Yeah, great. Okay, great. Is that that that is working for sure. Um, so I think we'll probably might as well get straight into it because I think there is a little bit of time pressure. Um, so yeah, great. Um, I was struck by the cover of this week's new statement which had Andrew Mah saying he was wrong to think that the UK could be a haven of peace and stability after the last election. And now we have even Mah uh saying that the British political establishment is collapsing and that Britain has become ungovernable. You have been very ahead of the curve in talking about the collapse of the British political establishment. So what is the big picture reason for why politics has been so crazy in the last decade? Uh so I think that um the kind of the big picture historical uh process is if you look back over the last couple hundred years in European history, you see this process repeatedly um whereby every kind of 30 or 50 years or so there is crisis and there is regime change. And the fundamental reason for this is that what happens is you have a set of elites with a set of ideas and a set of institutions. And gradually over time the gap between these elites and their ideas and the institutions and reality the gap gets wider and wider. And in the end the elites and the institutions fall down in that gap. Uh that process you see h play out over and over again. Uh that's the process I think that's playing out now. If you look at a sort of obvious example, right? If you go back to the 1840s, you can see the generation that won the Napoleonic wars created a whole new system. By the time they get to 1840s, they're thinking our ideas don't seem to work. The kids have gone crazy. The universities have gone crazy. There's all these new technologies. The international systems falling apart, etc., etc. Then you suddenly have revolution in 1848, new countries created. By the time you get to the 1870s and nature and doses and everything, it's a completely different world has emerged. The same process is essentially happening now. The old generation of the war has died out. The institutions post 1945 are all crumbling. Those ideas, institutions cannot cope with the forces operating in the world and therefore the more they act often you see just the more they drive themselves into crisis. >> And I mentioned um Andrew Mar quite deliberately because I'm interested to know what role you think um establishment media and some of our legacy institutions have played in this. >> So I think if if you if you So go back 200 years, right? Essentially no mass media. Fast forward over the next century or so, you have the telegram, you have the emergence of like mass media tabloids in the late 19th century. Then you have the cinema, radio, TV, and you get to kind of the 1950s and you have kind of peak centralization in various ways, right? So a figure like Stalin or the head of the BBC or the head of NBC news or something can create consensus reality for hundreds and millions of people. Stalin can delete someone from the encyclopedia. The BBC can decide X is a fact or true and everyone and you know all the people with degrees run around and just accept that that that's true. That world uh you can see it with say Walter Kronhite in the news, right? Walter Konite stands up in 1968 and says the war in Vietnam's lost. Everyone goes, "Oh my god, the war of Vietnam's lost." Well, the Kong guides told us so. That world starts to fracture a bit, but then in the from the early 90s, it really starts to implode. So now you got the internet completely breaking all of these centralized institutions. So centralized un so universities the old centralized media the old government bureaucracies all of these old institutions are now exposed to this incredible new scrutiny and hence the collapse of experts right everyone can now look at oh Harvard professor X of misinformation believes completely insane things about digital advertising or whatever it might be >> and um so with that um sort of fracturing and everyone uh being able to come at alternative sort sources of media and without there being one sort of fountain um of uh information. Um what ideas do you think that were once widespread or even ubiquitous do you think that will come apart or are starting to come apart already? I guess um well so like one obvious uh one big one I guess is the EU right the idea that the EU the European project is this great modernizing force um a force for technological development a force that's going to um help quell any kind of extremist politics this was extremely widely believed this idea obviously is is cracking up I think the whole concept of the rules-based international order that was so prevalent um and connected did the idea of this kind of inevitable globalization, the spread of free trade, the shift of manufacturing to China, all of those things. That whole set of ideas I think is cracking up. The whole set of ideas around diversity is our strength. Britain is a multicultural integration success story. Uh that is obviously um that idea is cracking up. Um, also I think the kind of economic consensus in the country as well between, you know, if you ever spent like an hour or two looking back at elections in, you know, 20 years ago, the kind of things that Cameron and Blair and co um or George Osborne argued about, it's just sort of completely trivial. It's sort of comical to look at their election campaigns now, they're essentially just agreed on all the most important things. Um but that economic consensus is also obviously cracking up because we've got unprecedented stagnation in wage growth etc. Yeah, it's like economic consensus like the rest is politics political um consensus. But um you've been writing about >> Rory of course is a is a good example of right. So Rory Rory champions pretty much every idea which is dying. You'll find >> you'll find Rory and Campbell um pretending that through an act of of sublime will they can turn the clock back to 1998 with Blair and Blair and um and and and Clinton back in charge. And one of the reasons we know it's not quite 1998 is because of just the openness I think with which everyone is talking about white hall meltdown and white hall dysfunction. Now you've obviously been writing about that for over a decade. Um what do people here what can they look at? What are the most striking examples of that white hall dysfunction to understand why it's happening? Um so I mean if you look at uh COVID right I think one of the most striking things about COVID is um not not so much like the obvious failures but the way in which the successes were immediately closed down because the successes were extremely embarrassing for the system. So vaccine task force um the sewage monitoring rapid testing all kinds of things that built which were then copied by many many countries around the world. Whiteall regarded this as absolutely humiliating for the old system. Therefore, immediately closed everything down in 2021. Um, you can look at drones in the Ukraine war. You know, before the Ukraine war started, lots of arguments. Some people in this room um were part of the argument with me trying to persuade the MOD and others invite all the change on that. it it you can now see for three years the whole drone revolution happening on YouTube but the mod's got even worse. Um you can look at the small boats you can look at the grooming gangs um you can look at procurement fiasco after procurement fiasco. I think I think the kind of overall most important lesson though is the old system just kind of ignores all of this, right? It's it's it's past caring. So, you know, 30, 50 years ago when you'd have one of when you'd have one of these disasters, there would be a lot of actual interest in the ideas involved in what went wrong and the actual government processes of what went wrong. But if you look at them now, it's like the old system just has no interest in actually facing up to the reality of these things and instead just circles the wagons and says, "You're either with us or against us." Um so yeah in different ways all of those different different examples show different different particular things but there's an overall pathology which is common across all these institutions now. >> So the pathology of um failing to build on successes or actively suppressing them and also ignoring things that have gone wrong um obviously both seem quite illogical. What are other things do you think that this audience might think to be true about Westminster politics or just assume to be true which doesn't happen? >> Um I guess one one big thing is that so this is a weird one where actually the less educated and the less attention you pay to politics you are the more likely you are to be correct and vice versa. So the more the richer you are and the better educated you are the more likely you are to be wrong. So I noticed amongst the richest, most successful people an assumption that highlevel political people spend huge amounts of their time on ideas on how power and government really work and what idea time is not spent on that they spend on trying to win elections and all of that is essentially not true. if you could like film number 10 or any government organization or political party that you'd be completely astonished how little interest there is in ideas, how little interest there is in power and government and how and how they're not even trying to win the election. So if your model is these people are trying to win the election, how do you explain the Biden White House completely um dismantling border security at the southern border at 2021 2023, right? It makes absolutely no sense. Similarly, if you think that Kiestarma is trying to win the election, then nothing that he's done pretty much in the last 12 months makes any sense, right? You come in, you immediately do winter fuel payments, which is not on anyone's priority list apart from a few officials in the public spending team inside the Treasury. Um, so that's that's the kind of the standard model for how politicians spend their time is just not correct. They essentially spend their time chasing the new cycle and on internal faction fighting and on short-term career prospects and that's what dominates everyone's time. >> Yeah, I think the winter fuel cut payment is actually a good example because even though in some ways it's it's a sort of relatively um small thing in the course of things it did do Labour Party so much damage. I mean in focus groups even in the last couple of weeks people keep bringing it up and one thing I think about when I because I spend a lot of my time talking to the country in focus groups talking to ordinary people and um it seems to me very very clear when the government should change direction or when politicians should change direction and it always I'm always caught out by how long it takes them to then actually do it. >> Why is that? I think it goes back to what to to what I just to what I just said right that the internal processes of Whiteall and Westminster are just incredibly internally focused. So they can just keep they can keep doing things because of internal arguments that make sense in the department or in the party or in or amongst the MPs in parliament. Um, and that that the kind of reference point for reality is if if your reference point for reality is that then you're completely you just you're constantly going to be completely out of whack with the public, right? And we've seen that repeatedly over over the last uh over the last 10 years. No, in the referendum, I mean, as they say in Moscow, thank God for fools. But repeatedly when we did things, you could see the remain campaign in Cameron just do the exact opposite as if they were just essentially doing no market research at all. But but the more stupid the thing was that they did, the more it was praised by the most high status pundits. And that is and that's another thing. If you take the opposite example, I'll give you one example, September 2019, right? Where we fire the 21 MPs to try and like force the whole crisis through on Brexit. That was seen in by the whole pundit world as quote completely insane unquote. But as you know and everyone doing focus groups said at the time voters loved it. Finally someone is actually trying to solve the problem and firing people. That never happens in Westminster. Hooray. So I think it just completely depends on where you're where as an individual in an organization you're orienting yourself to. >> Yeah. Is that that's actually I was doing focus groups when um it was a really interesting direct comparison. There was um a time when uh Kier Stalmer got rid of Corbyn from the Labour party and then that same week Rich Rishi Sunnak could have accident um could have actually voted against Boris Johnson in the party gate inquiry and I had voters in front of me uh saying that you know it's about time that Richie Sunnak took charge just like Karma and fired Boris Johnson and that was how they saw it. It was such an amazing missed opportunity and that's actually when some of their um they started to cross over and things like best PM was because it was such an obviously um missed goal. Silver on the boats, right? I mean why did Sunni twist and turn and screw everything up on the boats the way he did because he could not orient to what do the voters think? I've told the voters that I agree with them that the boats are stupid and I'm going to stop them. instead he then spent a year twisting and turning in response to pundit world and the internal faction fighting of his own MPs. >> Yeah, exactly. Um what So we're thinking everyone's talking about um already talking about what's going to happen at the next election which is sort of mad um just because everything is so instable and in flux and because Karma has had such a bad start um to this time in government. But what do you think is going to happen um in the short term and medium-term I guess up to 2029 and actually are we right in thinking it's going to be 2029 or do you think there is a decent chance that it will be earlier? >> I suspect that it won't be earlier just because um the MPs will punt off the the the nightmare that's coming for many of them. Um so I suspect it'll the the night our nightmare the country's nightmare will drag on to 28 29. I think um I think most of the current trends will just continue, right? I think that elite polarization will continue. I think you'll you'll see more and more defections from elite world to people agreeing with um what you might say like the outsider perspective. Um but at the same time, you'll also see more and more of the insider world, the kind of blue sky world, let's call it, double down on no, we are right about everything. We have to go back to 1998. we have to just explain to the public why they're completely wrong about immigration, more taxes, more power for the old system, etc., etc. So, I think that process of elite fragmentation and polarization that we've seen in America and see across Europe, can't see what force will stop it in Britain short term, that will carry on. Um, I think label will keep losing votes to the Greens and everybody apart from the Tories. Uh I suspect the PM star will be um got rid of next year. I think obviously Kem is going to be got rid of after the May elections. I think the big the crucial question is there. So the country's never been so disgusted with politicians and so much desiring a genuine change of direction. Right? Why did we win the referendum? Because we said change. Why did we win in 2019? We said change. Why did it star win in 2024? He said we're in a change. So people want that. There's, you know, 20 million people who who want that and there's more and more elites defecting. This event shows that process also also underway. I think the big question therefore is um like what what political force going into the 29 election can mobilize this energy both the mass energy and the changing energy amongst amongst elites. who can actually build on that and turn it into a political movement for the for the election. >> And who at the moment do you think is best placed to do that? What do you think who do you think will be the front runner to do that? >> So my hunch is that that so far obviously has a huge opportunity to do this, right? I think um if Farage had already set out uh uh a kind of recruitment path and said here's how the old systems failed. Both the old things are knackered. Here's how I'm going to take the country forward. Here's how I'm going to go around the country. I'm going to recruit 600 MPs. I'm going to recruit these here's the 10 people on a stage with me person. Each one of these men and women is obviously better than any of the useless people in Labor or Tories put up in the cabinet shadow cabinet. If he'd gone through that process or does go through that process over the next few months, then you obviously have to say that he's in the driver's seat, right? He's already in the lead. And if he can build a great team, that's what the country is looking for. Because the big doubt about Farage is well like I agree with him on immigration but he's one is it a oneman band with a packet of facts on an iPhone or can he actually be a build a team and and actually control number 10. If he goes down that path that will obviously hugely improve his chances of winning. If he doesn't though, I think um uh I think that I think the combination of public disgust with the current situation and this elite fragmentation process epitomized by the LFG event that's going to find an expression somewhere. >> So the old things are sinking. Can Farage tap into it? If he can't tap into it, I think that someone else will create something to do that. And of course, Toy Party might not even even exist in any meaningful sense a year from now, right? It's right that close, possibly even past the event horizon of death. Um, so it could be that like this time next year, the toy parties essentially closed down. A bunch of them have gone to Lib Dems and some of them have splined off all over the shop. >> Um, and when you talk about that sort of building a team, do you envision that as being people that are in politics already or necessarily people from outside the system? >> I think it has to be outside the system. Right. I I think one of the fun I mean you know if you just look 200 years ago we facing Napoleon we had pit 70 years ago facing Hitler we had Churchill now we've just gone through the trolley truss sunnak and stalmer with ministers like Hancock right something has gone drastically radically wrong with where elite talent spends its time in this country and um central to us turning politics around has to be a process of getting some of the extraordinary people we've got in this country spending less time on venture capital, less time in your tech startups, less time thinking about how to build a trillion dollar robotics company, and more time spent, I'm afraid, for some of you, um, going into Whiteall smashing heads together and sorting out things like procurement. >> And are there any other necessary preconditions for regime change? And also do you think regime change now has to come from the right of the political spectrum or is there an avenue for it to come from the left as well? >> It could. I mean it could right you see in the states you see Mandani and AOC and whatnot. That's where the energy is. Old Democrat party is d old old Republican party dead replaced by MAGA. Old Democrat party dying clearly being and all the energy is with the kind of crazy kind of crazy commies, trans activists, Gaza um Gaza people. Similarly here you can see um the kind of LGBTQ Hamas++ brigade. That's where the energy is here too. You can see that with the greens. So I mean that's already happening. I think here um I think that the big precondition for real regime change right is when the left gets into government it collapses because its ideas suck and don't work. But the right has been hopeless of political warfare for the last 150 200 years since kind of the modern world came into being. The right mainstream right has been extremely bad at coping with it politically. What's needed is a mix of a plan, a campaigning machine that can change minds and a talent acquisition, hiring network system that can bring in elite talent. Now, that process um is something which the left has always been much more effective at. If you go back over the last century or so, you see this process whereby smart able people on the left go into journalism, uh they go into academia, they go into government, they go into public service, they go and end up taking over all of these bureaucracies, right? But in the right, they've increasingly deserted all those institutions and gone off to be private researchers or run hedge funds or whatever. Um, so some new political thing, if you're gonna have real regime change in 2829, someone needs to build that machine that can be a communications vehicle, build an actual real plan and then pull the people into it. >> Thank you. And then um, finally before we wrap up, uh, are you overall are you pessimistic or optimistic about where things stand? >> O, what's that famous line about? um pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. I guess that's sort of where I am. I mean, so the the black pill is normally historically these crises are not no one gets ahead of them. They tend to just blow up in blood and disaster and that's when regime change happens and the new people take over. It's very hard to get ahead of these historical processes and the right has been hopeless in politics. I guess a white pill is that Britain is has avoided serious violence and a kind of meltdown for the last 200 years. So while continental Europe has had this constant churn of regimes, the British system has creaked and trembled but has managed to adapt. Fingers crossed that we can do that again. I guess number two, we've got extraordinary people uh amazingly given that we've butchered so much of elite education, but the country does does still produce a lot of extraordinary people. And I think um and I think events like this also I think for me are a white pill. Like I could never I tried to organize events like this when I was doing the referendum and failed. Tried to organize events like this in 2019 in the second half of 2019. We were trying to solve that whole nightmare failed. The flip side of a crisis is that able people come out of the woodwork and suddenly the famous Trosky line um you might not be interested in war but war's interested in you. Well, the same applies to you guys and to politics, right? You a lot of you wanted to do spend your time doing other things, but politics is interested in you. So, that's a white pill. >> Yeah. Brilliant. Thank you very much. Nice to know. And end on an optimistic note. Great. >> Thanks, Scarlet. >> Thank you. >> LFG to the max, everyone.