are many challenges to being a front line politician. I think that's fair to say. Looking at the political landscape that we have now 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? Of course the challenges are just vastly multiplied on a daily basis as to how politicians get through each day. First of all to point out the obvious that I was last in politics in 2005 when this technology simply did not exist. When I ceased to be a minister in 1997, I had never sent an email. That's how much the technology has changed. So I do find it hard to imagine. 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 a secretary and I had an assistant. Now members of parliament have seven or eight in their office. They get an allowance of about 180,000 or I think 200,000 if they're based in London, sorry if their constituency is London, for which they get about seven members of staff. 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. My only opportunity really was to do something photogenic over the weekend and get in the two local newspapers. Hoping that this would lead to a photograph in the local newspaper. Now of course 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 I mean the horrors that people write on social media about members of parliament and about who are on the other side, just appalling. I mean there are two situations in life where somehow civilisation breaks down. It's like Lord of the Flies is one social media and secondly sort of road rage. I mean I don't know why a windscreen between one person and another means that they can start screaming abuse at you as a pedestrian or another motion or whatever. Social media appears to be the same. I mean people write the most vile thing. I'm not 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 programmes. And I write back politely and then the email comes back saying oh it's 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 a lot of people find it wearing. They find it wearing themselves. They find it very wearing for their families, for their spouse, for their children. Horrible. I hardly know... I was struggling to remember her name. You'll laugh at this. I hardly know Liz Truss. 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 both are just like that, two teenage girls. Well absolutely. No absolutely. One last question before I throw yourself open to the audience so to speak. When I was doing my research I wasn't surprised to note that your mother, your late mother Cora 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. Did that lead to many heated political debates at home when you put your colours to the mast of the Conservative Party? Both my parents were very much of the left. I don't mean that they were communists at all, but they were both very much of the left. My father was, as you mentioned, 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 in Spain. 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 a great deal of disorder and strikes and killing and so on. And in 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 a strong Catholic. He was a vehement 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, you know, on fascists. In fact he did his work so well that in the end he fell under suspicion. He said this fellow must be a fascist spy because who else would want to, you know, save these fascists from being shot. My mother was just a student at Oxford but she was a student of Spanish so she became very interested in what was going on in Spain. Naturally she sympathised 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 were about 4,000 children arrived on a single ship. Some of them were sent to Oxford and my mother started making a 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 mother proposed and they married. So all that is that background. Now, so I start my life with a poster of Harold Wilson on my bedroom wall. I helped to run Labour Party committee rooms in 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 how to emerge from that, the Conservative. What was my father's reaction to this? My father was interested in democratic politics. What had shattered his life was a military coup, the ending of democratic politics. Nothing would have pleased my father more himself than to have participated in democratic politics. So I think that's the context. My father was not so much crossed that I was a Conservative but I had the opportunity to participate in democratic politics. Although in many ways he wasn't a particularly fair-minded man, he had a terrific love of language, both English and Spanish. I remember in the early days, my father soon got Alzheimer's so it was quite a brief period of understanding what was going on, that I had come back from the House Commons with Hansard and I was 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. I would give these speeches by my father and he'd say, but this English is just much. This debate, this rhetoric, so he loved all that. So that's the context. And your mother? Oh yeah, my mother was very amusing. She moved from being Labour to being a Liberal Democrat, whatever that is. Of course she was an enthusiast. So I said to her, 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 when I'd go to lunch there during elections, I used to go to Sunday lunch every Sunday and I'd go there during elections, and the House was absolutely festooned in Liberal Democrat posters. The garden was filled. You know these boards they put up for sale notices and they were all the way down the garden path. You couldn't see out of the bloody windows of these Liberal Democrat posters. I had to run the gauntlet of these Liberal Democrat posters. But when I lost my seat, she was so motherly and for the rest of her life, she was used to say to me, I know you're making his railway programmes, darling, but what's your job? What do you do? Excellent. 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. We have helpers here with microphones and please keep your hand up to the microphone if I've accepted your question at that point. 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 about half past two. So who would like to... Okay, there's a gentleman there at the back. Thank you. I'll allocate two percentages. Thank you very much for your talk so far. I just was interested when you were talking about the Carlisle to Zettel line, were you never involved in the Carlisle to Hoich line? Okay, and I think what we'll do is we'll take two questions, a 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, is it live? Okay, thank you very much and for all you did in politics and your fantastic railway programmes. Two questions. You gave a woop when you were 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 I'm sort of getting confused. I think that's how we'll start. We might just go back to those questions. Michael, the first question was on the extension to Hoich. Carlisle to Hoich. No, I'm afraid it's just a no. I don't remember ever seeing an issue about that crossing my desk all those years ago. But the other one was what made me go back in 1999? A mistake. No, it was a mistake and it's the nearest I've come I think to having wasted years because I was back in the house from 1999 to 2005 and I think it was egotism in a way because I thought I would like to choose the moment when my parliamentary career comes to an end rather than being hocked out by the public. So I went back in 1999 but all the things I knew really that it would be miserable, that it would be horrible, that it would... they were all absolutely true and 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 fortunately I began to do things like this week programme which were more or less compatible with being a Member of Parliament so 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 programme in 1998 which was not part of the series that I now do it was part of a series called Great Railway Journeys which had a different presenter each week and I had done a programme in that series in 1998 which was a 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 programme that made a bit of an impact and I was lucky enough that ten 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, ah, I remember Michael Portillo made a railway journey in Spain ten years ago let's get him to do it and by the way, this is absolutely... I know there's some distance to the question now but this is absolutely amazing and of course, the Spanish Civil War determined my father's life because of the break point 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 programme of Spanish Civil War in 1998 I would not have been invited ten years later to make a 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 that the telephone rings and they say, would you like to make a railway journey in Spain and ten years later the telephone rings would you like to make 15 years of series about railway journeys because you did this ten years ago and why was I a conservative was the other question really, wasn't it? I think initially at least and this is not a complete answer but initially I came to the view that I was a conservative when I thought the Labour Party was very washed up so although I'd had a poster of Harold Wilson on my bedroom wall 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 Tony Benn was playing a very important part in it and I also felt now that I was an adult I could open my eyes and make my own decisions and I decided to be a conservative then 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 circumstances of the time were quite important Thank you, could we have our next question please? So take the lady in the third role here As someone who's got direct experience of parliament perhaps like Matthew Parris You've just switched him Sorry, switch off Do you believe that the parliamentary system we have at the moment is irredeemably broken or are we just on a cycle where it will repair itself? Michael, is it irrepreably broken? Irrepreably broken We're talking here about the UK, aren't we? I think the UK system has extraordinary strengths and virtues Some of them are too obvious to state but let me tell you some of the things that I think really matter I'm 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 and 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'll 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 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 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 will be the same conversation I'll still say Mary you can't do this this is such an amazing strength to our system 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 went into politics to make decisions the thing I loved doing was making decisions I can't believe how many people today go into 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 ask 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 I'll give you an example 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 they describe the methodology and you get to the second page and it says there are three options for ministers ABC 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 the argument and then three options ABC and now the question was what do ministers want to do because all sense of direction have been lost so I think that that is a bigger problem than a systemic issue 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 the MSPs will sit at and you have the consul 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 you vote back to back that's an awful lot of time and I remember when I was an MP during the time that Michael 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 partying that issue there to the lady there Hi my name is Kim it's nice to meet you both thank you for having me and taking my question so if you were a politician in America what party would you be on and how do you see what's happening in that country unfolding thank you Michael over to you I don't think I can give you much of 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 recent times and although Donald Trump understood and supported Brexit I'm not going to tell you that I'm a Trumpite and also 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 polarisation and that I don't think has happened here and we have had polarisation on some subjects Brexit was pretty divisive but I don't think in general we are polarised on important matters of economic policy or social policy or immigration policy or whatever it may be there's a range of views and I don't think we do have that polarisation so that's another reason why I don't think that the system is broken because we don't have that polarisation and one of the things that's happened in the United States has been the gerrymandering of congressional boundaries so that you insure 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 between one election and another and 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 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 OK, next question please Gentleman Hi Michael you seem to travel but late 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 insure they're so immaculate Interesting question 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 of 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 OK, 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 but 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 none of that here's your key Mr Portello off you go now the luggage is not huge I am a medium size suitcase takes on a 10 day shoot five jackets five trousers and ten 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 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 whose job is to drive the van and also to carry the tripod and the rest of the team well we have 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 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 we fit into a smallish van a seven or a nine-seater van 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 into a single van so quite light and I must say the productivity of television compared with years ago has risen enormously and that's not all advantageous but for example when I worked for the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Chancellor of the 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 make five programmes in ten days two and a half hours of television in ten days so racial productivity is rather good and the reason I say it's not all good is that the profession has been completely casualised so all the people I work with you know you say goodbye to them on a Friday they 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 20 she said 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 now it's you know much more difficult position it was so it's not altogether a happy industry but it is quite an efficient one OK, gentlemen there, yes? Yes My shopped and disappointed when I saw you walking in here today following the other chap's comment I had actually met my wife at Parliament and she'd come in with purple trousers and she was very jacked 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 Well 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 tie and white shirt and once the British public gave me my sabbatical I burst free like a blossoming flower and all these colours have come to the fore but it may help you to know that I am colour blind and that I dress in the dark now it's interesting you mention purple and red my basic clothing philosophy is to wear opposites actually purple and yellow are opposites I know that but purple and red are pretty good contrast so it's always a very sharp contrast it will be yellow with blue green with orange etc and well of course it's just become a talking point it's just one of the ways in which the programme gets noticed but it's interesting I used to have what I called television clothes I wouldn't dream of wearing them my private life actually that's now spilled over into my private life so I now dress like that all the time and 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 yes well cultural appropriation is it so 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 take the latter thank you the lady right at the back in the green top 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 it 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 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 Scottish referendum correct well I absolutely believe in self-determination so 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 that doesn't mean I don't have an opinion I mean I very much believe in the strength of the United Kingdom and I would like to see it endure but I perfectly accept that from time to time that's quite a big question itself that Scottish people should have the opportunity to vote on their future as any other people would as far as my passport is concerned 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 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 and 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 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 non-controversial a couple of subjects to be introduced there the lady here yes yes thank you very much I didn't used to be a fan of yours in fact I whooped as well when you lost your seat up to five in the morning I think to watch however I'll qualify that by saying I'm a great fan of yours now from number of your programmes and the one I'd like to remind you of is when you lived with a 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 programme thank you for all your remarks let me see when that was a long time ago I think about 2001 maybe something like that so for a week I moved into a house in the Wirral and there were four children there and I took over from their single mother parent Jenny for a week and I was living on £80 for the week obviously money of the day and from that I had to feed the children for the week and so on and what ages were the children the children were the eldest was 12 and they went down every two years so 12, 10, 8, 6 I think maybe the youngest was 7 I'm not sure who could bake this programme today by the way because it raises a lot of ethical issues because obviously the mother signed the approval for the children to participate and I think even the father did because the father had not all together disappeared he didn't live in the house but he hadn't disappeared I think both parents may have given an approval which is what you're required to do but 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 from time to time met up with the eldest girl since she was 12 at the time so it should now be about 30 or something maybe more and she did say to me once she said what was it all about what was it all about so I had it slightly on my conscience actually but it made an entertaining programme at the time a lot of it was entertainment for example in the very first scene we go to the supermarket for the first time with all four children and I think they'd 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 had spent £28 of my 80 for the week and 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 it was quite funny at the time but yeah it was an interesting programme to make and I'm not sure that it should be made again quite honestly next question and the gentleman at the back hi after so many years of travelling with the Bradshaws do you now miss filming with a book and also is the plan for the next 10 sorry next few years every decade moving towards currently what was the end of the question is the next plan for the next few years are you just doing every decade until we get to the currently I see no in case people aren't too familiar with this we started these series using a guide book called a Bradshaws 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 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 even the First World War stories and I must say I thought this was very helpful fantastic perspective fantastic theme to the programme secretly we used to say to ourselves if only we could get rid of the book we could make quite good programmes here and the reason was that the book was not really as good as we cracked it up to be Bradshaws guides quite honestly were written in a pretty shambolic and haphazard method so that on some places you had masses of detail and in other places 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 using a single word my Bradshaws mentions crabs I must go and investigate fishing for crabs 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 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 much signage you try and film a beautiful building it's almost impossible the coasts by contrast are pretty pristy 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 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 quite decent television yes I enjoyed your programme in America last night I only managed the one I'll watch the second one later you were in a cowboy hat shop trying on the hats oh yes did you buy one yes you're talking about Stetsons aren't you Stetsons yes yes yes yes yes I I didn't pay for it 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 you know how careful one has to be about 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 did buy a Stetson and hat buying is always a very good sequence in these programmes wherever you go you can imagine lots and lots and lots and you just cut the film like that so that one hat after another appears on your head it's always quite entertaining next question yes the lady here and then I'll take the little thank you for coming along today you mentioned that you were that it was miserable and difficult and also mentioned some of the things that you relish such as decision making so I'm just curious what about being a politician was miserable what was miserable about being a politician well I mean I'm certainly going to put it the other way around and say that most of my political career I really enjoyed but I was very lucky for most of my career I was in government and I'm not going to make any pretence to you I enjoy being government more than anything else I enjoy being in my department travelling 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 the miserable thing was having been in government being in opposition 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 I didn't care whether I was relevant or irrelevant but when I was shallow Chancellor that I did find 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 everything was going well at the time the economy was zooming along 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 tried everything but things were going well and Blair was popular and they still remembered how much they hated us and so on so it was just a very unfortunate time to try to do anything in opposition Lydia, yes yourself 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're here 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 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 there are lots of people like me who have made their way through life and very successfully have acquired fame and fortune simply by using words that's all I do I just use words and the whole television industry is full of people who just use words and they're clever but they don't produce anything they produce entertainment they produce information but 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 now 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 that you maybe do different when you were a mentioner I'm not finding the PA system too easy 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 don't know specifically but I will say this I was first to minister when I was I think I was first to minister when I was 31 or something I may have got that wrong 31 and I was last to minister when I was 43 I mentioned Tony Blair before Tony Blair was first to minister of any kind at the age of 43 because we were born in the same month at the same year so all the time when I was in government of course not prime minister 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 you can't control these things as I've 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 wish it away I very much enjoyed it but I think I would have done better a bit later so I just wondered how you found working with the civil service are you asking that from a particular perspective I used to work in Whitehall I didn't hear these you used to work in Whitehall well if you did work in Whitehall you may have a view about how I got on with civil service but my view of how I got on with civil service was I thought I got on with them very well I valued them very much and I met some outstanding people I mean even in those days of course we were frustrated 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 I was so lucky I was a special adviser to Nigel Lawson who I thought was an outstanding minister and so for example he 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 of Civil Service would have a view and it would have consequences of public spending so 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 he'd go around the entire table and then one of two things would happen he'd either say well 13 of you said this and four of you 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 because he was a minister so 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 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 want to sound too elderly but there was tremendous respect for Margaret Thatcher again we had when we were in office some pretty bad information officers in departments 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 or different is that from today but that was the respect that was held in those days so 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 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 the bad bit was a sort of day-to-day unreasonable-ness so when I went to a meeting with the Prime Minister and 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 that is unreasonable or writing speeches were her it always went all night and at about 3.30 in the morning she'd throw down her pen and say is there no one who can write a speech 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 ingratitude and 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 our changes and I said oh well actually Prime Minister I prepared some information she said oh let me see 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 a tool this won't do a tool this won't do a tool I said Prime Minister it's just the first draft 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 cos this smart alec junior minister was being humiliated in this way so 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 day that I'll just tell this anecdote actually she was challenged for the leadership by Michael Heseltine and she was infuriated about being challenged by Michael Heseltine 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 Minister 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 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 I said don't don't quit and she said but why? 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 had not even thought of this and that was extraordinary that this woman who had won 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 you lose sight of the ground I think but I mean it was an amazing experience Did anybody else provide the advice that you had did you find out subsequently that anybody else had actually provided that advice that you had Michael or Yeah there would have been some but when I delivered the advice I was alone in the room By the way the advice was probably wrong Looking back on it it probably was wrong but it was what I thought at the moment The only advice you can give is what you feel is best at the moment Do we have any Yes so I'll take the lady first and then the gentleman beside you Thanks Michael for your talk I'm the current chair I'm going to settle in Carlisle so it's very nice to see our president here and to hear that you're 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 the Conservative party led the privatisation of the railways Do you think that that has been a success? Undoubtedly Now 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 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 100 billion this was an extraordinary transformation and I remember that when I was doing the settled Kala railway the assumption was that the railways were in terminal decline and that 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 is that the private companies did really want to have passengers I mean the nationalised companies I think were fairly indifferent 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 so no-one blocked a doorway no-one had an accident they ran the schedule they loved 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 misty-eyed about nationalisation I was only minister for trains for two years and I had to visit one disaster after another I went to the Clapham Rail disaster 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 out Perley, Perley in south London I went to three railway disasters in two years I came immediately after the King's Cross fire in which terrible numbers of people were killed I had to fire the chairman and the chief executive of London Underground because their negligence contributed to 100 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 to the gentleman but I see that there's a gentleman very keen behind you who has put his hands straight up so if I may I might take this enthusiastic questioner I was just wondering which politicians you thought were the best at the present moment I could see he had obviously some particular question in mind 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 that was his answer so I will go back to the gentleman beside the lady there 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 car I was very forward looking because nowadays stations even whole lines are being opened and reopened okay let me maybe go back to the previous question I'm not sure how many names I'm 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 those few who exist they have my admiration not naming any names though I see Mr Ptillo okay and if we could have a very last question, brief question the lady back there you need the microphone 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 consensual debate but your career was actually centred around an 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 observe Scottish politics from a great distance but I have not noticed that this hemisphere has produced unanimity amongst Scots so 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 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 David Blunkett when he was my opposite number and I was doing local government and we were constantly on the phone to each other to talk about sometimes to protect ourselves are you willing to accept this debate next week in Birmingham because the BBC have told me that you're going to be there but just stuff like that just kind of working things through together so I think there's probably more of it than meets the eye but certainly I think 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 before you appear on the media they very often say to you what's your view and you say this is my view okay then we won't use you because it's not confrontational I'll give you a little example I was defence secretary and I had a lovely flat in a building called Admiralty House building called Admiralty House and after I'd left it I think John Prescott was in the flat and the BBC rang me up they said John Prescott is spending £80,000 on doing up this flat aren't you outraged I said yes I'm outraged because it needs about 150,000 because you know it's got plastic avocado bars and it's got these fire places 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 more needs to be spent on it oh yes but we won't need to hear from you Mr Portillian well that's it it doesn't make the best box office but it is something that 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 apply their trade with courtesy and with respect and certainly that's what I do try to foster when I'm in the chair 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 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 thank you Annabelle 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 yes honestly I was not forgetting so Michael has kindly agreed 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 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 5 o'clock I've been asked to say that there's a discussion on the future of Scotland's art and culture so that's a 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