YouSaid · the spoken record

Catherine Ashton

lines on the record: 57
first: 2023-09-10
most recent: 2023-09-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Think the EU has sometimes given them all an excuse not to do the work. You know, they have to do the work to get in. I was very clear that it would take them years because you've got to do the work. You can't just get in. You've got to have done what they call the acquis. But it means your laws have to be the same. People have to feel when they come to your country that they're in part of Europe, not in a strange part of Europe. So the work has to be done. And some of them are very slow at doing the work. And I would get very cross with them about that. But they also could turn to the EU and say, well, you're not interested. And it kind of let them off the hook. So for me, it's about all of those things marching together. And actually Europe, I think, is now moving again to say we're going to get them in.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But every word of it they wrote. It's theirs. They have to sell it, not me. It doesn't belong to me. Doesn't belong to anybody but them. Because if you're going to go home and say, I have sat with the devil, I have signed an agreement. You've got to, A, believe it, and you've got to be prepared to sell it to people that will not respect you, admire you, and probably hate you. And that's what I think the job that I saw was my job was to make it happen, to bring everything I could to bear on the problem, to bring the 28 countries with me, to give them what they wanted, the real soft power of the EU getting closer to Europe, the opportunity, but to make sure that I wasn't the person that was leading it. They wanted to call it the Ashton Agreement. And I said, absolutely not.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the book is my homage to what I think real diplomacy is, which is it's quiet, it goes on, it takes its time, it keeps going. It's drip, drip, drip, it's small interlocking moments that create the opportunity. In the Serbia-Kosovo dialogue, there were two things that I took into that room. One is this was their negotiation, not mine. My job was to help them, to be there every minute. We met for 14 hours at a stretch. I never left them. I was always there. I was always willing to help, but it was their discussion. And I allowed them the space and freedom. And I did not breach anything from that room. I also made it clear that it was their negotiation, so the document that was written, the Brussels Agreement, I typed it because I was a faster typist than anyone else in the room.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yes, I do hope there's a change of government, and I hope it's a Labour government, because whatever else, we need change now. I'm hoping that when they look at what needs to happen economically in this country and in terms of its standing and in terms of who we are and who we want to be and the pride that we should have as a nation and our place in the world, that when you look at and unpick all of that, you end up with the obvious conclusion that we have to be much closer to Europe. I'm not saying we should jump back in. What I dread is the idea that we'd have a second vote and a third vote, then a fourth vote, and every five years we go in or out. No, we need to settle this in terms of our future in a much more sensible, rational, thought-out way. But there is no question that we cannot get the economy to where it should be without a better and stronger relationship with the European Union. Full stop. And therefore, that has to be part of any serious and sensible government.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A free press, you don't have the rule of law, you don't have things operating so that you've got real choices. You're not just trying to work out if you've ever heard of anybody on the ballot paper. It's not enough. And although you can't delay that part of democracy, you've got to think about it and think about it carefully and properly. So that was also very much in my mind at that time.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was an extraordinary period, and I've written about particularly Egypt and Libya. But we were watching this dramatic, this heidal wave coming across essentially parts of the Arab world. We didn't really know what we were looking at, that it felt good, you know, you stood in Tahrir Square and people were coming up and hugging me and they were forming political parties and they were going off to do things. And it had that headiness. There's a real sort of almost something you can taste in the air when you have a sense of revolution and change. But it never stays like that. And reality kicks in or people find themselves at loggerheads. There are those when change happens. This was certainly true in Libya that don't want what we want. They're not looking for a democratic future. They're looking for an opportunity to take power. So that starts to play into it. And back to my deep democracy point that everybody, the minute there's a dramatic change says what we need now is an election. And I used to say to them, elections are the cherry on the icing on the cake. They're really, really important. But if you don't know who you're electing, if you don't know,”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I find it quite hard actually when I travel around because, again, a couple of things strike me. One is how irrelevant we are. You know, we're not part of the conversation in many parts of the world. People don't ask what the UK thinks. I go to conferences where Britain just doesn't come up at all. And yet we'll be talking about huge issues where you would expect Britain to be recognisably a player. And I also think there's a sort of disbelief about us that we've kind of cut ourselves off. We're not able to do the bridge, not just from the US to Europe, but I also think from the Commonwealth to Europe and the Commonwealth to the US. I think there was a bigger role that we've also lost.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said to my office, do be a favour, just ring up and see what that is. There is an EU regulation. It's based, I think, probably on a British one that says you can't put babies in freezing cold water. The boiler had broken, the swimming pool couldn't work that day. They couldn't afford to fix it, so let's blame the EU. And you thought, well, there's a group of Brexiteers from then on. In other words, if you take something that people don't understand, we merrily talk about travelling across Europe and being able to work or study or whatever for many people that's just an unrealistic idea. It's never going to happen. What they worry about is they're here and now. And that was what they thought they were trying to address. And so what I felt when people voted was a deep sorrow because when I think about the economic hit we've taken, it's not going to help them get better access to the things that they need.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You saw that people were looking for an answer. Life had got tougher. They were worried about their families. They were worried about accessing the health service. They couldn't get a GP appointment then. They couldn't get a council advice for their kids. They worried that maybe that was because people were coming from overseas, particularly from Europe, that it was out of control. And they didn't see any of the benefits because we have never told them the benefits of being in the EU. And I'm going to tell you a tiny quick story. This is true. When I was an education minister, I went to a place, it doesn't matter where, in England. And I noticed a group of mums and dads with small babies outside a swimming pool in the town having an argument clearly with the manager of the pool and a big sign that said baby pool closed due to”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can feel empathy. It doesn't mean I think these people are right, certainly true in the case of the Russian foreign minister. There's a degree to which understanding why people think what they do helps you deal with them. It doesn't mean that you don't recognize how dangerous or difficult or in many cases of people I've met across the world who are just simply horrible some people are. In the case of Brexit, what you saw was, I think, two or three things. One is a great slogan, simple slogans for difficult problem.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was talking about places far away, not about Britain. I do say at the end that I was the first woman that Britain sent to the European Union. I did not expect to be the last. And being the last is a new kind of first for me”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the European Union often fails to recognize its own strength. I felt this when I was there and I think that hasn't changed. It's this massive economic superpower. It has brought together 27 countries with roughly the same ideals. I know there are big problems with Poland, with Hungary and so on. And there's always an election somewhere in the EU. I used to say every day, which means there's always a risk of something going wobbly or terribly wrong. But fundamentally, it's moving in a direction slowly, sometimes faster at other times. Look at how many countries want to get into it. They know that their economic security, their peace and their prosperity lies within it. And look across the world at organizations that are coming together to sort of look a bit like it. Institutionally, it can get a bit complicated, but then you're bringing 27 cultures.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bearing in mind that the Taliban is not, as you know, one thing, it exists in different forms with different leaders more radical than others, more pragmatic than others. And you need to put the time and effort and work into trying to do something because we have generations of girls and women to rescue from this, frankly, and we have to start somewhere. So it's not enough to me to, and you certainly don't do this, but many do, to sit and look at it and say it's awful and kind of wander off. We have a lot to do to try and work out what actually could make a difference because we can't stop and we can't give up on them.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sanctions are important because they're a statement to ourselves. But you're right, it's about looking at who gets affected by them. All countries want to need something. No country can solve any issue by itself. Simply impossible. You can't deal with pandemics or trade or dealing with security or any issue alone, even Afghanistan. So I think what I would be doing is starting to try and work out what they need and want. And then we start to look at, well, what does that mean in terms of what could be done?”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a real risk of that, Rory. You're right, and that's partly because we don't have a response to it. And then what? You know, we don't know what to do. We're not doing much around the challenges, for example, in Sudan that we've seen. We don't have answers. And I think particularly we tend to move now to saying, oh, I know what we'll do, we'll do sanctions. Sanctions were a means to an end, not an end, but we keep looking at them as if having put sanctions on something, we've somehow solved the problem as opposed to doing what they're supposed to do, which is to at least stop it getting worse.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are under attack and that's why it needs to be really deep. It needs to be. Able to sustain. So when I look at, you know, even in European countries, you see it wobble about.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Democracy's not finished anywhere, right? And it's not a straight line. You don't kind of merrily go down the path of democracy and it's all lovely. It weaves about. We elect strange governments. We have funny coalitions. We get presidents unexpectedly. And the point about what I call de-democracy is that the underpinning institutional framework, you know, civil society, free press, trades unions, business able to operate, rule of law, all this stuff is what keeps that democracy in the end secure.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said at the meeting that President then Sarkozy called in Paris, it wasn't about just protecting the people of Benghazi, important though that was. It was about the end of Gaddafi. And that moved it into a different place. And there are those countries, those leaders I've met, not just Russia, China, but across the world who would say this is what you do. You take a problem, you decide to get rid of the people in charge with no plan for what comes afterwards, and then you leave chaos. And there's a sense that you hear that repeated, unfair and untrue or whatever you want, but that's what they think.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the Russians and Chinese abstained on the vote on Libya, the UN. This is huge because the assumption had been they would potentially veto it. But actually, I've always maintained that they did so because of the pressure from the Arab League. Both were very keen to have very strong relationships with Arab nations. And the Arab League had absolutely come out 100% in favour of a no-fly zone and in support of what the UN resolution was saying. And I know that because I traveled via the Arab League to the UN. So I think they were much more swayed by that. But it became in the mythology that Russia created particularly, that Medvedev's then president had taken this decision. Putin didn't agree with it. Putin thought that it was the wrong decision. And that was in part to play to your point that we then went further than the resolution.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I could see, he described Maidan, and it wasn't that the people weren't there, but how he saw them and the role they played was entirely different.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Book about meeting Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia. At a room in the house of the Russian ambassador in Madrid, I flew quietly to go and see him to ask him because one must recall at the time they were our partners in the Iran talks. So I was moving from the Iran talks. So we had an ability to talk to them that we've subsequently lost. And I said to him, Sergei, what on earth is going on? And his description of what he saw was like Alice through the looking glass completely different, a reverse image. And you, again, you always have to begin to...”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saw somebody who Me too strong impressions. One is entirely transactional. Europe was useful as long as Europe was useful to Russia and useful to him. He didn't care about the development of Europe except in the context of how it affected Russia. He didn't have a sense of being part of something bigger. He did believe passionately in Mother Russia that this was a country that was great and he was determined to make sure that people understood it. And what I saw in the context of Ukraine was somebody who simply could not believe, never mind accept, that Ukraine could conceivably look in any other direction for its future than to Russia. And the only way that that could happen was because it had been somehow taken over. And this was not only true for him, it was true of people around him. And again, I'm talking.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very nervous about looking into the soul of anybody. It's an interesting concept, but one has to be a bit careful because what you see is what people choose to project. What I do think, and I would say this about Aung San Suu Kyi, who I met many times. I was in Myanmar a lot, and I went back to see her at her request after I left office, is that we often don't understand two things about the people we're looking at. One is that they don't look at the world the same way we do. They look at the world from where they came from, who they are, their perspectives, and what looks like a very obvious approach to us is not to them. It's not to excuse them, just is. The second is that they're dealing with a world that is not going to allow them to do the work or do the things that we think they should do as easily as we might do.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He is. And of course, one of the things that again, if you're working on negotiations or mediations with countries that have been through war and chaos, you're not dealing with people who are nice and easy and have no history. I don't know the truth of his history because I'm assuming that all the evidence has been collected, all the information is based on the testimony of people who we all know in that region went through terrible times. I wish they'd get on with it because I think it's important If justice is to be done, it needs to be seen to be done. That really matters to me. But all I would say is when you are dealing with solving problems at the end of a war, you are not going to be talking to people who sat back and did nothing in that war.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their countries. They were sitting with the devil. And yet they sat together. And from that moment on, I knew that we would be able to do something.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in Serbia and Kosovo, they were a series of leaders who were prepared to actually do something. It was not massive. But it was about sitting in a room together. So imagine you have two prime ministers, Prime Minister Thatchi from Kosovo, Prime Minister Dacic from Serbia. They've never met. They're the same age. They live a few miles apart. They come into my office. I pull all the blinds down because nobody can see this. They are both sweating. They are both absolutely terrified. And I'm absolutely convinced one of them's going to run down the corridor and disappear. They didn't. They came in and they sat down. A translator each with myself and a senior official. And I described this meeting in the book. But the tension was palpable. You could feel that for them this was a moment where both would be declared to have betrayed.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to remain popular. So doing nothing is a great solution to that. Don't rot the bolt, push the problem down the road. The really fantastic leaders are the ones who are prepared to say, actually, for the future of the country or the reason I was elected was to do something”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Managing, right? And then what is, I'm not going to do anything that's going to rock my boat. I'm going to keep my party or my coalition or whatever it is.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the agony of choices was particularly obvious in the Serbia Kosovo dialogue because you know a lot of leaders as you well know fight really hard to become leader when they get there and it's likewhe done it and then they just spend their time”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stole the slogans, simple slogans to difficult problems, and made those simple slogans really easy for people to understand and made it really easy then for people to say, well, this didn't work, this lot didn't do it. They have nothing to say. What about this?”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I spend time even now talking to former colleagues or people that I work with. Often we talk about this, what do we get right? What do we get wrong? What did we not see? And I do think that there is something about the financial crisis and the failure of a sort of what I call a centre-right, center-left perspective on what should happen. Nobody went to jail. People felt that we just covered it all up, that lots of people lost their homes. Lots of people lost their jobs. A lot of things went wrong and nobody paid the price, as it were. I think the follow on from that, which in our country was austerity, but in other countries was a variety of different approaches. And the inability really to have a narrative, which I think is something that always troubles me about what I call the centre ground or the centre of right center-left, we don't have a story to tell people about what we're doing. We just have a staccato set of policies or ideas. And that meant that populism”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Plus Germany, it was P5 plus 1. But the point was The five permanent members stuck together for years and agreed what they were going to do and didn't waver from it. And that's when you think about the situation we're now, seems almost impossible. And yet that's what we did. And I chaired for four and a half, five years of this, how all those debates between the countries as well. So that felt the heaviest.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one that felt heaviest to carry was Iran. Because it was not just on behalf of Europe, but it was for the UN, it was the only negotiation ever. Were the five permanent members work together? That's France, Britain, the US, China.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problem at the moment is that it depends what day of the week it is. Sometimes when the House of Lords has been spending huge amounts of time, as it has, for example, on the whole question of migration and small boats and all of those issues, then they get a lot of praise from a lot of people for taking the time to scrutinise. Wherever you sit in that debate, you can't argue they haven't scrutinized it better. The comments And then other times people just say, well, look at them all. All these people that kind of come in, they're all able to claim this bit of money. They're all doing this other jobs and so on. And it looks like something that is completely out of control. And again, we're back to, well, what do we wanted to do and what should it be thinking about?”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not going to do that. What is it going to do? Should it be a pre legislative scrutiny? Should it look at bills before they become bills, if you like, make sure that they've got sense in them? And should they look at what happened afterwards, which is something I feel really strongly about. We don't look at whether it worked, what we tried to do. Or should it do something else? And once you've identified what it's for, then you can decide who ought to be in it, whether it should be a little Senate of clever people or a big group of people who bring a certain group together for a particular reason. Should it be fully elected? Should it be representative of the regions and the countries and so on? But we always begin the other way up. And that's what I think why we'll never get there.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've served on at least one commission about reform of the House of Lords when I was leader of the House of Lords. And my problem is we always start from the wrong thing. We start with form not function and we should start with function. What do we want it to do? Do we want it to duplicate what the House of Commons does, in which case you run into the eternal problem that the Commons does not want to create a house that is of equal value because it will challenge the Commons. So we never find a way through to do the changes.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mine is that all prime ministers need in the House of Lords a cadre of people of the right age and energy to be persuaded to become whips and ministers because whereas there may be, as you know, Rory, five or six ministers for a department in the Commons in the Lords as one. So they carry the legislative burden and all of the questions and debates. They obviously don't have a constituency. So it's not the same job, but it's quite a big job. And I always say to people the difference between the laws and the commons is when you're doing a ministerial job in the Commons, everybody behind you wants your job. When you're doing a ministerial job in the Lords, nobody behind you wants you.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I grew up in a village. My dad particularly came from an extremely poor mining background. His father had died in the mines. Only in my 50s did I found out that he had a number of brothers and sisters who'd all died as teenagers of illnesses like TB or because of the work that they were doing because he didn't really talk about it. And he had managed to stay on at school and got a degree at night school and became an engineer, civil engineer. So I came from a background where my parents wanted me to go to university because they felt it was really important, particularly as a girl and a woman, that if I wasn't going to just end up doing a job in a sense that I was capable of doing a lot more. So they pushed very hard for me to go to university. And I was the first woman in my whole generation. Of women of that particular time to go.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think over the years, I would say that I've very definitely believe in disarmament, but I think how we achieve it certainly now will not be through any individual action. It's going to have to be through the work that goes on in the UN. One of the things that was really interesting for me to do, though, during the Iran negotiations was to go to Hiroshima and lay a wreath.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particularly in the 50s and 60s after you started to see the proliferation of nuclear weapons, lots of different organizations sprang up across the world and CND was the British equivalent. It had at its heart the concept that Britain didn't need its nuclear weapons and they didn't make it safer. And that was defined as unilateralism, I suppose, which was very controversial of itself. People sort of divided into different groups unilateralists, multilateralists, or people who felt...”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know us because he said the 80s and the 90s are the 70s. I'm older than my first job out of university was CND, yeah, for sure. And that was, again, almost an accident. Somebody showed me the advent and said, you know, you'd be good at this. And I can't pretend that I was knowledgeable or in any way. But they seemed to think that I might be able to do something useful.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particularly in the 80s, I worked with business in the community and I did a lot around Caulfield communities, economic regeneration, and then work on disability issues, issues for women, issues for minority ethnic groups. We set up different organizations and it was part of getting the public-private partnership to exist before the early 80s. It didn't exist at all. So that was a big focus. And it was in that capacity when I was doing all that, that I met young politicians, one Tony Blair, one Gordon Brown, to talk to them about what was going on and what we were seeking to do because it was unusual and it was about moving particularly business away from just the charitable part of its functions, important others are, to being really engaged with their own communities.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things I say to students, I'm Chancellor at Warwick, and when I do graduations is remember the job that will demand most from you may not even exist yet. And that's a direct reference to the fact that that was certainly true for me. Always wanted to work in social policy. For me, the thing that made my life interesting was trying to work on issues that affected people and especially issues that I saw of social justice. And that's not to be high fallutin about it. It's just that those things mattered enormously.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When that article came out, I cut it out and carried it round with me for weeks. Because it was the first time that I'd seen something where people accepted that just maybe. Were wrong, and maybe I had been able to do something, and you know, when you've got years, months, years of people just telling you you can't do it, that you're rubbish, that you look awful, that this, that, the other, when you suddenly see something unexpected like that, it was a real, for me, a really important moment.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but my paper doesn't like you. If I write something nice about you, it doesn't get printed. I don't get paid. And one journalist does a little tiny story, once wrote something about me having my watch on British time that proved that I was really thinking about my family, hence the misogyny bit is quite right, rather than the job.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does it drive you crazy when you get to see the film? And I sort of felt like that, that everybody loved this high representative is going to be this big new foreign minister. And then this sense of who? What is she doing in that? And I understood that because actually I didn't think that I should be cast in that either. I didn't for a moment until the day I was appointed expect it to happen. So I did understand it. What hurt a lot was there seemed to be a sense that I wouldn't be given the chance to even show that I could do something. And a lot of the ways that journalists operated, particularly in Brussels, meant that, as they said to me very openly, many of them were stringers, they only got paid if they got something in their newspapers. And I had 28 countries plus all the rest, second largest newsroom in the world after the Pentagon, I think. And I said, why did you write that? You know, it's not from this.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I tried to rationalise it at the beginning by saying it's a bit like when you read a book and you imagine the characters in your mind. So everybody thinks they know what Harry Potter should look like or Aragon from Lord of the Rings. And then when you make the movie and you cast the wrong actor.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To put the lid back on, it's going to take decades to solve it. So one of my pleas is that we think much, much longer term about these issues.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We try and grapple with the immediate consequences to stop things getting worse. We sort of put a bit of sticking plaster or a bit of a lid on the problem. And then we move on because the next one has appeared. And one of the things that I've tried to tell in the seven stories I tell in the book that are aimed at people really who are interested in foreign policy but haven't lived it, as it were, is to show also that while you're dealing with one, you're dealing with the other, that they don't come one after the other, they come all together. And that means that you're moving around trying to do as much as you possibly can. And then what came from me saying, it's not enough to sort this problem for the moment. And then what? What do we do next? How do we stop this getting worse? And then how do we make it better? Problems take decades to emerge. They bubble up and then explode. Why do we think it's going to take us six months?”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About their own The point was that for me, I mean, everything you said, I couldn't agree with more, that the challenge really that I see in diplomacy is that you're faced with a crisis. Well, the reason it's a crisis is because you don't know everything. If you know everything, it wouldn't be a crisis. Might be a problem, but it wouldn't be a crisis. They seem to come out of nowhere.”
2023-09-10 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 35. Cathy Ashton: Dealing with Putin and Lavrov, Kosovo–Serbia, and 'radical humility' · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source