Addiction, Breakdown and Finding Persevilience: Rory Interviews Alastair

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 wonder if that's what spin is part one is 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 is politics with me alistair campbell he's 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 perseverance one for example i think is fairly obvious david blanket former senior cabinet minister very good friend of mine and who has been blind all his life also talked to a former footballer clark carlisle who was a very good player played in the premier league not least with burnley but 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 uh and this will be our our first interview when the series goes out with kim ledbeater who rory and i have both interviewed on leading uh 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 lindsey nicholson who was our accountant 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 uh an important part of the book so i shall now shut up and let rory take over this episode is powered by fuse energy most energy companies are counting on you doing absolutely nothing not questioning what you're paying not switching just letting your tariff roll on which is costing you hundreds of pounds every year but the apathy goes deeper than our bills we've almost given up on energy itself we seem to all be accepting energy is expensive the system's outdated but that complacency is costing us fuse energy does not accept that because the energy transition is not something that just happens somewhere else fuse is building an energy company which is designed to bring down the cost of energy and right now its tariffs are up to 100 pounds below the off-gem price cap so 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 fuse energy.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 fuse energy.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 center around this word perseverance when did you first have this word when did it first occur to you when i was writing a book about depression and and there are some themes that if people have read my book on depression i've written two now they're happy depressive i guess that's a perseverance 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 i 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 is more positive and then it was actually a publisher who said look i love your word and you keep banging on about how you'd like to see it in a dictionary write a book about what it is and what it means and and just before we sort of get deeper into your personal life tell us what you think this word is saying um 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 no i think if something needs doing you need to sort it out try and sort it out and if you can't move on to something that you can sort out i 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 kia starmer lasted two years and tony blair lasted 10 years is that kia 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 not to wallow in them not to moan about them but genuinely how do you deal with them and how do you deal with them and how do you deal with them to try to address them and then for a government 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 they do they do um and i it's interesting when i was talking to fiona whilst 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 might we're going to be interviewing for the series but also lots of other 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 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 has to be there have to be values and integrity at the heart of it um so i would argue that why why do i say that trump is on one level per civilian 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 per civilian to say i'm just never going to admit that i've lost i'm going to pretend to have one and eventually i'm going to persuade enough people to re-elect me and it's incredible and it's it's something that you get to in farage as well and i i sort of sensed in people like list trust too there's a sort of relentlessness in these politicians that they never accept that they've lost i think you point out that farage failed to be elected eight times or something astonishing they just keep going they keep going and now i think with trump it's almost an illness that because i think he believes he didn't lost 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 showman 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 have i talk about 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 so they're they're the kind of basic qualities but 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 let's take nigel farage who you know reasonably well and 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 that the sunny face that we see is conceding the fact that he's not going to be able to get out of bed in the morning that it even for him must be pretty painful often i mean thankfully 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 you'll see though i don't think he'll be too effective by all the bad headlines and i think he sees the positives everywhere so i mean i say in the book in the book you know he had he had that plane crash came out smiling he had that car crash came out smiling all those defeats i'll show you and i think you need that relentlessness funny enough i've just seen we've just fiona and i just been to see the de gaulle films which i really do recommend to everybody they're absolutely superb but the second one a lot of the focus is on this general leclerc and one of de gaulle's generals free french and he's got it he just so he and okay it's a film but it's romanticized or 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 has he actually says at one point to achieve anything in life you have to be obsessed now that may or may not be true but i do think an eloquent and a very intelligent man who's a very intelligent man who's a very a very intelligent man who's a very intelligent man who's a very intelligent man who's a very 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 yeah but i got quite a lot done and maybe i don't know are you suggesting that our idea that um the best kinds of people to get things done are always balanced work life balanced 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 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 qualities 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 uh 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 she's always just like 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 too much to come yeah me it's less about what's gone it's what's to come um but then so then i said we sat down and had a cup of coffee 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 she 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 it and i like 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 a 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 um 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 uh frontline politics i've i'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 and all the sort of team around him we work 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 interesting 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 marin 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 madness 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 five 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 the 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 um 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 uh these people that we're talking about ranging from you to you know i don't know the ceos of a big company are role models in the sense they've achieved 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 like nelson madela 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 who has something like mandela i mean 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 um one of our fiona's oldest friends is the daughter of joe slovo who was one of mandela's key people in the in the anc and you know if you talk to i'd look i've never met mandela's children to talk to them but i wonder how much they think because 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 jail fighting a bigger fight yeah i know i know children are 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 we're not going to be able to do anything about it 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 and their kids are both great steve is now in the cabinet and rachel is one of my favorite people yeah on the planet and rachel has once said to me that you know we look to you and fiona as role models of parenting what i was saying what and i'm 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 etc 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 my role model i want to follow what you've done or whatever So I don't know, but I think that I do think think that this what i define as this perseverance the ability to to have a sense of who you are what you want to achieve in life and just to keep going there's gonna 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 uh 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 all of whom knew that something had happened that something 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 you exactly what happened is that something you're not comfortable talking about i mean 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 what did you believe well it was a psychotic episode which depending on who you talk to but the psychiatrist who diagnosed me when i was so i was arrested because i was behaving strangely up in scotland and what were you doing i was sort of um what was i doing i mean it definitely been built up for a while it's funny how the same people come in and out 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 is probably the reason why i should never have gone in the first place it was politically troubling me nobody in the labour party would have anything 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 out fiona and i'd fallen out i'd moved into the office and i'd been working flat out and i'd been working flat out and i'd been to 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 rothschild 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 round they were going off to the scottish labour party conference via this visit to rothschild to see gordon and his agency then a young mp and i just got stuck on this roundabout round and round and round and round and round i then dumped the car gave the keys to a guy at the naval dockyard yeah you 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 was jeremy deeds jeremy 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 sunny why is it spelled wrong s-o-n-y s-o-n son you're a 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 you think you're being punished your mind is being punished you're being punished you're being punished your mind is just on this constant loop you when i when i remember when i got arrested and i was driving in the back of this car in the back of taxi in the back of no in the back of a police car and these buses were overtaking me and i was trying to these anagrams of the of the the name of the bus driver of the coach company so your mind's just losing control and 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 you're not conscious that you're not conscious that you're not conscious it's not real or you totally believe it's real it's hard to explain uh you think it's real but you are constantly testing everything that it's communicating to you so you know as you know i had 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 kilt 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 dead 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 talk 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 is elvis presley singing or isn't he singing he's not i'm hearing it okay um i've had massive rows in the office well i know the office is not there so 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 because the other complication it was that it was the day that olaf palmer the swedish prime 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 kuhner we better keep an eye out for him okay i think so there's some weird guy who's trying to get too close to kenny yeah yeah yeah and i was and specifically what i was doing i was emptying my pockets and my bag on the floor and i think i was starting to take my clothes off right 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 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 do you keep talking to me whether i'm all right you know you know then 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 point about perseverance yeah 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 yep 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 a 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 previous few weeks fiona's not going to stick with me and am i going to be able to do this and i'm not going to be able to do this and i'm not 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 of death i thought that is and so sorry i mean that can sound strange people is it that's you had an idea of who was going to kill you or how no no no no just you would be you would be killed yeah and then and on the professional front i just thought you know i was probably a bit cocky and arrogant anyway so 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 you know 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 yeah i'm not going to say oh i was a bit stressed i was just i'll tell them yeah and within a few weeks no a few months i was able to laugh about it um and who was the editor who took you back richard stott richard stott so presumably that that is a big thing oh huge huge act of confidence in you totally yeah because he's the guy who told me not to leave the paper in the first place and then he was the first person who phoned me up who was any offer he said listen let's stick on him for a second because we you don't talk much about richard stott um 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 um i just wanted though to to touch on the 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 hospitals 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 people going through that and and who comes through it better and who comes through it worse and you know when is the moment at which people are just like screw it i'm gonna bury myself and never appear again and how do you come back it's interesting how many people in politics don't do that um funny enough when i was going through the mill 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 people the opposition are calling you to resign and the press are digging into every aspect of your life and all that fun of when that was happening i was hanging on to my breakdown and i was saying very very consciously this is not as bad as that 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 uh 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 um profiles of cowardice by jacob weisberg i think he's a goodness okay and he's picked on these eight people who he says as examples of people who've enabled trump even okay though that he knew him to be a complete monster and knew what was like to happen and he sort of goes through the reasons why 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 survived scandal after scandal after scandal i think shamelessness probably helps them in a way um but i found it really difficult and i found what i find i mean partly it's because i didn't 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 and especially because this is the blair period so this is the blair period so this is the blair period in 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 percivalian 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 you were 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 she 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 um suddenly these parts of your life tap in in a way that says oh well okay maybe i 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 i mean you often have an attitude towards media stories that 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 of my whole um i kind of knew i was coming to the end of a really important period in my life i'd 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'd ever said it in those terms i probably would have left the job if she'd ever 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 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 fiona 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 i have to have purpose and i have to have i think i probably do have a bit of a relevance issue yeah i have to be relevant in some way um relevant to what or to whom i don't really know yeah well i remember um david petraeus uh saying i think to us that he talked to kissinger which took an amazing string of name drops and kissing her had said the one thing he feared most was no longer being relevant and portray us really felt this i mean he took that from kissing and is totally determined to remain relevant in kissing his case he tried to remain relevant he was almost 100 years old yeah um 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 and 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 my top three depression episodes that was yeah one of the top three yeah um 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 with it just as i've come to terms with my depression in different ways i think i've come to terms with it i because ultimately we all i think everybody has a need to be relevant so i could 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 yeah that i think i have a this sounds a bit pompous but i sort of have a a duty and to try to use them i think if you just sat quietly and thought so if you you've seen me with people if somebody asked me to try to help them sort something yeah my instinct to try to do it yeah 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 yeah and then and then 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 fun of the books i mean i've said 22 books and as you say a lot of the diaries with novels i think the books are a form of this book really is about when i say it sounds again it sounds pompous the word the world needs now 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 a little bit of perseverance here you need to work out how you're 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 with uh i think the world is a pretty messy place and a complicated difficult place and so that's why 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 don't have to worry about what the world is going to be like they don't have to worry about their future they don't have to worry about what the world is going to be like they don't have to worry about what the world is going to be like they don't have to worry about what the world is going to be like they don't have to worry about what the world is going to be like they don't have to worry about what the world is going to be like they don't have to worry about what the world is going to be like they don't have to worry about what the world is going to be like they don't have to worry about what the world is going to be like they don't have to worry about what the world is going to be like they don't have to worry about what the world is going to be like they don't have to worry about And I guess this is probably true of all of us in different methods, is that you're both a 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. Yeah. I'm happy to argue with them. I'm happy to walk away. I don't care. Yeah. I, I 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 you've, somebody throws you a question and you formulate an answer in your head and it comes out. And after you said anything. Yeah, that was good. That I like that. And there was once when I, somebody asked me, how do you cope? This was 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 Jowell once said to me, how do you cope with this? And 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 is 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. And 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 in some ways a creator of the more per civilian approach. I took to this thereafter and that, and so then what, what is relevant? So, 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. I 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. Yeah. Or, you know, go on 15 holidays a year. Yeah. 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, how does the depression and the episodes that you write about in the book, very well in the book, 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 does, how's that all managed? And, 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? Do you, do you know, do you notice anything? Well, I noticed that you can be sometimes very grumpy and sometimes very cheery. I noticed 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. I mean, we noticed maybe that you were much more short tempered, but not, not that you've been depressed, right? You gave 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, do you remember once I think I was in Edinburgh and you were in Jordan, I think it was a few years ago now and it was fairly early on when we, so within probably the first year, maybe the second year of the podcast and you started off literally by saying, you know, how are you? Yeah. Okay. And you asked the question and I just said, well, to be absolutely frank, I don't even remember this. I said, I'm really not, not very good. And we ended up having quite a long conversation. I actually found that very helpful. Yeah. Um, I think when you say, how do you deal with it? I am, I don't want to come in. I mean, both Fiona and Tony Blair have often said to me that 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. Right. So I'd rather say I'm in a foul mood because. Right. Okay. Yeah. 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. And a bad phase might mean you've, although you've come into the podcast and you literally haven't missed a single week, but you might've actually struggled to get up, bed in the morning, shave, open the curtains, and yet you're still turning up and doing the business. Yeah. 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. Yeah. Get it in the voice. Get it in the voice. Right. And the eyes. Right. Yeah. Uh, so. And how are you at the moment? I'm fine, Rory. 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, is, is part of the problem of this condition that you can sometimes think, well, I'm not sleeping well. If I'm not sleeping well, it's bad. Yeah. Yeah. It, it is more likely a precursor rather 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, and, and added to it, I mean, it's true. Like, you know, I don't remember, I don't think I say this in the book. I think I do where David by psychiatrist, we used to talk a lot about my dreams. Yeah. And in, he mentions that you have amazing name dropping dreams. That's one of them. Yeah. He said, he said that this is the first time though. What happened when he died? His wife very kindly sent me a folder of all his notes. Yeah. And in one of them, it just said. First time ever Thatcher, Blair, Venka and Mandela all in the same dream. But I do have these strange. I mean, I do dream about Donald Trump and Liz Truss and I just do. It's like, so I think, I think politics can get me down and, and affect my sleep. Um, so, you know, but it's interesting when 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 therapy. I don't know if you found that, but I certainly find that. Um, and I also think the fact that, you know, and, and you've, it's weird talking to you like this because you, 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, oh, 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 because to me doing a podcast alone does not fill the relevance gap. Yeah. It's, it's, it's part of a picture that if I do all the other things I can say, yeah, you've still got a bit relevance. Yeah. One of the things that you've also begun to become very honest about is, is not just yourself, but children and being. Being a parent. So you've written very openly about Callum's struggles with alcoholism and you've talked about, uh, him going into 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, that was when Callum was sort of descending into alcoholism. By the way, I wouldn't talk or write about this if he wasn't happy with me. So to do. And I think the reason he is quite happy for me to do, he's not somebody who seeks the limelight at all, but he has just recovered or is, you know, he would say he's a recovering alcoholic. And, you know, I also write in the book about, you can have institutional perseverance and Alcoholics 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 really 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 um but he's amazing and and that you know seeing him now he's just sort of you you just think he's got perseverance you know 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 lambert called chris russell who's also a man of the collar and faith um but he actually 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 pretending it was easy or that i've even really still passive i haven't fully come to terms with i think but um it's a 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 perspiring 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 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 the scottish lady from from the western isles who loved the queen my mother's reversion it's your father's from the west yeah yeah yeah but my mother absolutely my mother was born in the same week as the queen right and she was called elizabeth right and she loved the queen very good she absolutely loved 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 have got nothing in common with anybody who has the name trump uh but no but my my the the thing about the monarchy is that some 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 with this weird voice when i could be outside playing football and how old were you then this rebellion six or seven right okay yeah right quite young it was definitely before 11 because we moved house and i can remember the house we were living in and um but i think the reason why i speak to your friend king charles and the institution's perseverance is because i say in the book look there are only so many fights you can fight and get rid of the monarchy i give up i i love it 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 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 the 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 i'm basically just saying because it's interesting one of the people who read the book at the publisher said you 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 think 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 to be here and they're going to be here and 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 is you talk to them a lot don't you yeah yeah yeah you just have chats with them say what would you think if i'm struggling when i'm writing something i talk to richard stop hey what do you say here old man he's called it every day come along man give me a bit of help my friend john merrier 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 of the two well let's let's let's get back to as we come to the end um as i said one of the things that you write about a lot in the book is death and it's quite a cheery book though isn't it it is a joke it's no it's a good it's a good book and it's it's a it's a really thoughtful book and i thought your passages on your friends and on fiona were the best bits the book are really powerful but there's been a lot of death i mean you're not that old no but two of your brothers have died a lot of friends and a lot of friends and we and we come back to them we come back to eulogies we come back to memories of people you care about who've died and there's a a question about relevance and fiona and aging that worries me which is that um one of the problems with getting older particularly if you get older and like your dear friend you'll kind of lose your wife you would enter a stage where you necessarily are less relevant because you're just getting older and uh where you're alone and that's something you do write about with it and 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 turnan 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 uh his side sort of i just don't think i fear and it's a it's a real fear so now as it happens fiona's amazingly fit and keeps herself amazingly fit um so yeah that's a real fear i have that i would that she would die before me is that it actually makes me feel more comfortable about my own death now then something said well 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 go 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 it it hits him at the core of his identity now look i think if both my parents are dead neither of them had alzheimer's 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 the truth is that you mentioned mandela mandela's relevant for the rest of time yeah um i think that might be i'm not putting myself remotely anywhere near the league let's just put that on record you're not else i'm not i'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 also think that, I think part of what my struggle has been, has been when you're defined, as a journalist, you're defined, you are the political 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 communication. That's definition. I think it's taken me a long time not to care too much about what the definition is, other than to. Yeah. 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? I think that the me of 30 years ago was relying almost entirely on instinct, as opposed to deep thought and being, 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 positivity, look, there are still people who, as you know, we talk about them a lot in the podcast. There are people I despise. Yeah. Okay. But in the main, I found that the me of today, way more than 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 me more positive. And so the message is that perseverance is in everybody. In that, in that sense, it's an optimistic book. It's a book encouraging people to find their own perseverance. So, come on, Rory, what does perseverance mean to you? And who's a perseverance person in your life? Either your family or a famous person or a politician or historical figure, anybody? You can't say Alexander the Great. I can't say Alexander the Great or Theresa May. So I'll go with my dad. So my father, 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. And 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 she 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 Sho 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? Obviously, there's tons and tons of people who are in the book. 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, which maybe I'm starting to think about more than I used to. I think if I had 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 I've interviewed with along with Kim Ledbetter. I don't know if she's lost her husband, then lost her daughter, breast cancer, car accident, then lost a job. Second marriage went wrong and really horrible. Horrible circumstances. And yet if you bumped into her on a train and just chatted to her, you'd say, oh, she was really nice. She was really positive about life. So yeah, I think I'd go with Lindsey. Very good. You know, it's interesting. One of the people involved in the process said it's kind of, it's not, 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 who's read the manuscript, was part of the publication process, 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 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 the self-help section. 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 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, polarization, and post-truth. I've got my three P's now can defeat those three P'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, particularly perseverance. Thank you Alistair very much. Thank you. Now, I would like you all to join me on Sunday night for a special virtual gathering 6:30 PM UK time. To receive the invitation, sign up to our newsletter at therestispolitics.com/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 Perseverant, why I've written a book about it, how it shaped my life and who has it. I'll also be taking in your questions. Hope to see you there.