 Fy hwnnw, gyda'r ffordd Ileon Macintosh. Ileon Macintosh, яw rwy'n dwych chi i chi i chi'n freonau diwrnod ysgolau. Felly mae'n rwy'n dweud o hyd cerddegau aethwr teimlo a mondi'r newid. Wnaen nhw'n cyhoedd yr gennig o'r gennymau'n ateb yn gwelyddio i d underlyingon ac yn ysgrifennu i'w yr ynwyr teulu i'r rwynt iawn. Daid yn dwych i ddwy i ddim i ddim yn dweud i ddweud i chi i chi i chi wedi gweithio i cyllid The guest Ken Clark, who is in a chat about his autobiography. Before we even start though, I'll just remind you that this is an audience participation event, so I hope you'll be sharpening your minds and thinking of some questions for Ken to throw to Ken. Before we even get to that stage, if you're good on social media, can you use the hashtag Festival of Politics 2017, that's FOP 2017, 10, 11, 13, 11, 11, 12 15%, 48, 16, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 30 35, 40, 40, 40. Felly, ac mae'n gwaith o'r blannodau dyma, mae'n gwaith a'r tŷwch Ioedd am yma yw'r tyn ni. Mae'n gwybodaeth i ni'n oal yn ymweld Felly, ni'n gwybodaeth i ni'n gwybodaeth i ni'n gwybodaeth i neud Mathewn yn ei fawr i'r tŷ tydd dyf Standyear werden aud warepGs is longevity", doedd hwniodw? Gwlybnym yn llengen, felly holl �ieves it has now become father of the house. Warren in Nottingham in Naughton hints that mail at the tender age of 5 was to be cream a politician, he attended nottingham high school, went on to in Kees College, Cambridge. He held the position of president of the Cambridge union and he was called to the bar in 1963 and became a QC in 1980. At university, Ken joined the Conservative party and his interest in politics gained momentum. After contesting the Mansfield seat in 64 and 66 general elections, he was elected to the House of Commons in 1970, winning the rush cliff seat. In his long career, Ken has held various ministerial appointments serving at the heart of government under three prime ministers. He has been chancellor, home secretary, lord chancellor, justice secretary, education secretary, health secretary and, laterally, minister without portfolio. As well as politics, Ken has a keen interest in jazz, Formula One racing, he enjoys cricket, birdwatching, romanesque church architecture and, of course, football, supporting both Notts County and Notts Forest. I understand that he is also fond of real ale, malbec wine and cigars. Author of his new autobiography, Kind of Blue, I am delighted to introduce you to the right honourable, Ken Clark. I am going to—this is two kens talking to each other in Edinburgh—it's a jaken ken ken. We're going to go through, hopefully, part of your career and your political interests and so on over the years, but do you mind if I just start with the most topical question, and the question or the issue that's dominated perhaps your political life in that of Europe and Brexit? I can just ask, does it make you sad or does it make you mad? Oh, both really. It's going to be one of the ironies of my career. The first Parliament I was in was one when Britain joined the European community. I was actually a whip in the Heath Government, helping to get the majority for the European Communities Act when we joined it, and when I started in politics, I became an active, decided that the Conservative Party was the party that was going to have the privilege of having me, and I finally made my mind up, and I joined because I was supporting, and like the other things, Macmillan's first bid to get Britain into Europe, so it's an irony that I look like being, you know, my last Parliament looks like being the one in which we leave the European Union, and I've been a supporter of the European project all through my life. I don't regret it. I think if I wish to cheer myself up, I just think, well, at least I was there when we enjoyed the benefits of it. We were a complete joke when we joined. I think I was very influenced by Sue's and that kind of nonsense, and the fact that we were becoming a bit of an economic laughing stock, being left behind by the countries we'd beaten in the war and so on. So, my to my generation, the European project, internationalism was all very key, and I think it's on the strength of the last 40 odd years. We built up our status in the world. We have influence, if we have influence at all in the world as a small country, largely because we're one of the vaccineers, one of the leading influential members of the European Union, and we base most of our relationships with the world on being in the European Union, and particularly once the Thatcher Government led the way to creation of the single market and moved on from just the common market and the customs union, that's how we've got a modern competitive successful economy in the modern world. So, I get sad, bewildered, angry. I mean, it probably makes me in the opinion of some of my colleagues, and that type cast me. I am of that generation of Conservatives, along with Hezzo and a few other well-known people, John Major and so on. This was the basis of the Conservative Party. I now speak out as a distinct, I'm not a minority, but amongst those who say anything, I'm more outspoken, pro-European now than anybody else, but I get on with the whips anyway, and they don't fool themselves, they're going to change my immediate also. But if I had to explain it, I'd say, well, all I'm espousing is the politics of the Conservative Party for the last 50 years. This is pure orthodoxy, the position I have now. Everybody else seems to have changed 18 months ago because of an opinion poll. I haven't, but it is. I've never seen a bigger mess, actually, because nobody knew what leave meant. So, you say it was limited before getting over a biography, you set me off. I mean, it starts for getting bored in my last parliament. I don't have those moments where I think, oh, being here, done this, what am I still doing this for, Clark? Why couldn't you find something different to do? This is just crazy. I have no idea. Nobody else has what's going to happen between now and Christmas, but my fundamental views remain the same. It is a sadness that I see all this going on, mad debate at the moment going on, with no idea what the next phase is going to be, what's going to follow it, what Britain's role is going to be in the world, and how we are going to, you know, meld in to the 21st century and the globalised economy and so on is all to play for. I suspect we'll be coming back to that subject. Absolutely. It's quite persistent at the moment, and half the public have got bored with it already because they only voted leave or remain, and rather, last minute, the sort of reasons, and no one ever talked about what the politicians are now all arguing about. None of this was mentioned by either side in the national media. The leading figures, the most serious arguments presented in the national media are either in favour of remaining or of leaving. All the silly ones were the only ones that got presented. So this is totally new. A lot of the less political public, the ones who haven't got much time for politics because they're too busy doing other things, you know, I think are already getting bored silly by this diet of Brexit. I think they will buy newspapers, so they're going to have to put up with it for a few years yet, but it isn't going to be a worrying state. So just to, if I may, to return to your early years and just life in Nottingham, can I ask first of all, by the way, how can you support Notts County and Notts Forest? I don't know what to do. I think I told you that I go to both of them when I'm around. I don't support both. I go to both because I started going with my granddad when I was tiny, you know, tiny, I was in short trousers anyway, and one week Notts County, next week Nottingham Forest. In fact, when asked then when I was very small, I also said I was a supporter of Nottingham Forest. Now, why I chose Nottingham Forest rather than Notts County, I'm not sure because I think it was because it had a funny name, sounded a bit like Crew Alexander, you know, or something like this, and also because Notts County then was the bigger, they both had enormous crowds, this is post war, so they had enormous crowds, but the Notts County was a slightly more fashionable and in one because we got some aging famous players like Tommy Lawton and Jackie Sewell paying for them and so on. So, the slight underdogs, with the funny name, were the ones I allied myself with. So, if I'm asked which I support now, even when I'm in Meadow Lane, which is the ground of Notts County, I tend to admit that I'm a forest man really. So now you came from a fairly working class family but your politics were probably shaped at university. You went to Cambridge and in fact you're famously part of what was called the Cambridge Mafia. It was the brief phase of meritocracy in this country. Had you say, I came from a very first ten years in an obscure pit village in Derbyshire and it came from a completely non-political background, although I did have a communist grandfather who had been a shop steward at the rally cycle factory and all this kind of thing. But I was keen on parties so I just followed it. But it was one of the first 11 plus days and there was a whole wave of people coming through and a party 11 plus got sent to the local independent school, which wouldn't happen now, that was given up even then by the Labour Party almost immediately, but it was an academic sweatshop and so now I went up at Cambridge and there was a whole lot of us there who had all swept in and we're all interested in politics. It was a very political time and probably a few times that the majority of the really politically active people all became conservative and we all became rather seriously obsessively conservative. That's been something funny in the water or something because six of us wound up in conservative cabinets at one time or another and because of the sudden wave of these young, we were all men coming out of Cambridge, we acquired this nickname of the Cambridge mafia which stuck to us. We've got people like Norman Fowler, Leon Britton, John Gummer, Norman LeMont and there was a whole lot of us and we were, first of all, all these guys are all friends of mine. I met all these guys because we were all active conservative students at Cambridge. The one name, of course, that was also there is Vince Cable. Vince was a year or two behind me. I always tease when I was President of the Union. What ever happened to him, by the way? He went off for years and years, he managed. He was only the Conservatives who became professional politicians. All the Labour guys went off to be academics and absolutely none of them followed us in the House of Commons, one, two, three, we never got there. Vince went off into the oil business, I think. Years later, Vince turns up, he'd been active in the Labour Party, social democrats, Gormith Jenkins, run up to the Liberals. He would come to the local school. And then suddenly he does up again. I tease him and I can remember. He was a very good speaker at university. When I was President, I gave him his first paper speech in the Union that the President had to select which undergraduates were going to join with our visitors to open the debate. It was your great moment if you wanted to get elected in the Union. You were invited to make a paper speech. It wasn't a paper speech. It was wise it wasn't. But you opened the debate. Vince was a very good debateer. I was the first one to offer him a paper speech, which I think he agrees. So Vince suddenly broke our record saying that 100% Conservatives have come out of the cabbage of the early 60s when he was joined eventually by a Liberal Democrat. But he's still left to me. But he doesn't disagree that much with me. He and I, when in opposition, we were there too. I think we were regards a couple of old stages carrying on about the economic politics of Gordon Brown. We were quite allied there. Vince would not like to be called an old stager. He thinks he's going to be a Prime Minister next, isn't he? Well, yes. He said so at the last minute. Well, as I haven't a clue what I was going to have to pass, I've never known politics in such turmoil. You never know. You never know. So if I may just fast forward slightly to the Thatcher government, because that was when you really had your break into... That was the making of you, as it were, as a Cabinet Minister. Would that be fair? Yes. I'd been in the Heath government. I was in the Whips office with Heath. But the Thatcher government, I served all the way through. I was one of the last survivors of the Long March because I was combining it with being a lawyer. I was a barrister. Everybody had outside jobs if you could get one in those days. The only people on the Conservative side who didn't have an outside job and they're living doing something else had rolling acres and were aristocrats and younger sons at least. So most everybody else went out of their living and I was a barrister. I put mothballs in my robes in 1979 when she finally rang me up and offered me a job. I'd been a shadow minister before that under her leadership and thought, well, three or four years and I'll be back at the bar because that's about the political life expectation of the average politician to point to minister. And 18 years later, having much reshuffle career, it was too late to get back to the bar. But I had never imagined I'd have an 18 year slab in office and it was first with her all the way through. And I think the only two people left the end who'd been in from the start all the way to the finish who were Malcolm Rifkin to me because we'd been junior ministers when it started and we was still there when the major government finally collapsed. But yeah, and it's quite an experience working with Margaret. I always say it was great fun if you could stand the hassle, which I always could. But yes, with Margaret. You would be described as a wett in those terms. The party, the Conservative party has always gone in for civil war, you know. Sometimes at a minor level, sometimes at a raging level and the Labour party has always done the same thing usually on their side with more violence and on ours. But that's because our parties are such broad coalitions because of the first pass the post system. It's all breaking down. It's not working now. But you have this great range of opinions. You sort of compromise the side of the government, present a pre-packed coalition to the country. They're both very, very wide. There wouldn't be single parties in any other European democracy. Tony Blair and George Galloway were in the same party for 20 years, for help and sake. I mean, impossible. But I mean, in those days it wasn't an argument of legality, wets and dries. And I'm economic liberal, social liberal. I was in the Acolyte of Geoffrey Howe. I was just as, I'm just as much a free marketeer as the dries. But very much a social liberal, certainly compared with Margaret. And she always regarded me wet. And I always said I was wet when I was asked, which was very reckless on me. But it slightly distracted things. But she never quite trusted me. I think my friends had to persuade her to appoint me to various jobs, I think, at various stages. Because I was always told that she would say to the people she was combined with, is he one of us? And she was never quite sure that I was one of us. And if you met Vim and Thacherites, no, I was not one of us. He was quite right. But yeah, that was the background. And I had lots of rouse with her. But she loved political rouse. And if you, as long as you held your own, she usually didn't mind. And I enjoyed working in it. But it could be quite a hassle at times. It was clearly a time of political turmoil itself. I mean, one of the biggest events, for example, would be... It was the best Government I ever worked for. She was the best Prime Minister I ever worked for. And it was the best Government I ever was in. And the best Government since the war, the possible exception of the Attlee Government, I would say. That's my view. Now, that all sets people off. Because Margaret was nothing, if not divisive, aroused great emotions. And the mythology that surrounds the Thatcher Government is quite comic, really. Both of the right, the ones who think she was a kind of goddess figure who walked on water and attributed to her all kinds of ultra-right-wing opinions, not all of which she held. She was never a very hardline Euro-skeptig in office. Never crossed her mind to leave the European Union. And on the left, you know, she had children, and she closed down our great industrial working class society. And if it wasn't for her, the Lassards would still be in their clogs, rattling over the cobbles on weights of mill. And she deliberately set violent police upon them all. So the whole thing was, actually, it was a very can-do Government. It was free market economics with a social conscience. And it was, to use a jargon word, it was the structural reform of a failing out-of-date economy, which had to be done. And she gave us the courage of our convictions. People like Geoffrey Howell all the way down to me. We were free marketeers. We deeply deplored this stagnant post-war thing which had built up vast numbers of nationalised industries, all losing money or being propped up, all uncompetitive, and everybody resisting change. And it was hard work. It was very controversial, all the changes. But we did produce modern, more free market based, more competitive economy, and we altered the labour laws and everything else and liberalised, made our labour laws more flexible. And the country, which was very demoralised when we took over after the winter of discontent and all this, I think restored a great deal of national self-confidence and everything else. We were much clearer about our role in the world after a few years of Margaret. And so here I am now making a part of a little speech on behalf of the Dutch Government. But it was exciting to be in it. And she moved me around quite a bit in it. But from getting to Edmund, she was never quite sure about where I fitted in, but she gave me some extremely good jobs. And I became increasingly notorious as I got into my more controversial one. So I emerged as a public figure. We didn't have all these PR people then. There was none of its messiest discipline in the Sarniff. If you were in a difficult turn, which is why the politicians are also unpopular now, because they take too much notice of lightweight public relations men, in my opinion, you went out there and you argued your case. And several of the jobs I did, I spent my life going out there arguing the case, sometimes competing to be the most unpopular man in the country. But making a case for change, why we were doing, why it had to be done, in a Government that was changing a lot, in my biased opinion, very successfully, and they would have ever attempted to reverse it. Well, I think we'll come back to a few of these points. I'm quite pleased you've made them, because I actually suspect that I've sparked a number of questions including free market with a social conscience. I suspect that many people would raise an eyebrow at that. Well, it's a phrase I've always used. Do you have it? Mrs Like yourself said there's no such thing as society. How can you ever say such a thing? Yeah, that's been totally, it's one phrase, it was a silly phrase, of course it's not true, there is such a thing as society. I think she was in the middle of an interview arguing about a society of bloc and she was saying, well actually society is composed of lots of individuals. I mean it's a silly remark taken literally, but I say the mythology of Mrs Thatcher that somehow she was a heartless right-wing sort of ideologue or rubbish. As is the right-wing equivalent that she was from Boda Siar figure who was fighting foreigners and putting down resisting revolution and ultra libertarian and all that, she wasn't any of that stuff. She was right of sense, she was much more right-wing than me. She was on the right-wing edge of the party and she was impulsive, but I think free-market economics with a social conscience is the description which somebody like me, a right-of-centre person, would give and nowadays it's what's collapsing now. I have to admit I'm probably part of the political establishment of the 1990s in the end. Economic Liberals, Social Liberals, Internationalist, Blairite, CUM1, Nation Conservative and we all got complacent. That was the politics of the western world most of the last 20 years and at the moment large sections of the public got fed up with it. It's not worked and it's all collapsing and angry, populist, hard right, hard left politics is sweeping it all away in most of the democracies of the western world including if we're not careful the United Kingdom. Again, we'll probably return to some of these before we do and I want to open it up so please can you just read your hand and catch my eye in between questions and I'll try and bring in to ask a question. Just to ask, just to ask perhaps to cast Mrs Thatcher more sympathetic like, a remark you made recently you suggested that you thought that she was suffering from dementia in her later years. Well that was when I was being asked about her fall which is said out of the book and I think obviously was involved in that bit. She'd lost the plot. She ten years is the maximum permitted dose for adults is the Clark theory of leading a country or a political party and after that either Huwbry saw losing your judgment takes over and she had lost her judgment. She was flying by the seat of her pants trying to do everything herself when she shouldn't have done and as an after I just was a passing remark said looking back because she was comparing her last year or two in office with the commanding figure she'd been five years ago, the much more collective figure. I mean who knows some of the early stages of dementia may be coming. Again in this mad age that was the only newsworthy thing I said. If you look at this morning's newspapers which I've only done one or two most of the quotes of politicians are half a sentence half a phrase from the middle of a sentence spun out of all proportion and given a meaning it never intended. I think it is possible she was suffering but I don't know it wasn't meant to be a profound thought who knows if she was because she became sadly she suffered very badly from dementia quite quickly after she lost office so perhaps what I describe as losing her judgment it perhaps was the beginning the onset of the symptoms. If I may I'm just going to bring in a few members of the audience just to ask some questions here gentlemen yes sitting on the edge there yes yes if actually if you could stand up just simply because it actually helps we're on facebook live and it helps the cameras find you so I'm right okay jump to use the mic oh it's on. Yeah do just speak like that we'll pick you up. Mr Clark back in 2005 a Conservative MP who's now a member of Mrs May's cabinet told me who was supporting David Cameron for the leadership told me that you were the candidate that most non-conservative voters would probably support hence why he was supporting David Cameron so with that in mind I would be interested to know how you feel your own party the Conservative party um how its history would have evolved had you been leader in one of your um attempts to lead the party I know how it would have evolved had I been leader yes you stood three times Ken so yeah right I will say it's the only bad habit I've ever given up is standing for the leadership of the Conservative party oh who knows you know the other thing because I thought one of these interviews often put to me you know I belong to that club of the best prime minister we never had you know with Dennis Healy and Roy Jenkins and all that and and I always say it's a great club to belong to because nobody ever had the chance of discovering how awful you were when you actually took over I have no idea um the the the the one that I should have won really uh I was the first to I was the media favourite to I expected to win uh the first one uh had I won in 1997 that would have been a disaster because nobody was going to beat Tony Blair in 2001 and it but it was a bad mistake for William Hague to beat me um because uh he would have taken over from me when I resigned in 2001 and the one the one to win was the 2005 election had it was the one after that that had I won that and I'd think I possibly could have could have been prime minister because Tony Blair was walking on water he was the the Kennedy figure of written when he was first elected uh well after 2001 this was wearing off and particularly because of the warfare with Gordon Brown uh it was all beginning to collapse now had I won in 2001 uh and had I persuaded the conservative party which I think I would have done actually to oppose the invasion of Iraq then I think we could well have beaten him in 2005 uh I I think that was all quite possible uh and said of which instead of being a fight between me and Portillo in 2001 Portillo failed to turn up he got beaten just to the post by Ian Duncan Smith and then the the conservative party was going to have to choose between Portillo and me we were the obvious candidates but the conservative party membership who'd been brought into the election by this stage we always change our system every now and again there were quite a lot of them that didn't want to vote for anybody named Portillo or Clark we'd both become quite controversial figures they never heard of this chap called Duncan Smith so they all voted for him uh and that was that was the best chance when Ian beat me in the runoff that was the best chance when I might have won what I where things would have been in 2005 I don't know uh they'd only given up the Labour Party they'd only given up my economic policy a few years before because for the first three years they stuck to my figures and all this stuff it might have been possible in 2005 to have averted the crash I think it probably would have been and people were going on extremely recklessly it'd been quite unpopular people like free money and everybody getting richer all the time and you know getting more and more excited that it's uh and people like me and Vince Cable were dismissed as people you know boring old so-and-so's who didn't understand the new paradigm when we criticised what was going on but again might possibly have pulled it together on the other hand that I said the start of his long answer I might have might have made a complete haulix of the whole thing and the 2008 crash might have finished me off you know completely and shortened my career to the leavers and brexitiers are silly people so I just want to oh sorry in light of that just start again I'm sorry I'm training around to hear you I've got a stiff neck you know. Earlier you referred to the leavers and brexitiers as silly people and I just wondered in light of that comment do you think Theresa May was wise to put Liam Fox, David Davis and Boris in charge of EU negotiations? I don't think I refer to all leavers as silly people that whatever I do that there is a silly element there's a silly element on the remain one as well uh but I do sometimes refer to the hardline fanatic you're a skeptic to whom it has for whom the cause has a religious quality which I just don't quite understand I'm afraid I do rather rudely refer to them as the headbangers and they are making a lot of the the the pace and noise at the moment but uh I thought it was a good idea when Theresa took over this impossible situation because I think it was a reckless irresponsible decision to to to uh call a referendum in the first place I never thought I don't think a referendum was a sensible way of running a country in the modern world particularly with such an enormous complex question with hundreds of some questions so she takes over when both sides are absolutely amazed to discover that lay leave has won and it it was quite good party management tactics to to to put the foreign affairs things in the hands of the now victorious leave side but it has made it extremely difficult to get the cabinet a cabinet which is actually able to agree on any substantive issue about where we're now going and what leave means because the one thing that was never raised in the referendum was what exactly do you mean by leave because I've never met anybody politician pundit journalists who were first moment thought that leave might win if you remember on the night farage had gone to bed and had to be woken up to say he made some remark you know saying the fight continues because none of the leavers had the slightest intention of taking any notice of the result uh they were going to just carry on and then demand another one in a few years time uh and a broad based cabinet was essential when she started but the main thing that's holding things up now is that the british government is not able to form a terribly comprehensive view of what exactly now wants to happen and that snag is being caused by the wide range of views i mean the Labour party is in the same mess but Jeremy is so excited the thought that he might become prime minister he's allowed himself to go along with a rather pro european platform and then i don't quite how Keir Starmer's managed it but they've got a slightly more coherent position than we have but there's a full range of views in cabinet and shadow cabinet and it does make it difficult we are bewildering our friends i think the main reaction on the cabinet on the continent is that they just do not understand what on earth is going on to the Anglo-Saxons on either side of the Atlantic i think some more questions if i can came from over here now there were a couple of people across my yes yes we went at the back there first yet and then we'll go to the man in the balcony woman first following on from that last question and a lot of what you've said about the chaos and the potential disaster or potential disaster is there any chance do you think that we might be able to avert leaving the EU i'm more pessimistic than most people who were remainers i don't think there is it's the the the political class as a whole leaving aside eccentric like me i think i was mainstream until 18 months ago but but but they've all decided that this referendum is a kind of instruction from on high it is the voice of the people and and it it can't be challenged now whether that will change it won't change in a hurry and i i don't think parliament could bring it's after that they're all the well terrified of the right wing newspapers they'd be accused of being saboteurs and enemies of the people if if they stick to the opinions they had before the referendum and they do genuinely i mean lot of them to be fair to my colleagues i'm getting very course and critical it's my stiff neck including grumpy old man but but they did all say of the referendum they were all going to be bound by it so they do regard themselves as bound by it so i i think there is little doubt we're going to leave i would require but an extraordinary turn of events i think to stop so i tend to concentrate and forgive the bias i'm showing throughout all this but there's no point by it you all know where i come from on Europe um the the the minimizing the damage getting as normal a relationship as possible is the best we can really do and we might get there yet that we i find this argument about the single market and the customs union which politically interested people who come to a festival of politics are probably kept up with i think most of the public have uh but they i don't understand why we're leaving them nobody nobody said at the referendum we were altering our trading relationships with the european union Boris Johnson who made himself the leader of the leave campaign dismissed any suggestion that we were changing our trading relationships politics of fear all that are they that it was all going to hang on and changed the germans needed to sell us their Mercedes the italians need to sell us their prosecco the Boris was one of saying that uh we could have our cake and eat it he he actually said and so we'd have just carry on having normal free trade well the free trade we can enjoy is if we stay in the single market and the customs union and i don't remember i know but nobody got reported in the national media arguing that we should come out of either eurosceptics used to say that the oh the economics of europe is all right we don't mind the common market that's all right it's the wicked politics they frighten their children at night by this plot to form a united states of europe it's all a terrible terrible secret plot being hidden by all the politicians to abolish all the nation states and create united states of europe many of them still believe that uh but but there was none of this let's the idea that we were all we're going to come out and we're going to put up a lot of tariff barriers and we're going to have different regulations we're going to start having building lorry parks for the customs checks that was not a big feature of the leave campaign in the referendum uh and so i still have hopes that that much might be salvaged at the moment while i'm trying to present it as we obviously need a transition period because we haven't the faintest chance of agreeing very much at all over the pace we're going before march 2019 we have a transition period and just stay in the single market and the customs union but i still think in the end you're going to have to negotiate what changes it because it is regarded by the vast majority of the little establishment is now predestined that we're going to cease to be a member i was astonished to find i was the only conservative that voted against article 50 but it was a fairly good indication of uh what was in the wind the party that had been the most pro european party gathered with the liberals for all my lifetime suddenly all but one uh was voting to leave so if Boris Johnson has been suggesting that we can stay in the customs union should he stay or should he be sacked i wouldn't sack morris i mean because the actual politics isn't away quite entertaining the politics of the last few weeks has been completely mad and the one thing that has dominated the report of the politics is the personalities i tried to avoid being with those politicians who always blames the media the media are only as bad as the politicians allow them to be but i mean there's not much serious reporting of what it is we're supposed to be negotiating it's all you know is teresia going to stay is boris up is boris down is philipe hamond up is philipe hamond down is she going to sack boris is i i've stopped giving interviews the media for about a week because that was all they wanted to talk about and i'd done a bit of boris bashing but it's it's uh other people were doing it gore enthusiasm so i left them to get on with it uh and uh you're not gonna what they need is to calm down ignore the media for a week or two get some medium term long term you and put in some effort into agreeing on whatever compromise they're trying to reach on what it is we want to negotiate and what exactly we are seeking to put in place for our long term role and our long term relationship with the european union and at the moment we're only bothering the trade and investment and all that and that relationship there are dozens and dozens of other subjects that we haven't even looked at yet all of which have to be resolved i'll take some more questions on the floor the chap on the balcony there with this politically established we're completely dumbfounded that people left and include myself you know is there any way the politicians can reconnect now with the public i feel that they're not connecting properly now they seem to think they were the elite and they could do it and look after everything and suddenly when they've asked everybody to vote the votes went the wrong way and they're completely lost now i hope i i only heard that in part that can the politicians reconnect with the general well i'll start giving you a bit of my pet clark theory but it isn't in the book actually but that this is a problem in every western democracy and and i personally haven't worked out quite why it's happening to someone like myself who you know i hope i wasn't an establishment figure when i started but as i say i've got became so you know in establishment politics i've a classic 1990s early to 200s politician and it's all changed it's all gone and in every western democracy the traditional parties have lost their their old hold they find it very good to keep it and the public hold the political establishment pretty near contempt in many places the political parties are unpopular institutions and voting is the mass of the population don't automatically think they belong to a party anymore most young people make their minds up without under the age of 50 make their minds up who they're voting for about two days before polling day and they're not depends what's uppermost in their minds at the time there's a lot of angry protest and so you know in America donald trump defeated the republican party he took their candidature which every expert would have told you had no chance he then defeated the democrats took the presidency and he's still making it up as he goes along but it was actually a protest against you know washington the establishment we have the referendum so that was four of our parties every party but u-kip was in favour of staying in the european union so they all voted with nigel farrage uh and uh we're out uh the french looked as though madame le pen was going to do a power of no good it's been very nasty but probably the most racist we haven't got any we there was a lot of dog whistle racism in some of the u-kip campaigning but on one side they they they they they absorbed the national front and people but but they they in madame le pen looked quite a threat but then a bloke called macron appears sweeps away both political parties along psychosi all in the dust balance you pay who i would probably vote for if i'm a frenchman at first but i'd probably voted for macron in the end suddenly you had this unknown right young hope swept everything away new political party he better be good because otherwise we economic and social liberals are finished if he makes a mess of it but but he's something like that now angela is just about held on the one place that's remain normal thanks to my great heroine angela mercor has clung on and uh i won't go on because there are these movements we'll see how the five star movement doing italy soon and it's um there's an angry rejection of politicians there's a rejection of the modern world it's all so complicated and a lot of people have been hurt and have missed out and they no one's really sorted out the aftermath of the two seven thousand and seven credit crash and the two thousand and eight slump uh and a lot of people have got left behind and been forgotten about and they they and people want it you know they they they want scapegoats uh they want a simple answer it's all the mexicans if you're an american uh it's all the immigrants if you're you know french if it's all brussels if you're british uh and you get these sweeping movements now the fault lies in part with the conventional politicians firstly we really have got to sort out the global economy and put it on a less fragile state which will take a few years more but more importantly somebody apart from macron has got to work out how to engage with the public and and you know on a way which does not remind them of what too many of the public regard as the discredited old political establishment which they wish to get rid of and and anyway that's a large of you the whole thing but uh and the other way which governments can connect to the key things was the simple things like looking as though you're competent to actually being competent delivering some sensible decisions and policies they'll all be unpopular public deeply dislike change no good governments ever popular in the first half of its term of office but then once it starts to work through people can see why you did it it seems to be getting better no point in taking a risk by trying the other lot you know it's not we get but that's the politics I'm used to Margaret Thatcher never had a popular policy the entire time she was in but we we we we we always won the elections we were miles behind in the opinion polls halfway through miles and miles behind sometimes uh but but you know you stuck to delivering government and it had a certainly unusual and different way of engaging with the public and it's arguing the toss about what we were doing why we were doing it and answering our enemies now your politicians don't do that nowadays they hire PR men who tell them to use slogans and not talk about policy and don't argue unpopular things that's that's why they all lose you I think actually you said that in your book as well that when you first when Margaret that just cabinet the cabinet actually discussed issues whereas you think modern cabinets don't discuss issues it's all departmentalised and run by by people in terms of that yeah spitting image was one of the things that created one of the myths about Margaret's cabinet and so if you remember you know so they built up this marvellous image of all these jokes about what about the vegetables oh they'll choose themselves and all this kind of and she was pretty bad but it wasn't quite like that at all and we did have genuine cabinet government now Margaret spoke for half the time she spoke for as much as she was a very bad chairman of meetings in a way because she she spoke as much as all the rest put together she'd always start discussion by telling us what she wanted to agree to and then a great lively debate would take place so but we did talk about policy and if you had a policy you went you were talking through cabinet committees and if you couldn't get agreement with your colleagues and the cabinet committees you went to cabinet and you've got to prove all that was then government policy and she she didn't win a ball she'd take defeat with very bad grace sometimes but she didn't always win and actually we all did compromise and uh I think once colleagues improved the the the policy I like running politics as a debating society anyway so actually having your colleagues test but you think your brilliant proposals before you've gone out and announced it can actually be quite challenging and and sometimes you do go away and start thinking you know well I'm not sure we've got this quite right yet and and try again we did a lot of that and so she she did do that and it was Blair I blame for getting rid of all that really Blair had no time for all any of this stuff and Blair couldn't understand he was going to be a prime minister and he got all these American experts who explained to him how he won elections and he got Alistair Campbell who was a prize journalist who'd come in and going to help him around the country and he didn't understand why parliament should debate and vote about all these things in the name of family friendly hours he tried to get rid of most of that and he didn't understand why the cabinet should spend most time I was reliably informed once that it is very early on they made the Bank of England independent and I think the then cabinet secretary is around so I hope he doesn't object to my saying this but I'm not sure he was my source so he can't really but and the cabinet secretary asked there well shouldn't we take this to cabinet to which the reply was what's it got to do with them and control freakery and message discipline and all this stuff was introduced by Blairites and a lot of other politicians at first were awed by this you know this is professionalism this is how they run it in America this is unlike all this amateur stuff that we've had before and I don't think cabinet discussions has ever quite recovered from that and people always start with cabinet discussions Cameron did and John Major did the problem also has happened is modern 24 hour media everything leaks and the one thing that stops a cabinet working is some of your cabinet colleagues going off either directly briefing journalists with an improved version of what's just happened in the cabinet or gossiping to their aides and their aides go off and have a drink with journalists and tell everyone what's happened and this happened to the major cabinet to be fair before Blair we stopped being able to do a lot of things in cabinet because it was all leaking all the time and spun campaigning versions of the discussions just appeared in the newspapers so if that was going to happen you know if you're the departmental minister you will bloat if you're going to talk about your subject in cabinet if it was just going to be used as the basis for an attack on you afterwards and I think that that still continues that's a bit of a problem now that Teresa certainly started by saying she said to me once that she wants to go back proper cabinet government and if her colleagues behave themselves and don't leak I think it would be very wise to do that because obviously they've got to get more agreement amongst themselves on the most difficult issue which is how to handle Brexit again. Take some more questions here now somebody just caught my eye put your hand before me I'll take that woman there and then oh yes that man there so I'll take the woman there and then the man there. Okay thank you. Mr Clark can I ask you another Brexit related question and it's another one. Can you speak up a little sorry? Is that any better? Okay good can I ask you another Brexit related question and something that does seem to be dividing your party at the moment which has been reduced to the game show slogan of deal or no deal and I'm just wondering the people that think we can walk away from this with no deal. How do you perceive the consequences of that and how do they believe that we really can just walk away without a deal? I think again I'm not that hard of hearing but I haven't had any difficulties on this. So how do I see no deal and all the rest of it? I do think that no deal is very unlikely because there's nobody on either side of the channel the most sensible person engaged in government or politics or business on either side of the channel who thinks that no deal is somehow desirable it would be totally disruptive it's it's it's dressed up and made to sound very grand and organised by being described as trading under WTO arrangements well the world trade organisation does exist and there are fallback rules which we've managed to get in the WTO but they're far from perfect they're for countries that haven't got trade agreements and we weren't able to improve them the Doha round failed so what happens is again sticking as we are at the moment in most of our debate to questions of trains on leaving out air flights and environmental standards and all the other things and security international crime as far as trades concerned you would have quite substantial tariffs and you'd have to have customs barriers and new customs systems and you'd have to have regulatory differences or unless you wouldn't have to have because none of the levers can think of a regulation they want to change yet but they all say they're going to and it would be totally disruptive it played me don't know how much it would damage movement of trade and investment but it's in my strongly free trade opinion it's a wholly inferior situation to the one we're in now so Brexit's already made us poorer with the devaluation it would make us poorer still if we went up to a degree which plenty of people tried forecasts nobody really knows but we will be poorer than we'd otherwise be now holding it out as an option some people say is a good way of bargaining negotiating um so you you should keep saying that no deal's better than a bad deal because that means the europeans taking more seriously i don't agree with that because i don't think anybody on the continent thinks we seriously mean it that no deal would be a failure and a disaster and it's not something if you're just using it to threaten them as a bonus begardenship i mean macron more or less said as much yesterday he doesn't actually seriously think anybody on the other side thinks no deal is going to be anything other than disastrous for the united kingdom um but there's a great range of deals and it all depends what it is you're trying to negotiate what your the thing you should have in mind in any negotiation is what is your end game and suddenly you should keep some of your quite a lot of your end game secret from the other people once you've decided what it is what is holding up things at the moment i think most of all is no one's quite sure what the end game is and that's what we've got to clarify um but some things like what is the point in restoring tariff barriers between ourselves and 27 countries on the continent what is the point of building huge lorry parks so we can have go back to full customs procedures and then you know as you as no lever can ever identify a regulation a market regulation which a british government ever opposed the british like regulations all the odis right to me demanding more regulations of this that and everything else i'm a bit of a mildly deregulatory myself but you we have very high standards of consumer quality of product quality animal welfare health and safety environmental rules no levers ever been able to identify seriously to me any european regulation we say want to change they're not one that any british government ever opposed they get stumped middle stump if you ask them which one are you thinking of changing all sometimes they produce rather obscure batty ones but there's no no no no mainstream one and uh we just don't need to introduce all this um and you're not giving up too much if you say that no deal is a very undesirable it'd be very bad for the europeans as well other europeans would be disastrous for us there's no great concession saying let's forget all this no deal stuff uh but let's get down some serious negotiations about just how far we are going to rain integrated with the market and the rest of europe how far we're not the objections the objections which serious levers have to not just signing up and staying say stay in the single market stay in the customs union my position is not there's anything wrong with the single market what they say is if you stay in the single market you've got to have freedom of movement of labour so we can't to which my answer is well why don't we try negotiating some changes to the freedom of movement of labour i don't feel strongly about this you do uh well let's see if we can find something that reassures you and when i say stay in the customs union uh they say oh we can't stay in the customs union uh because then we couldn't have trade deals with anybody else to which my reaction is uh well how easy do you think it's going to be to get trade deals with all these other people and get better ones and the ones we've negotiated so far through the EU by being the country that urges the EU on to get these deals uh and i know Liam Fox needs something to do but is that quite a good enough reason for leaving the customs union and but concentrate on because nobody ever says there's anything wrong with the customs union in principle we're all free traders so it's fine and nobody says there's anything wrong with the single market because we're all free traders apparently that's what we're going to agree with the Filipinos or somebody quite shortly it's these conditions it's oh well it comes with freedom of movement of labour and it comes with our not being able to do your unilateral deals with the Australians so try to dress that if you can the second one's difficult the first one's not too difficult you can dress that if you'd like it's difficult to negotiate another question just a man there yes oh sorry yes okay man up there yes sorry referendum do you think that constitutional referendum are fundamentally different and should perhaps always have two components first that we've had on brexit to agree in principle what people want to do if they want to leave the EU but always a second check that those people are actually getting what they want if they're going to change everything for everyone for the next 50 years that so is it unreasonable to have that valid valid vacation that people are getting what they want yeah well let's make clear i'd be very careful here's an english politician in in scotland scottish referendums i did vote for the scottish referendum on the basis it was a scottish issue as to whether they had it or not and actually the great thing whatever it is although it's not a simple question because the lord knows what flows from scottish independence i mean rebuilding a border between scotland and england not easy but but but the um all right have a scottish referendum that was fine and that that in the brexit case uh i just think it was unsuitable i mean in my book i described the row i had with cambran he like harald wilson who held the other one on the same subject it was all party management that's all they're interested in uh their parties was divided they had noisy minorities on the subject and in both cases fondly imagined they would quieten down the row by giving them a referendum it didn't quieten down anything it lined it up quite a lot on both occasions um and i wouldn't hold a referendum at all on a big brawl brush issue like that it is essentially government by opinion poll and i'm a democrat i'm a total democrat parliamentary democracy organizes it the people do things and then they're accountable for the consequences in the parliamentary go you get sacked when you've made a mess of it uh but you know the next time we're thinking of going to war to say we must have a referendum and ask about it i mean the iraq war or 70 percent of the public were in favour of it the invasion of iraq in the opinion polls when i rebelled against the duncan smith's lead on the iraq war i thought his i'm going to get myself in a real mess here because 70 percent of the public uh i think it's a good idea a year later you couldn't find anybody who'd ever met anybody who was in favour uh of invading iraq it's not no way of running a wealth store certainly not a country now that on the point that having had one the broad question of principle quite a narrow majority voted leave again the other problem is i i do agree to on both sides it's true of the remain side as well as the leave side people voted for a whole variety of different reasons there were cross currents there always are in these things uh and so do you have a second referendum on what actually emerges now there i'm even more of a maverick i'm totally i'm quite apart from most of the other you know frustrated remainers i don't want ever to see another referendum in my lifetime quite honestly they're a complete gaunt lottery spinner coin usually when you start the campaign and the idea that having put a very complicated question about should britain be a member of the european union you now put a question saying have a look at this long list of terms that we've now negotiated with 27 other states uh do you approve of this or not would be folly in my opinion they would be bizarre quite how you'd debate it i'm not quite sure and what would happen is you'd go off on a tangent again because that's the last referendum did with our 70 million turks going to come here to take our jobs you know was soon to take over and what happens if you have another referendum in this time my side of the argument wins it how do we answer the remainers who turn around and say well let's make it best of three you know there's another one um as i think parliament should be allowed to get back to its job and it should do its job properly not be intimidated uh i'm actually holding the Government to account when the government has sorted out what it's negotiated and discovered what it can negotiate and and let's get back to a slightly more grown-up form of of of politics i think and then if parliament makes a mess of it one thing i have no doubt whatever is the public are entirely entitled to sack the lot of them if they've all made a mess of it and and the you go back to your constituency and your account for what you've done and some of its work some of it's not and you argue for the good bits and they return if they believe it macron swept away vast numbers of mps out of the french national assembly can i just i want to take some more questions of the phone a minute i just wanted to move away just because all the questions about brexit so far and i'll be honest i can only take so much brexit but uh we debated every single week in here as well so can i just ask you a few questions about uh just about your personal life apart from anything else because in your book your book is called kind of blue but that's actually a jazz reference isn't it yes it's one of the myos davies my readers have divided half and half i mean those who've come across a bit of modern jazz and rid to get the get the context of kind of blue and those who've just looked at it and think well that's a sort of description of my my political role in life you know and and uh that that that's uh a jazz is one of my enthusiasm i get rather obsessive usually about the things i get you know i don't just have hobbies or interests i suddenly start getting rather carried away so for you i'm not so much now because i don't get a jazz clubs anymore but but i used to get quite immersed in jazz all over the world get jazz clubs and Ronnie Scott size of regular and i have vast numbers of records and things and uh i think a lot of us get stuck in the music that enthused us at a formative age in our lives the for those jazz people here hardbop blue note records all that that's my favorite type of jazz i listen to every type of jazz and when myos davies was emerging his great quintet with John Coltrane and that that was when i really was getting every LP as it came out because it was was then making the running in jazz and and uh so kind of blues reaction that nowadays i just got the odd cd in my car and i'm driving up and down motorways i play it and i get to jazz very occasionally but it's still the only music that really moves me that's the only one that i get really bothered about but jazz is one of my great enthusiasm do you think MPs can have interest i'm intrigued you've got a lot of interest outside politics i just noticed this week for example a former colleague here Douglas Ross who is now a conservative MP and he's also a lineman and he runs the line at european matches and he got criticised for going off absolutely savage for it it was barcelona against somebody wasn't it yeah the smp need to get a sense of proportion for god yeah no no no it's uh well good for him you know you i think uh the all the what only thing of mine mine mine are an eclectic collection of things i mean not many people are interested and i have been a fanatic birdwatcher i became a fanatic birdwatcher real conservationist not many people combine that with formula one motor racing they're the two are totally but i'm a petrolhead as well um the the only thing my interest having common i think when i ask myself what what is it about my you know makeup of course you can't ever work out for yourself uh it makes me so keen on these things the one thing they all have gone they're all things when i'm engaged in them when i'm at a race when i'm birdwatching when i'm at a cricket match all thoughts of politics all thoughts of work vanish unless i with some political colleague and if i'm not careful we start talking about what is going on but that's usually in the tea interval we don't wander around birdwatching chattering politics it is a switch off it's just to get another part of your being going and absorbed in something it gives you a sense of proportion gives you a you know it brings you back to reality stops you coming to obsessive on the politics so yeah i do all these things i noticed too that your book was dedicated simply to jillian your wife yeah well my but my wife i lost my wife a couple of years ago um yeah i mean i was very very dependent on jillian she she i also she she knew that i was going to be a politician she that my mother-in-law could not get me to concentrate properly on the preparations for my wedding because i was at that time fighting in a parliamentary election campaign in the general election but we got mad a few days after over when i lost at mansfield the first time uh and she knew i was very politically Cambridge but the normality the home life the support you know she gave me was just kept well sane really and stable and she looking back you know i'd get the sacrifices that she makes this is true of most MPs certainly the ones that become ministers you first have got to be a workaholic to be actually a cabinet minister senior one because you've got two jobs you're being an MP and you're got a more than full-time job as a senior thing and so your family are often long away and and uh you know your spouse wife in my case has really got all the responsibilities with an absent partner uh to keep the normal home life together bring up the children all this kind of thing and so uh yeah so i dedicated to my wife not surprisingly really and i occasionally feel twingers of guilt she against my generation we just sort of a granted that's not just me but a lot of our guys your wife gave up her career if the two clashed and i did half the graduate women i knew and i did know some from Cambridge and Virginia was one uh you know when they went down they became housewives quite rapidly because they could not combine the career they might otherwise have taken but in those days with their husbands and they were just taking for granted that that would happen she would have been an academic historian if she hadn't married um and obviously we were married for 50 years so suitably it's uh dedicated to my wife i didn't i played this down in the book i didn't try to determine the book was going to be a political memoir uh but maybe because i do relish my privacy i've i've never combined my private life with my public life. Genium was very politically active but again as the MP's minister's wife sort of a role but she was genuinely interested in politics but um so the book isn't going lots and lots of stuff about uh by private family life particularly it's me giving a political narrative late at night into a recording machine but uh all things dedicated to Gillian because without her whole thing would have been quite impossible i would never have been able to live a life as i did. You use a dictophone but you're not a big fan of technology i should say we're alive on facebook here so i've never been on facebook i don't know what all these things are they occasionally my children show me bits of it and i'm slightly appalled but there were several sites in my name on there at one point right and they've all gone out just my office has persuaded me to get one on twitter taken down if you're a b-list celebrity if you don't have a if you don't go on internet and the social media men jokers turn up and start going on in your name so a lot of bogus ones and i've had to rest bogus ones but otherwise my children occasionally who despair on me show me political exchanges on the social media and i realize an old phogion this is the way we're going that's where future generations will get their news and that's where the political debate will be most of the newspapers probably won't be in print in 10 years time but it tends to appall me because the level of debate on twitter and things is not in my opinion is a staggeringly high level and there is a tendency to resort to personal insult at the drop of a hat you should read what they're saying here yes why women MPs go on the social media i cannot imagine they just have to put up with the torrents of abuse i'll give you a quick question from sad people in bed-sits somewhere in the globe is they join themselves sending insults to women politicians they like why do that when you can be insulted in person in the house of commons absolutely rob on facebook he says one of the things that it is a young person's medium for the most part not nesli a facebook yes under the age of 15 and rob asked about this he says that's young that's so there's a there's a fair amount of societal and generational inequality my generation blamed the put the blame on the deregulation of the 80s what do you think with that you're a deregulation yes well firstly i think this intergenerational thing has a lot in it and i think it's going to having earlier given my racy personal theory of the problem of political democracy in the western world has a lot to do with it and i think my generation if i again made a i don't normally keep describing myself as an establishment man but a mainstream politician of the 1990s i think we did this is the mistake we made we made the country a much richer country we raised the quality of life of most of its inhabitants the actually of the global state g7 the amount of poverty in the world plummeted as never before and never since as we were developing with the structural reforms including the thatcher ones the modern modern globalised economy but we missed out badly on the distribution what was happening to the distribution of the benefits missed out if you'd like on the social conscience bit i talked about and in deregulating and i think was deregulating but we failed to pay attention to the worsening climate for younger people and the quite extraordinary range of events which gave my generation all kind of advantages which their children grandchildren couldn't have and this is people who suddenly realised you took the 2007 2008 crash to exacerbate that make it very much worse and then to reveal just how serious it has become but it does does now need to be tackled and free markets do need to be regulated and we do need to look at aspects of the housing market aspects of the savings market aspects of our pension arrangements to give the same opportunities to people under the age of 50 that most people over the age of 50 did without forgetting the fact that not everybody over the age of 50 has been that lucky so we still have some quite hard up pensioners so but there are some we have some very lucky pensioners the housing market has gone so manic that everybody who's bought their own house which is the majority of my generation got all kinds of capital wealth just as a windfall you know manner from heaven and then people we know under the age of 50 half of them can't even begin to start buying a house and they're about the same position in society so that we were when you're much younger but it's all totally changed and but the housing's the obvious thing but there are several other areas where restoring opportunities to everybody to have a fair share of the benefits of whatever success we achieve is should be one of the aims of politicians for the next few years and it you know it I repeat that so I'll stop repeating this again but the I think that is one of the explanation of why the voting habits of the public in so many reasonably prosperous and successful western democracies have become so aberrant and so peculiar as they have become in recent times we'll take a few more questions from the floor I've got a man here then a woman in the balcony and then some more people over there so the man here first sorry I know right I was going to ask yet another question about Brexit but it's time's chasing us I'll just lighten the load a bit what is your favourite knots forest moment and what's your favourite wine then what's the same favourite wine favorite wine and favorite knots forest yeah my favorite nottingham forest moment well uh we're in the european cup surely I never got to either of the european cup finals and the nottingham forest is all obsessed with the club years which were the great years but I didn't get to either of the finals and and and uh I go back before that I think my favourite forest moment I mean the club years were the great years and Eric Wax was the greatest manager of any football club since the war because I think either you or I could have a go with Manchester United for a year or two with all that money and we might actually pick up the odd trophy or but for to go to a couple of nondescript midland football clubs like darby county in nottingham forest take the first one to the first division championship fall out with the board have a lunatic couple of months at Leeds and then turn up at another nondescript midlands football club and take them to the first division championship and the two european cups it's just lunatic I mean it's no one's ever going to repeat that but the first time we were in a fairly bad way after the second world war when I was a lad I say I was following the least fashionable club we got relegated from the second division down to the third division south and we came suddenly back from that and got back to the first division and we won the cup in about 1959 and I I was at school later years in school so going to Wembley to see what's probably the most unfashionable English cup final since the war nottingham forest versus looton town I went down with a friend of mine from the sixth form at my school in nottingham and he hadn't got a ticket I somehow managed to get a ticket and five minutes to kick off he was able to buy one at face value because the touts couldn't get rid of them and uh so it was a great match we we I still remember it but half the matches I go to incident I couldn't remember this season but we went rapidly into the lead I think we were too near the lead I'm now making mistakes but and then we had one of our players injured and there were no substitutes in those days and a man called Roy Dwight had his leg broken never played again and we had to spend the last hour of the game defending our lead which was reduced to one goal so the moment when we actually won the FA cup final which when I'd started to watch nottingham forest would have been regarded as a preposterous idea because the cup final was then the great football trophy that's probably my favourite forest moment sounds like to reason me in the government to the 10 men in the broken leg and can I just take the woman in the balcony there you can think about the wine as well the woman in the balcony mr clack can I appeal to your experiences chancellor the extrecer regarding the economy we've gone through a long period of austerity where a lot of people have suffered a lot such as the nurses the police the tremendous cuts in society and yet suddenly we have enormous billions to spend on Northern Ireland on the the Brexit on paying over special sums for our debt etc what is your opinion of this I'm sorry that it would be to me it's been we've gone from austerity suddenly we've got billions to spend on Northern Ireland or on brexit is that really a good use of public money well I mean yes I would be careful because I've been very candid because I am a cavalier maverick venture now and I there's no reason there's no point in my carrying on in politics if I'm not actually giving my views but I better not upset my colleagues too much I am a fiscal hawk and I am worried about the state of the public finances I think we we do need to explain to people that it's not sustainable to keep borrowing money as we are adding to the stock of debt when we've already up to 80 per cent GDP which is something of my generation is impossible it's one of the very biggest parts of our expenditure as a government now is the interest on all this debt and we haven't really had austerity we managed to steer away from the crisis in 2010 so compared with the you know if the British all tell themselves for a terrible period of austerity it must come to an end now if you meet an Irish or Portuguese or Greek or you know we don't we haven't seen anything and so far we've avoided all that now I'm not in favour of accelerating the tightening up at a time when the economy is very fragile and has slowed down but it will be a great mistake in my opinion to think that oh let's forget all this nonsense you know let's just print and borrow a lot more and throw a lot of money about that way that way disaster lies that's how the Greeks got where they are you know and so they're my views on the finances of it you deal with the Northern Irish well Northern Irish politics is almost about negotiating so I had nothing to do with it I was just an observer of all this but they they drive a hard bargain on all sides in Northern Irish politics if you think of it it's the politicised society of the United Kingdom very dangerous at times has been for many years and they're all tremendous experts at negotiating so they drove quite a hard deal and you say throwing money at Brexit we haven't thrown much money at Brexit all this arguments about the money which is very important how much how we are going to our financial obligations are going to come to an end in Europe but it's all being it's mainly all the attention and the press is on it because it's the one thing that everybody understands are we paying money to foreigners lend itself to much more lively reporting than what will be the consequences of leaving the title or modifying the customs union or whatever it happens to be or what what what what what what do you think of the decision to leave your atom and all this sort of thing so throughout the the whole single market particularly but the whole European projects been based on the fact that the richer countries pay more in than they take out and obviously has a budget and the poorer countries take out more than they put in so the British have all paid in and we always argued about how much but along with the Germans and the Dutch and even the Norwegians from outside we're net contributors and the Germans the Dutch and the British always paid on the basis that the sums of money involved where they get quite large are trivial compared with the economic benefits of having access to that huge market. There was never said we should stop paying into the budget and now with this closure is you have a problem of calculating how much is needed to be paid to end our liabilities and for so long as we get benefits as long as we through a transition period enjoy free trade then just like the Germans and the Dutch because you can't negotiate with the German Chancellor and expect her to go back home and saying to the German taxpayer well we've got to pay more money now because the British can enjoy the benefits for free previously they paid for like we do and you certainly wouldn't sell that to you can't negotiate with people asking them to go away making idiot demands of their own clients their own public so it's a question of how much and then they're all there's the things we've already signed up and agreed to then there's inherited debts and obligations and assets half the world's got unfunded pensions liabilities and so long as we were in we were one of the countries running up these unfunded pension liabilities when we leave what's our share of the unfunded pension liabilities very boring technical subject when you find out I'm very glad I'm not going with the one in the end and negotiating the figure I haven't got around to figures yet but again the media and the populist politicians know what the public's interested in so currently apparently Theresa's offered 20 billion I never heard Theresa offer 20 billion and the speech was reported in that way doesn't have a figure in it I've never heard a giver figure nor have I heard a figure that anybody demanded on the other side they were trying to work out yesterday that Macron said we weren't halfway there so he's demanding 40 billion where's it all rubbish but the principle needs to be agreed and established of course we'll pay money if you just say oh no no no we're free now we're a sovereign nation forget it you sorted out we're paying nothing we're not undertake your obligations we're leaving I don't know how you think you're going to get on with the first trade deal in the wider world you're trying to negotiate if you think you can get in New Zealand let's take the friendliest country in the world where we might do a trade deal if we were suddenly found ourselves all right if you begin by saying well of course we're not going to be tied by any obligations ourselves we'll agree some mutual rules and so on but we are a sovereign nation we are going to change them sometimes we're not and there are disputes so we're not going to your funny foreign courts no no no you'll have to get you through the British courts if you want to sort out disputes with us well I don't think you get off square one with the New Zealanders there's quite a lot of other tricky points with the New Zealanders as well but but you can't behave like that and so eventually there will be a bargain and we'll be in agreement about how much the British are going to steadily over the transition period pay for their past obligations past liabilities and whatever benefits we're still getting through the transition period um but that I'd literally put it in whatever I think in a perfectly accurate factual way that's more boring than you know Theresa said 20 Macron said 40 you know pistols at dawn uh and of course stout euro skeptics say nothing go whistle for it and uh and so on which is and sooner or later we've got to move on from that can I just say that so we we began with brexit we were finishing with brexit it is rather the mood of the day isn't it really and then we'll put if you're not careful this is these are political enthusiasts we're all political enthusiasts going to a festival of politics we'll put even more of the public of politics if it's all brexit for the next three years understand what I'm going to have to end with an apology to a particular there's so many hands going up there but can I suggest I think ken's going to make himself available downstairs to sign copies of your book am I right in thinking that yes so the bookseller will insist I don't have a long conversation with everybody who comes up but I'm around yes keep your short your questions and the people in the queue will deeply objective I'm actually busily arguing I don't know the politics of health or something with the person who's in front of the queue so well short points I think we've welcome can I say thank you very much to to you our audience uh and and to our audience on facebook live as well thank you very much for coming along today I can ask you to join me in thanking ken clark