Addiction, Breakdown and Finding Persevilience: Rory Interviews Alastair

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1:23I'm on Jordan time. I like that. OK, how do you protect yourself from arguing with your co-host? I just watch you argue with other people. No, I have this tactic when I think I'm losing my temper, I just rub my thumb and my index finger together. That's what I do, and I just calm down. Yeah, that's cool. And how do you protect yourself from online scams? Well, the answer is I find NordVPN useful for that. It's not just a VPN app. They've built in next-gen antivirus block scams, phishing attacks before they reach you, so you can carry on knowing you're secure. To get the best discount on your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com slash restispolitics. You'll get four extra months free on the two-year plan,

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2:34Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash restpolitics. Cost and coverage may vary. welcome to the rest is politics with me alistair campbell and me rory stewart and this is part one of a mini series and this one is about my new word perseverance described as follows in the book the ability of an individual group or organization to turn any situation setback or meaningful experience into a positive opportunity to grow to advance and secure their core interests and beliefs so why have i invented that word i've invented that word because i think the world does need that sort of word because it's about trying to turn i guess everything negative into something a bit more positive in our own lives and in the world i

3:22wonder if that's what spin is part one is coming coming up, and part one is going to be a rather weird event where Rory Stewart, you may have heard of him, he presents the rest of his politics with me, Alastair Campbell, is going to interview me about whatever he chooses to. We've then got a series of interviews with people who are in the book and who, to me, represent different aspects of what I see as Percivalians. One, for example, I think is fairly obvious, David Blunkett, former senior cabinet minister, very good friend of mine and who has been blind all his life. Also talked to a former footballer, Clark Carlyle, who was a very good player, played in the premier league not least with Burnley,

4:02but has several times tried to take his own life, sometimes in really brutal circumstances, but is now in good shape and is the chair of the UK's, one of the leading mental health charities, Mind. And then also, and this will be our first interview when the series goes out, with Kim Ledbeater, who Rory and I have both interviewed on Leading, but who became an MP, not least because her own sister was murdered during the Brexit referendum. But we've paired her up with a very, very close friend of mine called Lindsay Nicholson, who, as I account in the book, has had more pain, grief, loss, suffering than most human beings could bear. And her account of how she has borne it is an important part of the book.

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5:33So switching isn't just about paying less, it's about expecting more from your energy company. And it only takes you three minutes. Switch to Fuse at fuseenergy.com slash politics. Use the code politics and you'll get a free Trip Plus subscription allowing you to hear all the extraordinary members content that Alistair and I are now producing for you. Visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions. You've written books on different things I think that interest you and people. I mean, obviously they've been your diaries, but there's obviously been a real interest in leadership, vision, management, strategy, communication. And then somewhere you've begun to centre around this word perseverance. When did you first have this word? When did it first occur to you?

6:22When I was writing a book about depression ah um and and there are some themes that if people have read my book on depression i've written two now the happy depressive i guess that's a percivalian thought isn't it the happy depressive because that basically is me saying i get depression but i'm really i'm mainly quite happy with my life and then when i wrote the bigger book about depression, Living Better, I was just trying to wrestle with the idea of what I was saying and whether there was a better way of subbing it up. So that's the first time I used the word. It feels to me not like perseverance, not like resilience, not like persistence, but it feels perseverance. It's more positive. And then it was actually a publisher who said,

7:06look, I love your word, and you keep banging on about how you like to see it in a dictionary. Write a book about what it is and what it means. And just before we sort of get deeper into your personal life, tell us what you think this word is saying and its component parts. I would say the obvious component parts are perseverance, resilience, persistence, and patience. That's where the words are coming from. But they feel, all of them, I'm afraid, including patience, because as you know, Rory, I don't think patience is a virtue. I think if something needs doing… You need to sort it out. Try and sort it out. And if you can't, move need to sort it out. Try and sort it out. And if you can't, move on to something that you can sort out.

7:48I think resilience to me is about banging your head against a brick wall. I say in the book, for example, that I think one of the reasons that Keir Starmer lasted two years and Tony Blair lasted 10 years is that Keir Starmer saw his resilience as a great strength. It is a great strength, but not on its own. It has to have all the positive things that take you through the things that are forcing you to be resilient. So I see the word for an individual as being whatever problems being thrown at you, your responsibility to yourself and your family and everybody else is to genuinely try to think through how you can address them. Not to wallow in them, not to moan about them, but genuinely how do you try to address them? And then for a

8:35government and for a country or for a cause and a campaign, it's how do you take everything that happens to you and turn it into an opportunity to move in the opposite direction, to move forward, not backwards? Now, when I began the book, I thought maybe that the point about perseverance is it was a sort of morally positive form of persistence or resilience. It was persistence and resilience in a good cause. With values. Yeah. But there's a rather interesting bit in the book where you speculate on whether, in a sense, Donald Trump and Nigel Farage you obviously don't like and whose values you don't share might not also have a form of perseverance. They do. And it's interesting. When I was talking to Fiona

9:18whilst in the process of writing the book, and I said, and so I thought of all these people who are in the book that I mentioned who I see as sort of shining lights of Perseverance. You know, some of them we're going to be interviewing for the series, but also lots of others, some famous, some that you've never heard of. And Fiona said, yeah, but you've got to say Donald Trump's Perseverance, if that's your definition. And that's why I think you're right to have picked up on the fact, for me, he has all the attributes you need for perseverance apart from the most important, which is that there have to be values and integrity at the heart of it. So I would argue that, why do I say that Trump is,

9:59on one level, perseverant? Just the very fact of losing an election, which virtually everybody in the world knows he lost and accepts he lost. But it is quite percivilian to say, I'm just never going to admit that I've lost. I'm going to pretend I've won. And eventually, I'm going to persuade enough people to reelect me. It's incredible. And it's something that you get to in Farage as well. And I sort of sensed in people like Liz Truss too, there's a sort of relentlessness in these politicians that they never accept that they're beaten. It doesn't matter what the headline is. It doesn't matter how many times they've lost. I think you point out that Farage failed to be elected eight times. Isn't that astonishing?

10:40They just keep going. They keep going. And now I think with Trump, it's almost an illness because I think he believes he didn't lose the election. I think with Farage, he kind of knows that he's a bit of a con man and a bit of a show man. But he has secured thus far an awful lot of what he's tried to achieve. Now, the reason why I also write about Putin and I talk about how Putin sees himself in this sort of, you know, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Vladimir the Great, that's how he sees himself. I don't believe he will ever be seen like that. Although he has shown a lot of the qualities that in other people I highlight, in terms of just keeping going, turn everything that goes wrong to your advantage in some way.

11:21So they're the kind of basic qualities, but then then you need i think it's important to have these these values on top one thing i think that most listeners won't really understand is how people keep going so so let's take nigel farage who you know reasonably well you've seen quite a lot of most of us would feel oh my goodness you know if people were writing that about me in the newspapers if i'd lost eight times if I'd screwed up as badly, if I was in scandal after scandal, I just want to go and hide my head. Do you think he feels often very distressed, very battered, that it's actually difficult for him to get out of bed in the morning, that the sunny face that we see is concealing the that it even for him must be pretty painful often

12:06i'm thankful i've never had to be in a bed while he's waking up to face today to see what he's like in the morning but i think less than trump actually i think trump at some deeper level must have a very very big hole inside him i think to be cited as seen as the most powerful man in the world but constantly have to say so and constantly have to advertise his own greatness i think with farage it's something different i think farage is a genuinely i don't think he'll see those i don't think he'll be too affected by all the bad headlines. And I think he sees the positives everywhere. So, I mean, I say in the book, you know, he had that plane crash, came out smiling. He had that car crash, came out smiling.

12:54All those defeats, I'll show you. And I think you need that relentlessness. Funnily enough, Fiona and I have just been to see the DeGaulle films, which I really do recommend to everybody. They're absolutely superb. But the second one, a lot of the focus is on this guy, General Leclerc, and one of de Gaulle's generals, Free French, and he's got it. He just, I don't care, it's a film and it's romanticized and what have you, but he's literally trying to get from A to B in this battered old truck with bombs flying around him, tanks firing at him, but he's just sort of, nothing will stop him. And he actually says at one point, to achieve anything in life, you have to be obsessed. Now that may or may not be true,

13:35but I do think an element of, you use the word relentlessness, I think that is a form of obsession. I think the other thing I'm trying to do in the book is to turn what I know other people define as negatives in me into positives. So a lot of people think being obsessive is a bad thing. A lot of people think being addicted to things is a bad thing. And it is, okay. So how do you turn those into positives? And maybe are you partly saying that you suspect that many people that people admire are a bit obsessive and addictive and unbalanced? In other words, there's you with people saying you're an obsessive workaholic, you've got a bad temper, etc, etc. And you must feel, but i got quite a lot done and maybe i don't know are you suggesting that our

14:29idea that um the best kinds of people to get things done are always balanced work-life balance well-rounded individuals or do you have a suspicion that sometimes a lot of the world runs on people who aren't like that you need all sorts but i do i think that a lot of the world runs on people who aren't like that you need all sorts but i do i think that a lot of people assume that the problems in their life are insurmountable that there is no way out of the social or economic situation that there might be and for some of them that may be true let me interrupt there for a second because maybe i didn't frame it right what i suppose i'm getting to is that do you sometimes think that what people perceive as your negative

15:09qualities were actually the secret of your positive qualities oh i see that if you'd been a more laid-back balanced work-life balance rounded person you might not have actually got as much done yeah 100 i mean this morning uh i didn't sleep very well last night okay and there'll be lots and and the world does affect my sleep you know there's lots of bad stuff going in the world but whenever i say to fiona in the morning oh really bad night she'll say well you're doing too much she always just say you're doing too much and it's true i might be doing too much one of the things that stops you sleeping well is that you've just packed too much into your day so your mind is worrying yeah there's too much going on or there's

15:47too much to come yeah it means less about what's gone it's what's to come um but then so then i said we sat down mad a couple of in the morning i said yeah but okay all right to have less in my head i'm gonna have to do less i've got to go out this morning because i'm gonna be talking about the book should i have not written the book and said, we didn't need to write the book. And it's true. I said, no, I didn't need to write the book. I've written 22 books. I didn't need to write any of them. But I think, yeah, the obsessiveness is definitely, I think, what drives me. And I quite like the periods when I don't have it so much i wonder whether this isn't one of the things that we struggle with which is probably historically people were more comfortable with the fact that

16:42a loss of men they were predominantly men who got things done were not entirely balanced and normal right um and that you didn't really expect Gladstone to have a great work-life balance. And that maybe part of what makes Alexander the Great is he is a bit megalomaniac and paranoid, otherwise he wouldn't have done what he did. And we're struggling with this because we also have another set of values, which is about your personal, not your public life and maybe we're struggling to work out how to talk about the fact that often people who achieve genuinely impressive things may not be in their private lives models of balance i i think that's right and i mean i think you know you've you've been in frontline politics.

17:25I've spent a decade working alongside somebody who, you know, I always say with Tony Blair, he worked bloody hard. But those of us who were working for him usually had an hour on either end of his day because we're preparing for it and then picking up pieces from it to keep going. So people like myself and Jonathan, Angie Hunter and all the sort of team around him we worked I'm not saying we had as much responsibility as he did but we probably in some ways worked harder and I think you and my children were young at the time and you kid yourselves that you can give them everything that a good parent should be giving you do your best but it's never good enough and I and I think it's taken me a long time it's really

18:05interesting how for example i've ended up when i structured the book at the start i had no plans to write it in the way that i've written it ending with this chapter which is it's a sort of it's a love letter to fiona but i guess in in some ways it's also a bit of an apology um because i don't think you can now she would fiona would probably if she was here probably well i haven't really changed much i still will you know say as we're on holiday in italy no we can't go yet because santa marina hasn't arrived or i'll still be very focused on work related things but i think most if you look at most um david owen you know former labor foreign secretary founder of the sdp etc he's he's got a whole thesis about politics and

18:54madness and that you know most people who strive and succeed in in politics have got something a bit long it's something i feel because as you know to your fury i spend far too much time hanging out with ceos of big american tech companies and they are deeply weird people of which the one that everyone knows about is elon musk but i can assure you the other 20 of them are all really weird yeah and when i go on holiday with them they're literally on their laptops all the time yeah um and they are working 120 hours a week and they would say you cannot be a very successful entrepreneur or the ceo unless you do you think they're right unless you live like that i suspect they probably are because

19:38the the only experience i've had in my life which was like that was running turquoise mountain and that was probably the thing i was most proud of and i did it with no wife no kids and i just thought about nothing else did nothing else worked every weekend and it really worked i mean there's something incredibly productive about being completely absorbed every waking minute in a project as opposed to balancing it with something else. The result is, of course, that we struggle with the question of role models. So I'm going to come to you on this role model point, right? Because on the one hand, of course, these people that we're talking about, ranging from you to, you know, I don't know, the CEOs of of a big company are role models in the sense they've

20:25achieved a lot but in other senses we're kind of saying to our kids well you don't want to be like that because they don't seem completely rounded what's your sense of how we deal with this question of robots i mean occasionally we find exceptions don't we like nelson mandela we can all agree on it's lovely because he's achieved a lot and he's also a nice guy but it's not that common that we come across somebody as you know i call mandela the patron saint of perseverance purely because of that surviving 27 years in jail coming out with a smile and then completely transforming his country it's one of the greatest stories of humanity but i was talking recently to and of our Fiona's oldest friends is the daughter of Joe Slovo,

21:08who was one of Mandela's key people in the, in the ANC. And, you know, if you talk to, I've never met Mandela's children to talk to them, but I wonder how much they think, and of course one of them died when he was in prison. I wonder how much they think, well, my dad was never here for me. He was in prison i wonder how much they think well my dad was never here for me he was in jail fighting a bigger fight yeah i know i know children of people who are involved in the anti-apartheid movement whose strongest sense is yeah well yeah we got democracy in south africa but you know my life's pretty fucked up so i think it's very that the role model thing is is fascinating because you get i mean, I write about Neil and Glennis Kinnock in the book as a per-civilian relationship, okay?

21:52And their kids are both great. Steve is now in the cabinet and Rachel is one of my favorite people on the planet. And Rachel once said to me that, you know, we look to you and Fiona as role models of parenting. What? What? What? And I was slightly panicking about it because, but then when she explained it, I kind of understood it. She said, well, look, I get the feeling that you've got good relationships with them all. And they're based on the fact that they sort of know that you're busy, but when you're not, you're always there for them, et cetera. Now, i don't know if that's what they say or not you get this as well you get people on the back of the podcast saying you know the way you talk about politics we get loads of students saying you know you're

22:34my role model i want to follow what you've done or whatever so i don't know i but i think that i do think that this what i define as this perseverance, the ability to have a sense of who you are, what you want to achieve in life, and just to keep going. There's got to be a thread to it all. Let's start with the mental health stuff. I mean, that's been so central to you for a very, very, very long time. But if we go back to when it first happened, so this first breakdown is when you're sort of 29. Presumably at that point, it wasn't something that you talked about openly or shared openly it's something that you began to share openly after that is that right it kind of was something that i shared openly

23:13uh not openly i didn't sort of go around advertising it but i was quite high profile within newspapers i wasn't known by the public but i was quite high profile within newspapers i wasn't known by the public but it's quite high profile within newspapers all of whom knew that something had happened that something had i'd gone mad i'd been arrested and i'd ended up in a psychiatrist and can i interrupt something because one of the things i think the audience often doesn't quite know is is exactly what happened is that something you're not comfortable talking about i'm totally comfortable so so what what what was actually the thing was it was it post alcohol was it alcohol was it a psychotic episode i mean well it was a psychotic episode

23:50which depending on who you talk to but the psychiatrist who diagnosed me when i was i was arrested because i was behaving strangely up in scotland and what were you doing? I was sort of, what was I doing? I mean, it had definitely been building up for a while. It's funny how the same people come in and out of your life. I was going to Scotland with Neil Kinnock. Because even though I was the news editor of a paper, the new paper that was about to start, because it was the Today newspaper, which was a bit anti-union, which was probably the reason why I should never have gone in the first place, it was politically troubling me nobody in the labour party would was having much to do with the paper so i persuaded neil to let me go with him do a big profile etc i'd been working flat

24:35out fiona and i'd fallen out i'd moved into a hotel i was drinking very heavily i was you know the night before i'd virtually emptied a minibar we fly to scotland i get to scotland i hire a car when i knew i was completely off the rails when i was going round and round this roundabout near the rothsheith naval dockyard where i was about to go and see gordon brown and neil kinnock so you were supposed to be reporting on them but you were just driving around around the roundabout they were going off to the Scottish Labour Party conference via this visit to Ross Ives to see Gordon and his constituency, then a young MP, and I just got stuck on this roundabout, round and round and round and round.

25:13I then dumped the car, gave the keys to a guy at the naval dockyard, who just thought, what am I dealing with here? I said, phone this guy called Jeremy Deeds at this number, tell him I've left my car, I can't drive. I then find a cab, I get a cab to Perth. Who called Jeremy Deeds at this number tell him I've left my car I can't drive I then find a cab I get a cab to Perth who was Jeremy Deeds Jeremy Deeds was the managing editor and so I get to Perth and by now I am I'm becoming conscious of losing control of my own mind and what does that feel like it's really hard to describe. It feels like anything you look at, you think is speaking to you. So there's a camera. It says Sonny. Why is it spelled wrong? S-O-N-Y. S-O-N. Son. You're

25:55a son. Is this to do with your parents? Why? You then look over there and you see Charles Dickens. Did you not read Charles Dickens enough at school? Is that why you're being punished? Do you think you're being punished? Your mind is just on this constant loop. I remember when I got arrested and I was driving in the back of this car. In the back of a taxi? No, in the back of a police car. And these buses were overtaking me and I was trying to do these anagrams of the name of the bus driver, of the coach company. So your mind's just losing control. And by then I'm hearing things as well and I'm seeing things. And when you hear and see things, is it that you're half conscious that it's not real or you totally believe it's real? It's hard to explain. you think it's real but you are constantly testing everything that it's

26:50communicating to you so you know as you know i had a brother who had schizophrenia this was in scotland neil kennett was the leader of the labor party he was a big figure yeah there was a piper to pipe him into this dinner that he was going to so a piper walks past me yeah okay i stopped this guy he's wearing a kill he's carrying his bagpipes i say is this because of donald i said to him i see okay but of course he didn't know who donald was he didn't have a clue so he said donald being your dad my brother was a piper yeah so he says what are we talking about and he's because he can sense immediately i'm not something wrong here yeah he wasn't unpleasant yeah but it was like um yeah he just looked like this is really weird so i'm thinking why won't he

27:32talk to me about donald having schizophrenia because you're convinced that he knows donald and he knows i'm convinced there must be a reason why he has passed me right at this time carrying a set of bagpipes while i'm starting to hear voices which is what donald so I'm now thinking I've got schizophrenia so when you're hearing the voices you're you're also half conscious you shouldn't be hearing the voices that one of the disturbing things about well it's a mix so you can hear I can hear his voice but I can also hear Elvis Presley singing his Elvis Presley singing or isn't he see he's not I'm hearing it okay I've massive rows in the office well I know the office is not there so why am i've had massive rows in the office well i know the office is not there

28:05so why am i hearing these massive rows in the office okay and then these two policemen arrested me and they arrested you because you did what i think they just realized they were actually special branch okay and they and because the other complication it was that it was the day that olaf palmer the swedish minister, was assassinated. Okay. So security around Neil was quite tight. Okay. So I think they just thought, this guy's spending his day with Neil Kinner. We better keep an eye on him. Okay. I think so. There's some weird guy who's trying to get too close to Kinner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And specifically what I was doing, I was emptying my pockets and my bag on the floor. Right. And I think I was starting to take my clothes off.

28:42Right, okay. So they came over. They were very nice, actually. Yeah. They were very, very nice. But they would have picked up pretty quickly that you were not with it i was really not well yeah and they were actually really nice and funny enough when they said to me are you okay and i said no that was the f i felt such a relief because i'd been probably not okay for quite a few weeks and every time fiona said listen are you all right i'd be saying why did you keep talking to me whether i'm all right you know you know and you do that you've got the problem not me i've been doing that for weeks whilst drinking every morning and and also hearing the voices or not the voices only started on that day yeah and the

29:18point about perseverance i say in the book that both fiona and my sister yep who's the only one left of the four of us yep they both think I hang on to this too much. But I think the reason I do is because I think the way I dealt with it thereafter is what made me feel I have this kind of perseverance. Yeah, I mean, it is an incredible moment because here you are age 29 and you have got this amazing career because you've just got this fancy job in a new newspaper and then you've just blown up in the most humiliating way possible outside a Labour Party conference and you're thinking particularly with what so you write about this in the book what's been going on the previous few weeks Fiona's not going to stick with me

30:00and am I going to be able to keep my job presumably also have I gone completely mad so I'm not going to be able to work for the rest of my life. So it's an unbelievable moment because it's a moment where you might have felt, well, this is the end. I did. I did. I felt that on several levels. Actually on the day, I know this is an insane thought, but I thought I was going to be killed. I thought I was being tested. I was failing the test and the punishment was death. I thought that is. And again, sounds strange to people. Is it that you had an idea of who was going to kill you? No, no, Just you would be killed. And then, and on the professional front, I just thought, you know, I was probably a bit cocky and arrogant anyway.

30:41So a lot of people were loving the fact that I'd blown up in smoke. But actually, when I went back to the mirror yeah i left i left them today and went back to the mirror and they were absolutely brilliant and the reason this started with you asking if i was open with them i think it was one of the best decisions i ever made i just decided when they asked me what happened i'm just going to tell them. I'm not going to say, oh, I was a bit stressed. I'll tell them. And within a few weeks, no, a few months, I was able to laugh about it. And who was the editor who took you back? Richard Stott. So presumably that is a big thing. Oh, huge. Huge act of confidence, isn't he? Totally. Because he's the guy who told me not to leave the paper in the first place.

31:23And then he was the first person who phoned me up. And he said, listen, come and do your job. Let's look on him for a second because you don't talk much about Richard Stott. And he obviously sounds like an incredible man because he was prepared to take the risk of taking you back again. And he believed that you would still be a great journalist and that it would work out. And it did work out. I just wanted though to touch on this question of disgrace and what that means in someone's life. I'm sort of haunted by this because actually I do know quite a lot of people, professionals of different sorts, obviously a lot of politicians, but actually quite a lot of public figures and senior figures and

32:05hospitals and schools and who at a moment in their career when it really seemed like they were almost at the peak, something happens. Often the media get after them. And I haven't talked to you enough about that. I mean, what's your experience of people going through that? And who comes through it better and who comes through it worse? And when is the moment at which people are just like, screw it, I'm going to bury myself in terms of later in government and suddenly when you're at the center of a media storm and people are going for you and the opposition are calling for you to resign and the press are digging into every aspect of your life and all that. Funnily enough, when that was happening, I was hanging on to my breakdown.

33:03And I was saying very, very consciously, this is not as bad as then. I was saying that I would get up every morning and say that this is not as bad as then. You can get through this day. If you can get through this day, you can get through tomorrow. I was suicidal at points and partly that was the depression, but it was also the, just the sort of hell of the circumstances. And it's interesting, I've just read that book, Profiles of Cowardice by Jacob Weisberg, I think he's called. Oh, goodness. Okay. And he's picked on these eight people who he says as examples of people who've enabled Trump, even though they knew him to be a complete monster and knew what was likely to happen. And he sort of goes through the reasons

33:43why he's written the book. And one of them is that, you know, there has to be at some level a sense within all of them a sense of shame yeah now i suspect with trump there isn't despite i think the dark hole might be an incapacity to feel things like that but i think with most people there is and i think some of the some of those people that we may have seen survive scandal after scandal after scandal, I think shamelessness probably helps them in a way. But I found it really difficult. And I find, I mean, partly it's because I didn't, in quotes, think I'd done anything wrong. Yeah. But I could see, my rational mind could see why I'd become such a target. And therefore, but I did require a lot of inner strength during that period.

34:34And especially because. This is the Blair period. So 1997 to 2003, where you were literally right in the center of everything. And of course, you're dealing with all the fallout of the iraq war which of course begins in 2003 that was without doubt the worst period of the lot and and of course the reason why talk about per civilian relationships that was also the time at which largely for political reasons my relationship with fiona had become so strained because she was supposed to iraq war. Because she was supposed to Iraq war. She was, she, she couldn't understand why I was literally sort of working myself, you know, 18 hours a day to, to sort of support and project something that she felt deep down because we're so close.

35:21She couldn't quite believe that I would believe in this. Yeah. And she knows that I can only really work if i believe in something um and so it was really really hard but i think that it's a combination it's interesting it's so interesting talking to kim ledbeater and lindsey about how they get through sort of you know grief on an unimaginable scale and part of it i think is we all dig into those parts of our our character and our history that suddenly become relevant to it so i found for example on the on the day that david kelly body was found it was really interesting the sorts of people i felt i had to speak to and the sorts of people who got in touch. Suddenly, these parts of your life tap in in a way that says, oh, well, okay, maybe I shouldn't be thinking like that. Maybe I should get through this. Maybe I should keep going. I mean, what we're seeing here is that you're somebody who can be very thick-skinned.

36:27I mean, you often have an attitude towards media stories that far can ignore them. But you're clearly not entirely thick-skinned. I mean, there are things that you feel unbelievably deeply. And I wonder whether the psychotic moment or the way that you felt in 2005 reflect that you actually also can take things very very hard it's not it's not as simple as you just have a rhinoceros skin and nothing gets through it's it's certain kinds of so what do you think are the things that get through and what are the things that don't in this in what is it that really causes the the pain and the psychic trauma and what are the things that you feel you can just brush off and i think most media things i can brush off um i guess what that was speaking to was just a sense

37:15of my whole um i kind of knew i was coming to the end of a really important period in my life i sort of felt that for some time partly because the truth is that if fiona ever had said i'm going to leave you if you don't give up the job if she never said it in those terms i probably would have left the job and it's interesting i mean i talk a lot in the book about my psychiatrist who another death that that i took really badly because he was such an important figure to me because he was only somebody that I started to see long after I left Downing Street yeah I got through Downing Street without seeing anybody and he had this analogy that Fionn was like a fifth limb yeah so I guess that's that fear of loss I think is important in me um but I think the other thing is I have to have

38:03I have to have purpose and I have to have I think I probably do have a bit of a relevance issue. I have to be relevant in some way. Relevant to what or to whom, I don't really know. to us that he talked to Kissinger, which is an amazing string of name drops, and Kissinger had said the one thing he feared most was no longer being relevant. And Petraeus really felt this. I mean, he took that from Kissinger and is totally determined to remain relevant. In Kissinger's case, he tried to remain relevant until he was almost 100 years old. What do you think is going on there what what do you think this relevance thing is because of course it was quite dramatic you'd been right at the heart of everything from 97 2005 and then suddenly you weren't relevant no

38:54and it could have been coincidence and it could have just been the art of decompression after a very pressurized period but the the depression which followed leaving Downing Street was if I had to write by top three depression episodes that was yeah one of the top three yeah and I think it was this sense of well what's my purpose I've had a now my sister who's a believer Christian she would argue that's the whole okay that needs to be filled by god yeah and i've never even though as you know i'm very interested in god i've never been able to make that make that leap um and so no i think it's uh the honest answer is i don't know i don't know what it is but but i i've come to terms it, just as I've come to terms with my depression in different ways.

39:46I think I've come to terms with it. Because ultimately, I think everybody has a need to be relevant. So I could easily, at some point in my life, decide that relevance could be defined by family by parenting yeah by a charity job by whatever i could find ways of thinking that but i guess what it is i i think there came a point where i thought if i go through the various stages of my life education journalism politics i think the skills i've developed over the course of those three different parts of my life have kind of got a merit that I think I have a, this sounds a bit pompous, but I sort of have a duty to try to use them. I think if you just sat quietly and thought, so if you've seen me with people, if somebody asked me to try to help them sort something,

40:43my instinct is to try to do it. But also, for those eight years, it all came together. And there you were at the top of your game, bringing all those skills together. And then suddenly, quite young, you're sort of almost being put into a sort of retirement where you can't use all those skills. And I've never been that motivated by money. I don't mind making money, but it's never been my main thing. And I think, funnily enough, the books. I mean, as I say never been that motivated by money. I don't mind making money, but it's never been my main thing. And I think fun of the books. I mean, I've said 22 books. And as you say, a lot of the diaries, novels, I think the books are a form of this book

41:15really is about when I say it sounds again, it sounds pompous. The word the world needs now. And okay, that's a bit of marketing. But I actually think when I talk to, when I go into schools and talk to kids, I often think, you know, come on guys, you need a bit more, need a bit of marketing but i actually think when i talk to when i go into schools and talk to kids i often think you know come on guys you need a bit more a little bit of perseverance here you need to work out how are you going to work out okay yeah you're worried about this you're worried about what are you going to do about it i mean as you know i think young people get a very bad rep i think they've got a lot of challenges they're dealing with which we didn't have to deal

41:41with uh i think the world is a pretty messy place and a complicated, difficult place. And so that's partly why I love going and talking to them. I always get a kind of sense of energy off them. And I don't buy into the snowflake generation thing. But I still think that they, sometimes I think they can be given the message that don't always think that the problem that's in front of you has to be solved by others. Have your network. Reach out to them. But ultimately, there's so much you can do if you think deep in yourself. And so, you know, what I find with young people is that message lands. It's been really interesting. You know, when we did the competition for people to guess the name of the book, it's quite interesting that a sixth of them got it right. And I haven't mentioned it that much on the podcast. That's why I think it's the word the world needs now. and I guess this is probably true of all of us in different methods is that you're both

42:46a kind of tough guy and you're somebody who takes things unbelievably hard so it is this sort of odd combination where sometimes you're presented with an Alistair who's a very tough guy who doesn't matter what anyone does to him it has no effect on him and then on the other hand you talk very very honestly about episodes where you are completely thrown off balance more so than other people yeah and they're both they're both real yeah yeah they're both real i mean you know you you've seen me in situations where where somebody has a go yeah as long as i don't feel they're going to take out a gun and shoot me it just doesn't bother me. I'm happy to argue with them. I'm happy to walk away. I don't care.

43:28I once, and I think family is so important. I remember once saying, I can't remember where I said this, but as I said it, you know, sometimes somebody throws you a question and you formulate an answer in your head and it comes out. And after you've said it, you think, yeah, that was good. I like that. And there was once when somebody asked me, how do you cope? This when i was i was war criminal i was this i was that i mean younger listeners won't really appreciate just how much the mail the telegraph the spectator this lot just every day stuff coming at me and you know and people who say how do you including people in politics remember tessa john wouldn't say to me how do you, including people in politics, remember Tessa Jowell once said to me, how do you cope with this?

44:06And I remember saying to her, look, if I thought my mum and dad, who then were alive, if I thought they thought I was a terrible son, if I thought my kids thought I was a terrible father, not that I'm not there a lot, but I was a terrible father, and Fiona thought, on balance, I wish I'd never met him, as opposed to, on balance, I'm glad i did yeah i couldn't cope with that yeah so work at that and then don't worry overly about this and even when it affects i always used to say if it doesn't affect how i do the job and that would only have happened i think this is where tony blair's quite a good boss because i think he understood what was going on he understood they were getting at me as a way of trying to get at him and i understood that

44:47and he understood that yeah now eventually he may have decided look you know it probably is right that he goes but he tried to persuade me to stay but i knew at the end it was time to go and and i think that the crash that followed that was a in some ways a creator of the more per civilian approach that i took to this thereafter and that and so then what is relevance i mean i i remember saying to john prescott of all people and there was a point where gordon was trying to get me to go back and get a seat and do this and do that i remember saying to john prescott do you know what i never ever want to have a boss again. I never want to have a boss. And it's not that Tony wasn't a good boss. I just want to be my own boss.

45:32I want to shape my own life on my own terms. Now, some people might have said, that means I want to play golf three times a week. I want to go on 15 holidays a year. But my shape in my own life was, I want to do a bit of this and a bit of that and i want to somehow knit it all together and give it purpose how does the depression and the episodes that you write about in the book very well in the book um relate to doing the podcast listeners see you coming in week in week out three four times a week you've not missed a podcast in four years and yet presumably in the background there are four day periods where you're depressed there are days when you're more elated i guess what's going on there how's that all managed

46:19and and do you think that listeners know do you think the team knows or is it just something you keep to yourself and you notice after the event i mean what's going on what do you know do you think that listeners know? Do you think the team knows? Or is it just something you keep to yourself and you notice after the event? I mean, what's going on there? Well, why don't you answer? Do you know? Do you notice anything? Well, I notice that you can be sometimes very grumpy and sometimes very cheery. I notice that sometimes you will say, I think it was sort of beginning of last year, you said, well, you've probably noticed I've been pretty depressed for the last few weeks. And we didn't quite notice in that way.

46:51I mean, we noticed maybe that you were much more short-tempered, but not that you'd been depressed, right? You give me a very bad image of my profile. So I guess the question is, how does the outside world know, and how do you deal with that when you're working with a team week in, week out? Well, do you remember once, I think I was in Edinburgh and you were in Jordan, I think. Yeah. A few years ago now. And it was fairly early on. Yeah. So within probably the first year, maybe the second year of the podcast. And you started off literally by saying, know how are you yeah okay and you asked the question and i just said well to be absolutely frank don't even remember this i said i'm really not not very good and we ended up having quite a long conversation conversation

47:36i actually found that very helpful um i think when you say how do you deal with it, I don't want to come in. I mean, both Fiona and Tony Blair have often said to me, look, you've got no idea how you emanate a mood. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I'm not conscious of that, but I'm conscious of the fact that people say that to me. Right. So I don't particularly want to come in and have everybody thinking that I'm in a foul mood. So I'd rather say I'm in a foul mood because. Okay. And I wouldn't advertise to everybody that, look, I'm really going through a bad phase. But I would if I felt it was going to be relevant. The bad phase might mean, although you've come into the podcast and you literally haven't missed a single week, but you might have actually struggled to get up, bed in the morning, shave, open the curtains, and yet you're still turning up and doing the business.

48:34Yeah, I think it's more likely that I'll be feeling this is a struggle and this feels like a chore. So you would notice it more if you were with me afterwards. Okay. Because I would suddenly have an absolute energy slump. Okay. Because the effort when you're depressed to keep going in that way is really quite, takes a lot out of you. The people who really, really, really know me get it in the voice right and the eyes right yeah uh so and how are you at the moment i'm fine roy i am i'm fine i am fine uh i'm not sleeping well right but i think that's to do with and does that worry you sometimes do you i mean it's part of the problem of this condition that you can sometimes think oh i'm not sleeping well if i'm not sleeping well it's bad yeah yeah it is more likely a precursor

49:30rather than so so when i'm not sleeping well it's a warning sign it's a warning sign and it basically means just dial back a bit um so that and added to it i mean it's true like you know i know remember i don't think i say this in the book. I think I do. Where David, my psychiatrist, we used to talk a lot about my dreams. Yeah. And he mentions that you have amazing name dropping dreams. He said that this is the first time. What happened? When he died, his wife very kindly sent me a folder of all his notes. Yeah. And in one of them, it said first time ever thatcher blair venger and mandela all in the same dream but i do have you're all these strange i mean i do dream about donald trump and liz truss and you know i just do it's like I think, I think politics can get me down and affect my sleep.

50:27So, you know, but it's interesting what you say about the, because I honestly, I'm pretty good at the moment and I've had quite a long period. I actually think the podcast has been good for me for that because I think, I think forcing yourself to think in a structured way about a lot of madness going around you is actually quite a helpful therapeutic i don't know if you found that but i certainly find that um and i also think the fact that you know and you've it's weird talking to us because you and you've seen so much of this you know how i always feel that when you and i are out and about and people come up and say i love your podcast and i can always say i think in different ways we both find it a bit difficult don't really enjoy it yeah because

51:11to me doing a podcast alone does not fill the relevance gap yeah it's it's part of a picture yeah that if i do all the other things i can say yeah you've still got a bit relevant yeah one of the things that you've also begun to become very honest about is is not just yourself but children and being a parent so you've written very openly about callum's struggles with alcoholism and you've talked about uh him going Alcoholics Anonymous and what that meant. You've also talked about moments where he'd been dishonest to you, stolen from you. What does it mean to be percivalent, not just an individual, but as a parent? Well, that was when Callum was sort of descending into alcoholism. And by the way, I wouldn't talk or write about this

52:05if he wasn't happy with me so to do. And I think the reason he is quite happy for me to do it, he's not somebody who seeks the limelight at all, but he has just recovered, or he would say he's a recovering alcoholic. And I also write in the book about you can have institutional perseverance and alcohol is anonymous is just the most amazing organization and it's it's you know i think you could say it's been a lifesaver for him and he now gives an awful lot back he gets and he gives um and how did we get through that as parents it was really really hard i think the i think i don't know what you're like as a parent in terms of fixing but i think both fiona and i like to think we can fix any problem and i think the key a key moment

52:57really was when we sensed that callum was beginning to understand that he had to fix the problem but that he there came a moment at this rehab place he was in up in scotland where we sensed that his mindset on it was changing that was the key the key was not i was trying to fix it um but it was it was i don't know how we got through it to be honest it was absolutely hellish um neither of us were sleeping then and you were just convinced we were both convinced at a certain point, we're going to get a knock on the door. There's going to be a knock on the door. Something's happened. He's fallen in the canal. He's done this. He's done that. But he's amazing. And, you know, seeing him now, he's just sort of,

53:37you just think he's got perseverance, you know, to have been as low as he was, as addicted as he was, behaving the way that he did and now sort of doing all the stuff he does it's uh but it's i can't i don't know is the answer to the question you just have to dig really really deep into your own reserves interestingly one of the inspirations for the book you mentioned the archbishop he's got a right-hand guy who used to be at lambeth called chris russell who's also a man of the collar and faith um but he actually he said to me uh ages and ages ago you know you should write a book about you and fiona and how you've dealt with each other and so that's mainly that's partly why there's so much about the family through this because i think i think relationships perseverance is if anything the most important part of this um but i'm not

54:29pretending it was easy or that i've even really there's still a pass if i haven't fully come to terms with i think but um it's anybody who's ever watched that and and weirdly people always used to say well you had trouble with alcohol and you got through that so that must have been able must have been a help it wasn't it wasn't because i think i'm thinking i could fix this or you could fix this if only you did what i'm saying you should do and it's just the worst thing you can do in some ways like that well okay i mean this is a slightly awkward segue but i i guess it's something that you have talked a lot about you're very interested in i mean in that chapter on alcoholics anonymous you talk about another institution which you see as

55:10personal which is which is the monarchy and i think the chapter heading says what do alcoholics anonymous and the monarchy have in common um and i write about that in a way from because i'm trying to weave politics in and out of the book and i think i've said to you before that my first memory of a political row was with my mother when i refused to watch the queen's christmas message oddly sometimes i think your mother sounds a little bit it's a terrible thing to say to you but she does sound sometimes a little bit like trump's mother i mean she's who again famously was a scottish lady from from the western isles who loved my mother's from your father's from the western yeah yeah but my mother absolutely my

55:51mother was born in the same week as the queen right and she was called elizabeth right and she loved the queen very good absolutely love the queen but she loved she loved charles as well so it's your father's family that's more like mary trump's family my father's family i've got nothing in common with anybody who has the name trump uh but no but my my the thing about the monarchy is that so that was my first kind of sense of a political impulse you know why do i have to watch this woman who wears a crown and talks in this weird voice when i could be outside playing and how old were you then this rebellion six or seven right Right, okay. Quite young. It was definitely before 11 because we moved house.

56:30And I can remember the house we were living in. But I think the reason why I speak to your friend, King Charles, and the institutions per civilians is because I say in the book, look, there are only so many fights you can fight. And get rid of the monarchy. Give up. Give up. I love the moment where you did acknowledge that there are moments where you sometimes wonder whether a politician or a celebrity, it was necessarily what you want doing that role either. Yeah. Well, and yeah. Because I imagine your Republican thing is partly that you actually slightly resent the idea that there's any unelected person doing that role it wouldn't necessarily be much better if it was frank bruno or no i i think the thing with with the king and the monarch is is the sort of class thing and it's

57:15the toffery and all that but and the other thing look i love how many times we said this on the podcast i love good speeches and i love people who can make good speeches. And I have to say his speech in Congress, I think that was the moment where the doubts that a lot of people had that he could do the job after the Queen evaporated. And since then you've seen his own perseverance in relation to his health. So, yeah, I'm basically just saying, because it's interesting, one of the people who read the book at the publisher said, you know know do you think it's part of perseverance to know when to give up now instinctively i will say never give up yeah right but i think there is a point where you

57:55think listen you thought that you maybe campaigned for that bit you've written about it but now you've lost yeah it's not going to happen yeah they're going gonna be here at least well past your cell by date yeah so go fight about climate change or something else your mother would be very happy she would she'd be she would be really happy and i think that's the other thing about grief and death i think i don't know if you think you talk about your father who's dead i mean i think this thing about people who are dead still being with you when you're thinking through good things and bad things yes you talked to them about dead she yeah yeah yeah you stuff chats with them say what would you think if I'm struggling when I'm writing something I talked to Richard stop hmm

58:36hey what do you say here oh man he's called it every day come along man give me a bit of help my friend John Merritt who was married to Lindsay before he died i talked to him i talked to victor my old agent uh you know when i get when i get an offer on the book is that enough ed what do you think so imagine we'd say and he has got the best name drop i've ever had that's in the book alistair can i call you back i'm just getting on bono's playing with sure or was it sure playing with bono i can't remember one of the two one. One of the two. Well, let's get back to, as we come to the end, as I said, one of the things that you write about a lot in the book is death. It's quite a cheery book, though, isn't it?

59:15It is a cheery book. No, it's a good book. And it's a really thoughtful book. And I thought your passages on your friends and on Fiona were the best bits of the book and really powerful. But there's been a lot of death. I mean, you're not that old, but two of your brothers have died. A lot of friends. And a lot of friends. And we come back to them, we come back to eulogies, we come back to memories of people you care about who died. There's a question about relevance and Fiona and ageing that worries me, which is that one of the problems with getting older, particularly if you get older and you're different, you're going to lose your wife, you would enter a stage where you necessarily are less relevant

1:00:02because you're just getting older and uh where you're alone and that's something you do write about with it i mean tell us a little bit about your thinking on that because you you mention it in passing in the book no this goes back to david sturgeon and the fifth limb i i don't think i could well i know that practically i couldn't cope without fiona and i'm not sure i could cope emotionally either now the truth is i've been amazed i mentioned neil i mentioned stan turner who's a friend of mine he's the burning manager they both lost their wives and look neil is still grief-stricken okay but you've seen him a couple of times recently he's lively he's thoughtful he's energetic um Stan has become a great cook. I just don't think, I fear,

1:00:51and it's a fear, it's a real fear. So now as it happens, Fiona's amazingly fit and keeps herself amazingly fit. So yeah, that's a real fear I have that I would, that she would die before me. it actually makes me feel more comfortable about my own death now then something so what about her but the thing is i don't have any worries about fiona being able to cope uh you think she'll be okay i think she'd quite well oh quite a life uh how about old age and relevance i i sometimes feel when i see people in their 80s and early 90s, particularly people like you who've had very, very big public careers, that it can be a bit tough. I had a bishop say to me recently that he realizes now he's 90 that his whole life he'd prided himself on how quick his mind was on how smart he was and now he's slowing down and

1:01:53it hits him at the core of his identity now look i think if both my parents are dead neither of them had alzheimer's or dementia um i've seen quite a lot of people who do have alzheimer's and do have dementia i think if i went down that route i find it very very difficult um i think there is something about knowing when to stop now i say in the bio i will never retire and that is a mindset i have now that could change um but i think and it's not about being relevant the truth truth is that you mentioned Mandela. Mandela's relevant for the rest of time. I think that might be, I'm not putting myself remotely anywhere near the legal system. Let's just put that on record. You're not Nelson Mandela.

1:02:37I'm not, and I never would. But I think that the reason why I sometimes think that books are more important, say, than the spoken word, this may change as the technological revolution goes on, but I think books are an important part of enduring relevance. Your kids are an important part of enduring relevance. And I think sometimes your views can be. There are people who are hugely relevant in our politics that most of our listeners and viewers have never, ever heard of because we talk about their ideas but they're just their ideas that happen to become part of people's lives so i don't think it's and i i also think that i think part of what my struggle has been has been when you're defined as a journalist you define you are the political editor of the

1:03:20daily mirror that's your job you're defined by that you are the prime editor of the Daily Mirror. That's your job. You're defined by that. You are the Prime Minister's Press Secretary and Director of Communications. That's the definition. I think it's taken me a long time not to care too much about what the definition is other than to me. Yeah. So I don't care how I'm defined anymore. Yeah. I care about happiness that I hope I am building in the course of the rest of my life. Final one. For the reader of the book, for Perseverance, what do you think is the one message in that book which you wouldn't have been able to get to 30 years ago? Writing it today, what do you think the message is that reflects the Alistair of today, not the Alistair of 30 years ago?

1:04:07I think that the me of 30 years ago was relying almost entirely on instinct, as opposed to deep thought and trying to be rational about yourself. I also think that the reason why I miss David Sturgeon so much is that I felt that having somebody, I know you've done this as well, but having somebody that you could literally unburden yourself to and then spend a few days thinking about that and writing about that is what's made me i hope more reflective more reasonable i've still got a temper i can still fly off but i think i'm a lot more reasonable than i used to be i think i'm also in terms of the the positivity look there are still people who as you know we talk about a lot in the progress There are people I despise. Yeah, okay, but in the main I found that the me of today way more

1:05:11Than the me of 30 years ago can see the potential Positivity and perseverance in virtually everybody that I meet right? I think once you start to Think that there may be more to this person or more to this view than you initially thought, you can find that way. So I think it's made more positive. And so the message is that Perseverance is in everybody. In that sense, it's an optimistic? And who's a perseverant person in your life? Either your family or a famous person or a politician or a historical figure, anybody? You can't say Alexander the Great. I just, actually, you know what? I'm going to go with my mother. I think I spend far too much time praising my father. My mother is about to turn 91.

1:06:09And I don't know what it's like about to turn 91. She gives the impression that she is 70. I mean, there's just no change that you can see. And I imagine it must be often bloody awful being 91. And yet she gets out of bed every morning. She's got a huge smile on her face. The whole thing seems effortless. She can fly out to Jordan to babysit. She can come out to down to London when show and I are traveling. She's supporting local charities, supporting the local church. She's editing books and she never gives the hint that there could be something wrong but i'm pretty sure that there's quite a lot going on beneath the surface and that's real perseverance very good very good who would i choose who's there's obviously there's tons and

1:06:59tons of people who are in the book um funny if i was going if I was going down the family road, I'd go with Fiona's mum, who is 101. Now, I can't pretend she has a smile on her face all the time, but she's bloody amazing and she still plays the piano and she still follows the news and has views and so forth. So I think that there is a positive to aging uh which maybe i'm starting to think about more than i i used to i think you have to look at all the people that i've kind of looked at in the book i mean the reason i've dedicated the book to fiona and lindsey fiona because she's put up with me but i think lindsey's perseverance and she's one of the people, but I think Lindsay's perseverance,

1:07:47and she's one of the people I've interviewed with, along with Kim Ledbeater. I don't know if she's lost her husband, then lost her daughter, breast cancer, car accident, then lost her job, second marriage went wrong in really horrible circumstances. And yet if you bumped into her on a train and just chatted to her, you'd think, oh, she was really nice. She was really positive about life. So yeah, I think I'd go with Lindsay. Very good. You know, it's interesting. One of the people involved in the process said it's kind of, it is a memoir, but it's not a memoir. It is about politics, but it's not really about politics. It's partly about politics, but actually ended about saying, I tell you, I get the guy yesterday

1:08:30who's read the manuscript as part of the publication process who said, thought I'd just let you know, I've just done my first half marathon and I was inspired to do it because I read about who, how you tackled your first marathon. So there's a bit of kind of, it's not, I don't want to see it on self-help. Right. Don't want it there. Well, actually, I don't care where it is. But it's like, it's a mix of all those things. And then, of course, there is a very, very powerful political message as well. I actually say, I wrote this as it was at the printer. I had this postscript thought you probably haven't seen this because I think I wrote this after the proofs went to you and it basically says you'll have heard us talk a lot about the three p's on the podcast populism

1:09:16polarization and post-truth I've got my three p's now can defeat those three p's it's perseverance people with principles ah the new three p's very It's perseverance, people with principles. Ah. The new three P's. Very good. The positive. Well, let's finish with that. Perseverance, people, principles, but particularly perseverance. Thank you, Alistair, very much. Now, I would like you all to join me on Sunday night for a special virtual gathering, 6.30pm UK time. To receive the invitation, sign up to our newsletter at therestispolitics.com forward slash newsletter, and we'll send you the link on Sunday to join us. I'll be talking to Izzy Stanley, our journalist on trip, about why I came up with the word Percivalient, why I've written a book about it, how it shaped my life, and who

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