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Jonathan Powell

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67
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2023-05-29
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2023-05-29
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  1. “No, I don't think it was 13 years. You count the opposition too because it's all the way through. In fact, a number of friends of mine, I had a friend who had been Chief of Staff to Vacc Havel. He said, what you need to do as I approach the end of this period, knowing I was going in 2017, you need to go and see a psychiatrist because the down from this is going to be terrible. You're going to crash and you're going to be in awful shape. And I didn't go to a psychiatrist. And it didn't happen like that at all. I woke up the next morning to the news that someone had tried to bomb central London and I thought, why is no one called me? And I thought, I don't have to worry it's not my problem. And it was a blessed relief rather than the other. So I didn't have a crash and I didn't have a crash afterwards, so I was very lucky from that point of view.”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, I think that's actually also a danger. You correctly point that out. There's always a danger that if you don't have time to really consider things, if you're operating on five or six things at once, I always remember I have an ancestor very tenuously connected ancestor who was one of the four knights who murdered Thomas A Beckett. And I always thought of my job is don't do that if Tony says go and execute the Bishop of Canterbury. Think twice before you do it.”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I can't ever remember anyone's name. When I meet them, even though I've met them 15 times, so you sort of lose that sort of memory. So I used to have a diary because anyway I could actually remember anything as I wrote it down.”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “For example, coming over here to Northern Ireland and trying to negotiate while knowing what's going on in Iraq, trying to get back before the war starts when the plane being late and I'm not going to get in on time, trying at the same time to do with a minister resigning somewhere else. So you've got all these things going on at once.”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “As long as it stays about five or six. Strange thing happens to your mind actually doing that job. I think I have the world record of being Chief of Staff in a Democracy because going through from when I started fraternity until the end, certainly by comparison with the United States, where they really never last over four years and rarely over two years. And that is that your mind grows so you can deal with five or six really big things at once. But what you lose is the forward and backward bit. So you lose your memory before that. It's like stretching your muscles in a particular way. And I think that's what happened to me”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I quite like you. Yeah, I quite like the adrenaline rush of having at least five or six things going on at once. So, yes, I think that's probably a personality type.”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Used to think I actually relished when I had latest crisis, you see. He could see me coming down the corridor about to tell him some ghastly thing that had happened. Peter Mandelson was going to have to resign or whatever it was. And he said, there's always a grin on my face. And he believed that I actually enjoyed having these crises. Maybe there's something to that.”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I was thinking what Tony said about me was that what he liked about me was that I was provincial. I wasn't a Londoner, someone who came from the provinces like him. And so I didn't have a Londoner's natural sort of feeling they should be governing. And then he called me Essence of New Labour, which I think is probably about right, because Alistair is much more old labour. That's why you could do something like work with Gordon Brown afterwards. Whereas I was all new Labour.”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “They're all sort of slightly sort of overly smooth extroverts. You don't come across sight that. You seem to be a slightly different personality type, is that right? Oh, I'm definitely a different. That's actually why number 10 under us worked and why it doesn't work under quite a lot of other people is that we were very complementary people. I didn't want to do Alice's job. Alistair had no interest in my job. Neither of us wanted to do Angie's job. So we were very different sorts of personalities, actually. And that's why I think it worked. And how would she define your”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “It depends what you're measuring by Alice, by your standard. No, I'm sort of a pretty weak liquor, but I'm definitely not a Tory. And Jonathan something that Tony Blair spotted in you brought you in to be chief of staff and you remained all the way through. I think you're probably the only chief of staff who's done a full 10-year prime ministerial term, I guess. But you're quite different to the rest of them. I mean, I obviously spent a lot of time with Alistair, spend quite a lot of time with Dave Miliband, see a little bit of Tony Blair.”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “He did the shadow agency for Neil Kinnock all the way through. Yes, no, he'd always be my sort or role model. That's why I wanted to go to LSE and do economics because Chris was a huge.”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “He calls himself Pole because actually that's nearer to the correct Welsh pronunciation. It's a Welsh name which is Apuel. What did your father call himself? They call himself Paul because he wanted to get it spelt properly, a sensible way to do it.”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “But it wasn't issue. I remember going for an interview for a job with Douglas Heard to be his private secretary. And he interviewed me and said, I don't think we can do this. It's the Powell Pole problem because my brother called himself Charles Pole. And he couldn't have the idea.”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Exactly, but I was able to predict his future, but it's simply because he was the easiest person to get on the campaign bus with. And so I went on his first campaign visit to New Hampshire in 1991 and minibus. We all went around. He kept stopping at McDonald's and then stayed with him campaigning basically for a year. And the very odd thing about all this is when you were serving in the Foreign Office during the 1980s, your brother Charles was Mrs. Thatcher's foreign policy advisor. Yep, Charles went to work for Mrs. Thatcher number 10 in 1983. Was there the whole way through and then stayed with the first year of major when he took over from Thatcher? So there you are as a permanent civil servant, increasingly drawn to the Labour Party, and your brother is absolutely the power behind the thrones sitting in Ten Downing Street under conservative prime ministers. He was, but he was a civil servant. He was a diplomat. He never became political, but he was very, very close to Thatcher. And I don't think he probably could have stayed in government after Thatcher left not very long anyway. And he left soon after that.”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “In the front office from the late 1970s. Had found yourself in the embassy in Washington. First came across Tony Blair. Was that your first time you met him? Yes, no, I joined the Foreign Office in 1979, and then I was posted to Washington in 1991. And actually, the interesting thing about going to Washington in 1991 was my job was to follow the opposition candidate around an election campaign. There's been a job doing that since the Second World War. And when I came in, George Bush was at 75%, George Bush the Senior, after Gulf War. Everyone assumed he was going to win. There was no chance the Democrats. The candidates running were called the Seven Doors because everyone was waiting for Mario Cuomo to come in on the Democrat side. And I had to choose who I was going to follow, and I decided to follow Bill Clinton because he'd been at my college at Oxford. And this later led to me having a reputation for being a brilliant political prognosticator because I couldn't.”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Oh, you crossword from me. That's not my thing. I don't do that. But Jonathan, let's get a bit of a sense. Since your childhood And how you got into the foreign office? I was very conventional middle class kid. My dad was in the Air Force. I grew up on Air Force bases in Singapore and around the world and then back in the UK. I went to boarding school, was hoping to go to LSE and do economics, but instead went to Oxford and did history. And then I went into journalism briefly when I left, well, first I went to a scholarship to America, went to Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania. And then I got a job working for Radio 4, and then I went to work for Granada with days of Tenny Wilson and got to meet the Sex Pistols. Was that as big in your life as Alistair meeting Brittany? It was much more important than meeting Brittany because I was much younger and much more impressionable. And Tony Wilson was God at that stage in charge of Manchester and the whole Manchester music scene. But my parents didn't think that was a proper job. They didn't have a pension. And so I applied to join the Foreign Office and got a job in the Foreign Office.”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “No, no, no, that's not true. No, he called me after he became leader during the summer, late summer, I think it was, and said, will I come over and talk to him and be interviewed for the job of chief of staff? So I said, yes, okay. And I flew over. And then I had to fly back, but I was going to host Gordon Brown when I got back. And when I got to Heathrow, I discovered Ed Balls and Gordon Brown waiting for the plane. And I couldn't run into them because then I'd have to tell them I'd be meeting Tony Blair. So I hid and then got on the plane at the last moment.”

    2023-05-29 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 20: Jonathan Powell: How to negotiate with terrorists · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source