YouSaid · the spoken record

Lionel Barber

lines on the record: 66
first: 2020-12-01
most recent: 2020-12-01
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

“Manvin has been a real pleasure talking to you and to the audience. Thank you for your questions. Thank you for your interest.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“1919-2020 no, one and a half years, well, four and a half years, but for sustained reporting to bring that company down and expose a two billion pound fraud. And yeah, I felt good about it. And yeah, we did champagne, even under lockdown. Post lockdown. Post lockdown. Just want to say...”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“big investigative story, and I personally edited it, and you know, we named the person who's now on the run somewhere in Russia or Belarus this Austrian, by the way, very strange that Wyakard, the great German successor, was run by two Austrians. I said that and had a few jokes in Germany as a result. But the wire card, you know, they immediately they put lawyers on us, they put the, you know, we were investigated by the regulators of criminal complaint, and it cost us several hundred thousand pounds to defend ourselves throughout that period, and yet that first piece named Jan Marseillek, and we were never sued for libel. By the way, there were PR companies, I'm not going to name them, that were just in the swill, getting loads of money off Wirecard. I mean, it was appalling. And it took two and a half years.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I was really proud of that because the pressure on us, I was very proud, I just want to say President's Club where we exposed this appalling, privileged elitist club in the Dorchester, which did raise a lot of money for charity, but basically took advantage of young women. They were groped, manhandled, propositioned, you know, the black time men only dinner, and we exposed it. It's the only time I ever agreed to send a wonderful reporter Madison marriage undercover to actors a hostess and she witnessed it, and we blew the story sky high in it. You know, we took a lot of credit for it. But the real one was wire card because, you know, that was Germany's great text story. We've been following it Dan McCrum, the great reporter who led on that story for several years. I always liked to take a big interest in every single.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“all your time. I always used to say we focus on our knitting. We do what we want to do and by the way we're going to do some really brave independent journalism and that's what we're going to focus on. But did I feel occasionally, you know, what the Sunday Times did on Philip Green? Yeah. Did I sweat about that and did I feel sore about that? You bet because the story was in front of us and we didn't get it. You bet but I didn't spend all my time looking over my shoulder.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't look at spend my time looking over my shoulder anything, and I was very privileged in terms of, you know, the owners didn't second guess me. I was completely free, based on performance. That's why I did my 14 plus years. One of the most disheartening things is for an editor to sit in a news conference in the morning and go through all the stories that you've missed. It's just completely self-defeating. People know what you do is the judicious intervention, where you've read all the newspapers, you know what's going on, and you might have a word with the editor one on one. You know, you don't throw tantrums in public. I didn't do that. And if you get beaten consistently and you can make it up whether it's three, four times, you start moving people. And there are consequences, but you don't spend.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I gave a speech in Oxford on, by the way, on fake news about three years ago, where, you know, fake news in the post truth age, and I talked about, you know, the need for the publishers to become, sorry, the platforms to fess up and actually become more publishers. And they've kind of started doing that in terms of interventions. And I think that's right. A lot of people say, no, you can't do it. It's censorship. They need to take more responsibility for what's appearing on their platforms. I mean, we have to do that. And we've got to face all these, you know, difficulties which we haven't talked about, but you know how hard it is, you know, on the libel law in this country. The odds are stacked against us. It's really difficult to do serious investigative journalism because you've got these battery of lawyers who are threatening you and threatening to hang you up by your boots.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, I don't think they should be forced to do anything in terms of support of journalism. That won't work. What they should do, I think, is, you know, you need to look at the terms of trade between, for example, Facebook and the news organizations. Essentially, they wanted to take the content, give you a bit of a check, but keep all the data on your subscribers. That's an unequal trade. That's why we didn't do it. I think they could seriously put some money into training journalism, training journalists, and they could also think about what they might do to support local journalism, which I'm very concerned about. But you can't force them. We don't operate in that kind of society. And maybe they could be taxed a bit more effectively and then, you know, help our public services. But that's pretty difficult as well.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's the way it was. You know, you get the facts and you fill out the questions and we'll give you the answers by facts. The Wall Street Journal, by the way, went along with it. More you know shame on them, Jerry”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So yeah, one or two did. President Xi, but he's never going to be interviewed by anybody. We got offered an interview by Fax, which I said no to. Fax. Yeah, yeah.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was already I was going to go down with one of my colleagues, Fred Studerman, who is the analysis editor. And, you know, we were going to go down to southwest Germany and eat Ice Bine, this calf brains, I think it is. I can't even remember what it is now, but this real horror dish which Margaret Thatcher, you know, really, really objected to. And we were going to go in his favorite pub. And I was going to interview the man, you know, one of the great German politicians, the man behind German unification, the man who was literally stabbed in the back by Angela Merkel. She was his protege. And we were going to talk about Europe and being a statesman. And he had a fall and never really recovered. So he was the one that got away. And I think there is probably, well, Macron got away. Yeah, that was one.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he's had a, you know, I'm writing something about the treasury, by the way, for Prospect magazine, a long piece. So there's another, there ends the commercial break. So I've been thinking a bit about this, and I think he had a glorious summer, which is now turning to a winter of discontent. I think he's now been beaten up a bit and he's got muscled a bit downing street. And, you know, he turned on the spigots. They were very effective early out of the blocks with the furlough scheme. But I think now it's really getting a little bit more difficult for him. But he's, look, he's a heavyweight. He counts in the cabinet in a pretty unimpressive cabinet with a lot of several second raters and one or two third raters. Rishi Sunak, you know, his gold standard and he's good, but he is going to have a tough next year or so, at least.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, Jacinda Adern just comes across as authentic. I think, by the way, Rishi Sunak, he does come across as authentic. He's comfortable in his own skin. He's not, he's articulate, he's serious, he knows the facts. I think he's probably a bit premature in terms of him being tipped already as a successor to Prime Minister Johnson. I think that's dangerously premature. You don't want to be out there that soon. But in terms of him as a performer and as a serious kind of politician, he's got something. No question.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you can't make it up. I mean, you either come across on cameras authentic or you don't. The camera finds you out. I mean, remember in 1960 with Richard Nixon, I say remember, I mean, obviously we weren't around. I don't remember watching the thing. But there is that famous camera shot of Nixon with his five o'clock shadow, slight bit of sweat in front of the TV scene. And he looks dodgy. And you can't take that.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, look, she's authentic, and authentic is the big word. She communicates extremely well. She's disciplined, she's humane, you can see that she's not bludgeoning the electorate. She's got charm. She's a very effective performer, but also she's got performance but delivery. She's actually met her promises. And this is, by the way, something the present government could perhaps learn from Jacinda Arden. Of course, everybody says, oh, it's a remote country, it's a small country, there's a tiny population. That's not the point. The point is she's made promises and she's kept them. And that's a certain discipline about leadership, which I think is very important and very impressive.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, you know, it was just over sort of, he's fairly small, by the way, but by that moment I was definitely felt smaller than he did. Macron, I think, has been an extraordinary political force for trying to restore the center in American politics. He creates from a movement he created a party. I think he's given a number of great features, importance defending liberal democracy, perhaps. Sometimes somebody said to me, these should have been written by the Chief of Staff, not the President, because he's too much out in front, but by and large I would give him credit, and I think also he's restored some of the relations between France and Germany, where France had been somewhat marginalized, and I think Hollande frankly was a poor president. So I give Macron reasonably pretty high marks so far.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I only met him briefly when I said in the Elysee Palace when Mario Draghi was getting the Legender and he introduced himself to everybody and I said siege presente, Monsieur le President, he said Jevonib. If I could introduce myself, he says, I know who you are. And it was just, you know, Macron is that correct.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But first of all I was also in that hearing with Robert Peston, who as usual asked the first question no problem in the House of Commons and we were asked you know you were kind of you made it worse you were responsible no we were not responsible for the crisis these were flaws in regulation that you know enhanced and incentivized risk irresponsible risk taking now in terms of our role You know the thing I did I said we're not going to have panic on the front page there will be no word like panic that's not right we did it once in that week once when the system was literally melting down but you have a responsibility to check the other side of the story not go with the herd and just on northern rock you know it was bust it was going to be bust There would have been a run on the bank. So I don't blame Robert at all he did his job.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start sounding off, you are going to put yourself at risk if you are pretending to be or at least claiming a degree of objectivity balance and neutrality. So, you know, people do, I think Tim is right, as the BBC Director General. I'll probably make myself unpopular saying that, but I'm going to say I support him.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again, I think that you've got to put things in context and you've got to call people out who are spreading it. I think, by the way, fake news has been around for a very long time. I mean, you know, this is just rumors at one level or propaganda, state propaganda. I mean, you know, we've had fake news from Orson Welles with the invasion of Mars. But I just want to say one other thing about social media. I back Tim Davy, the new Director General, in actually imposing some rules on people in responsibility who are neutral. And I think they're great journalists, but they have to be careful. And again, I say this, and I say this as a tweeter, by the way, 88,000 followers, but no contest with most of the people around here. But, you know, you've got to be careful. It's a really dangerous medium. And if you...”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And similarly, monarchy can be distorted to a tyranny. This is really important to understand, and it's why some curbs and it's better if they are self restrictions should occur on social media. Now, mainstream media is relatively, and that certainly applies to print, in decline, but it can still be a very important force because it can adapt. And that's the story in the book about the Financial Times and about how we went digital. And look at what we're doing now. We'd never have been able to do this 10 years ago. So as long as mainstream media adapts and goes digital and plays in that space, it can compete with social media. So again, I'm a relative optimist, but I'm eyes wide open.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, the problem with social media is it polarizes, and I think there could be some serious work done on how it affects elections and campaigns. And, you know, it really does, it fosters division and it's interesting that the big tech giants like Twitter and Facebook have realized that they can't just have a free public square. We know that democracy, if you go back to the Greek politics, the theorists, you can have something like democracy, but that can be distorted to anarchy.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm not familiar with the latest results, the polls on Bolsonaro, but I just wanted to say that I do have confidence in journalism. We haven't talked about one of the most important stories that we did in the last year of my editorship, which was the wirecard scandal, which, you know, Germany's big fintech company was a fraud. And the reason I mention that is because it showed that facts matter. And I think with climate change, facts matter. The science, even if you don't believe all the worst things, you know that if it could be right, you need to take precautionary measures. So I think the good news regarding Brazil is that with Joe Biden in the White House, you're not going to have a climate change denier and you're going to have some pressure on Mr. Bolsonaro not to further deforestate the Amazon.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“have a clear majority so he's probably going to have to find a majority within coalition either with the SNP which will demand independence or with the Lib Dems”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's one good piece of news in Britain, and that is finally we have a serious opposition. We did not have a serious opposition under Jeremy Corbyn. He's a totally marginalised figure who has been wrong on almost every serious historical question over the last thirty years. I mean, of course he was the leader. With Keir Starmer, we have a serious person, somebody who actually does his homework, has clearly got Johnson, Boris Johnson on the run, he's done well in House of Commons questioning, and I think he's going to rebuild the Labour Party in the same way that Kinna can Blair did in the late 80s. But he has a problem in how to get a majority. And in that respect, I think we have to watch what happens in Scotland, because Scotland, the Scottish Labour Party, has collapsed, and it's going to be hard for Keir Starmer to get a majority if he doesn't...”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we're all going to have to pay and the younger generation is going to have to pay because the money does have to be paid. So we can borrow, and of course interest rates and inflation could happen sometime, but I don't think anytime soon. So don't worry about the debt. Worry a bit about the deficit. Taxes are going to come soon, but only, I think, maybe in a year to 18 months time.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“order, it's clean, it's growing, and you know quite a few African countries are jealous, so in a funny way I found him rather impressive. We haven't talked about Mohammed bin Salman, the strong man of Saudi Arabia. I'm not sure I was so impressed, but he was definitely, you know, he was the coming man, and that's what this book is about. He's explaining how power works and how power is exercised. But I think overall probably the most impressive person I met was Jim Baker, the Secretary of State, Treasury Secretary White House Chief of Staff, just because he got so much done. He was a positive force for good. He made the system, he showed how it worked in Washington.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think in one respect Kagami was really impressive, and Kagami is a bit scary because what he does is he whispered, and by the way, that was three and a half hours in his presidential office with David Pilling, the Africa editor, because it was often with these interviews, wasn't just me. And he whispers, so you have to crane forward, you find yourself craning forward, and at that point your neck is beginning to hurt, and then your backside is really, really sore because, you know, his first answer has gone on 45 minutes. But then you remember the history. I mean, yes, he's probably been responsible for murders, or at least indirectly, but his country, Rwanda, was torn apart in nineteen ninety five. A million people died of genocide, and now, you know, there's a semblance.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he goes, Yes. Populism in Spain, populism in France, in Germany. He's going, yes. And I said, well, how long is it going to be before it comes to Russia? And, you know, you always know with Putin when you've got him because he doesn't answer the question. Instead he lashes out. And he lashed out against, you know, it's the end of liberalism. It's the end of the liberal idea. And, you know, you people are degenerate in effect because you tolerate sexuality, gays, all this. And it was just, I couldn't believe it. And we had our story. So that's my interview technique. I'm sure you got a better one, Manve.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Neck and sausage fingers they took the seats, so we didn't have any seats to sit down on Henry Foy and me, the Moscow Burgy, and finally we came in, and the one piece of advice, and I talked to my American friends who'd, you know, spent time with Putin, they said, you know, treat him with respect. Don't go for him because he'll just clam up. So when people talk about oh you cozing up to him, no that was the best way of getting him just not to feel that this was a conversation and at one point he described me as a historian which I thought was you know very exaggerated but you know eventually we lured him in or I lured him because I got the question which is you know which really riled him and you can tell when he's riled and and the question was you know if you think about national populism that's populism in America”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I met him. This was the third one. I'd waited five years just so people don't think that, you know, you ring the Kremlin and, oh, I'd like an interview. It doesn't work like that. I mean, this took a long time and finally he agreed. And here's the master of destabilization. He's the person. He's like, he does judo. He's constantly trying to put you off guard. And when he looks at you, it's a little scary. I mean, he will look with that slightly watery eyes. He just looks straight through you. He's completely cold-blooded. So I did a lot and I describe in the diaries how to prepare for the interview with Putin. This was the big interview in the Kremlin, in the cabinet room, with the Tsars, the statues of the Tsars there. You know, he kept us waiting for nearly four hours, you know, and we had to stand because the bodyguards with no...”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Existential threat sounds like the Soviet Union. Of the Cold War which had nuclear weapons pointed at our various capitals. troops and tanks massed and the eastern reaches are the folder gap, you remember that? I don't think China is like that. I think actually China operates incrementally. And what they do is they sense out weakness. We haven't talked about Putin, which is the great exploiter of weakness. But China will test, and then if you retreat, and we saw this of coverage, you know, they were constantly pressing, pressing, pressing. And if you gave any ground, that was it, they'd take it. And so I see that, them testing all the time. And they've also clearly violated intellectual property. They've got massive spine, not saying the Americans don't do it either. So I see it not as an existential threat, but as a systemic challenge. And by the way, the last point is obviously, you know, on liberal democracy, we've got to defend it. We've got to defend it. This is not something you”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years it's already happening is that countries are going to be increasingly put under pressure to choose between America and China on these investments.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that decision has already been made in that the government's banned Huawei, which is the 5G champion, and I describe in the book, by the way, it's an extraordinary story, meeting the founder of Huawei in Shenzhen. It's a rare plug in the book again, but it's a very, very rare on the record interview with Ren Shenfrei in 2011 in Shen Shen. So I think that we do need Chinese investment. But in areas of critical national security like 5G, I think you have to have eyes wide open and make sure that we're not compromised. The fact is, of course, which is not mentioned enough, is there wasn't really an alternative because we had obliterated the competition ten years before. So, you know, the story of the next five years.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a new force in town, and that anti corruption campaign and the restoration of the party, I mean it's scary, he's broken the tradition or is about to break of two terms only, so we have a new type of leadership, which is a pretty scary leadership in China. Third, China sees it as particularly under Xi as it's playing a historical role, the middle kingdom is back. It is the superpower in waiting. And therefore it's going to be of more formidable competitor, not just in the region, but also in the rest of the world where China is making its presence felt, not even just in Africa, but also in Europe, in places like Serbia. They are using their money to gain, to buy influence, to gain influence, and they are being a world player. They've got a ways to go. America is.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I made, I can't, I mean, they told me actually at one point, you have made eight trips to China, you know, as editor, you know, and therefore you are no China and, you know, we went through, I met a lot of people in power in the big business. So here's what I think. First of all, modern China. It's an extraordinary economic success story. They benefited from being part of the World Trade Organization in that period of globalization. They took advantage of the rules as well. But they also brought tens, hundreds of millions out of poverty, and the great shift from the countryside to the cities and urbanization is extraordinary. Second, things changed under the new emperor. When I remember that first trip in 2013, within weeks of Xi Jinping taking over, you knew so.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The last point, and you'd appreciate this as a journalist. Every piece I wrote, and I didn't just by the way spend when I was going on these trips, you know, I was in favelas in Sao Paulo, I was in Kabira and Kenya, and I was in Mumbai and the slums for five hours. I didn't just hang around in five star hotels. I saw, you know, a wide range of people. But when I wrote, the pieces were edited. I never, I stood back from the editing process, and it was rigorous. I basically feel pretty good about where I am. And what we did.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, access, as you know, is double edged. So you get the access, you could be there either controlled or compromised. And so you have to go in eyes wide open. Frankly, as an editor, first of all, you know, I thought it was better to go out and actually see people and use the FT's privilege and my position to stage big interviews, tough interviews, rather than sitting in my office staring at a computer screen. I mean, the way I could go out and work with reporters in the field, and you know, I'm not, I think most people at the FT and most people have been interviewed by me would realize that I'm not a pussy cat. And, you know, I went in with wise wide open. I was not compromised, and I felt that it was the best way of going about the job. And just in technical terms, just as”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of our stand on Europe, you know I never ever cared about friends. If you're the editor of a newspaper like The Fan, if you're an editor in general, you don't have friends. You can have acquaintances, but you don't have it's completely the wrong way, which is why this diary, yes, I met all these important people, and I talked to them, but you know, I was not friends with them. You can't afford to be friends. And if you're actually running a paper, you have to stand by principles, and the principles were we were a pro European paper, and we believed in the European Union and membership, and we were going to stand by that and sod the friendships.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Politically, so of course we can deal with it a bit like waking up in the morning and going straight into a cold shower. But if you've got it running a slight temperature, which we are at the moment, I wouldn't actually recommend, sorry for this extended metaphor, taking a very long cold shower, and that's what it's going to be.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was a mistake. I think it was an act of self harm I wrote that editorial in two thousand sixteen and I think the economic consequences, look, this is a great country, it's got lots and lots of positives. So I am not running down Britain. Michael Portillo basically called me a traitor on television as much as that, said I should be ashamed of myself, he said a few minutes to midnight. And, you know, we pointed out the economic consequences of joining and the deal we're going to get if we do get a deal, which I think we will, will be skinny, bare bones and inferior to what we have, which is privileged access to the single market. And we had our cake and we were eating it rather happily in economic terms. And I make no bones about pointing out the risks. And I think we've marginalized ourselves.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a terrible campaign, and he never wanted to make a political speech in favour of joining, so I just think that was a major, major problem, and he was outfought by Dominic Cummings and the others. Now, was there a constituency of It was still a poorly fought campaign and I fought, David Cameron for calling it.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has something to do with that, but I just want to say, because I'd say it in the book, is, you know, I have a real problem with David Cameron's cavalier attitude to calling a referendum and general referendums as a principle, because we live in a representative democracy. He called three referendums in six years. And he'd obviously never been to Las Vegas because he doesn't have a first clue about odds. He got warned in Scotland. I mean, it was 55, 45 in the end. He had a vote on the alternative vote on proportional representation. Well, it was kind of proportional representation in 2011. And then he called Brexit without having any idea how he was going to fight that campaign. He thought schmoozing with a few editors would be, you know, the way to do it. And then, you know, it was a disaster.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She does have a, by the way, a wicked sense of humour as well, but she looked at me and she just said Well, I'm not going to talk to him seriously about anything. Maybe about environmental policy, i.e., you know, the Arctic, you know, Huskies. She'd seen that ad. I'll talk to him. He's pretending to be green. I'll talk to him about that. But it was a real put down. And by the way, a huge insight for me because I'd been saying to the Tories at the time, you really shouldn't be leaving the EPP. You're going to be left out in Europe. And she said later when I saw her earlier this year for my last ever interview, she said, well, that was the moment that I knew that they were on their way out, because they shouldn't have done that.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why? And I said, well, because he finds it hard to take decisions. And she said what? He's really effective in counsel in the European Council. And I said, well, not so much in Britain. And then she said, after a dramatic pause Duncomte Cumer which is well, that means Cameron's coming to power, and I said may well be, yes, and then she unloaded about Cameron leaving the European People's Party centre right grouping, and how he was anti Europe, and then there was the classic Merkel put down, which she does very well. And by the way, is a little bit scary, where she says.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I know what you're referring to. Yeah, I mean Markle at that point had been, and it's very funny, there's a sort of slight symmetry in our, I mean, she's obviously much more important and powerful than I was, but three weeks after I became editor, she became Chancellor of Germany. And I did interview her three times. I refer to two of those interviews. And at the beginning, 2008, we talked about the financial crisis. And, you know, she was a little bit stiff. She was still feeling her way. And I wanted to know what she thought about David Cameron and Gordon Brown. But I didn't quite have the nerve to ask her during the interview, and we stood there having our photographs taken, and she said, How do you think Gordon Brown is doing? Now this was in German, of course, Natulish. And I said, which is, you know, as you might imagine, not so good. And she said.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“as well as profitable, and I think we've got a bit of a way to go, which is why at the end of my tenure, you know, I did support with, you know, some input this notion of a new agenda for capitalism. And I summed it up by quoting McCauley, I think it is McCauley, the great historian and politician, which is you need to reform in order to preserve. I think that's about where I stand as a, you know, if you ask me about my political principles, that's probably where I am. I'm not a Burke, I'm a Burkean. How's that?”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think we've certainly learned in one respect, which is heavily regulating the banks, and we've turned them almost into utilities. They're not getting the same returns that they did. The risk has been limited. But I want to come back, Manvine, to your earlier question, which I wasn't seeking to evade. But you ask an incredibly important, and it's a huge question, which is, has the model of capitalism that we've come to know, which is based largely around not just the profit motive, but shareholder value, that it's all about creating shareholder value. Is that lopsided? Should we not take into other factors into consideration, like climate change, like how we treat our workers, diversity, all these things to make companies really enlightened?”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Movement that mattered much more because immigration was suddenly became a very big issue, and probably, you know, that's what politicians needed to focus on a bit more, and also by the way financial services, total liberalization. I mean, that was one of the reasons that we led into the financial crisis.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not entirely. I mean, the legacy of the financial crisis was actually clear, I would say, by 2010, 11. And you've got to remember this wasn't just the financial crisis. This was a crisis of globalization. This was saying the model that we've had with free movement of capital, labor, goods, services, that that model had almost run its course. And I remember, you know, everybody at the beginning in the 90s when the world economy was opening up huge benefits to China and India, but everybody was focused on goods. What happens if, you know, these goods come in and undercut our manufacturing sector? Actually, the irony, and I say this in the book, was it was labor.”
2020-12-01 · Intelligence Squared · The Powerful and the Damned, with Lionel Barber and Manveen Rana · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source