YouSaid · the spoken record

Simon Hart

lines on the record: 55
first: 2025-04-07
most recent: 2025-04-07
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

“Occasionally deeply frustrating way of life, and it is a way of life, not a profession or anything like that. You know, did I love every minute of it? No. I mean, sometimes as the diary will impart, sometimes I just, you know, chewed away at you, you know, I don't think I made the right calls on numerous occasions and wish I could, you know, relive those bits a bit. There is hope. And I think, you know, sometimes there are people emerging who think, actually, do you know what they are, really, really good? Just let's hope we don't sort of suck the life out of them before they've managed to maximize their potential. But it's the system we have. And politics is meant to be passionate. It's meant to be argumentative. We're meant to have these very, very sort of hotly held opinions. We're meant to, you know, the rough and tumble of politics and the way in which parliament is constructed is by and large all good.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it's beyond recovery, by the way. This was not a speech at a funeral. I still think Parliament is made up largely by very good people who've got the very best of intentions, but do occasionally get it wrong. My fundamental starting point is that what makes me sad is... Think sometimes we probably didn't give the level of support to people that we should have done in order to maximize their chances of success in whatever role they were put in in government or whatever the role they chose as backbenchers. I'm very saddened by the fact, and Alistair touched on it just now, talking about my son's observations, I'm very sad about the fact that”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've never really asked myself that question. I think for a lot of people, there is a degree of sort of family. People often used to say to me are not being facetious or anything. They used to say to me that this is about my mum, it's about my dad, it's about my family. It's about something which they can be proud of other than having shepherded the digital inclusion bill through Parliament or something like that. Maybe that was all just flannel for something else. But I think overall the idea that the honor system brings joy and pleasure and pride to people who have gone without being asked to over and above what life normally expects of them. I think tune. You don't need to answer that. Well, I think from somebody who used to work for Tony Blair, I think you're on a very...”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The J Wall said in the chief reps office, you always got a steady troop of people coming in to tell you stuff. Normally how you could do better, which is all par for the course. But we had a bit of a running gag that nine times out of tense exaggeration. But as they left the office, just closing the door behind them, they'd lean back and say, oh, by the way, about my knighthood. And sometimes they were very legitimate bidders. But sometimes I used to think it was a bit cheeky because Rishi's view about those things were as a right, those kind of honors should always be for people who'd gone over and above that which they were being paid anyway. And so they had to have a sort of very special achievement and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so we nearly called the book that, but then we sort of resisted.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I blame my fantastic special advisor for coming up with that story. Again, I don't think that it's unique to tourists, by the way. So before you completely abandon it, no, there are some.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or whatever it is, then we will improve that. And for a very fleeting moment, I was Minister for Implementation, which when Boris and I both worked out what that meant, it was meant to be something which was designed to help deliver government projects with greater ease and speed. But it was given to me as a equivalent of a parliamentary undersecretary, the lowest in the food chain. It's the least qualified person to deliver on that as you could possibly imagine.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a, needless to say, you know, a bit of a theory on this, which is that almost everything I think in government is down to political will. If you really want to do it, or you really have to do it, you can do it. I mean, look at Nightingale Hospitals. Who would have thought you could build a hospital in three weeks at Excel or wherever it was? There's a desperate need or desperate urgency, these things can be done. And it goes back to what we were saying, I think, about plunging people into departments, taking relatively junior MP, sticking a label on them saying, you know, Minister of State for such and such, and then expecting them to deliver on major change in a very short space of time, often went up against a slightly resistant treasury. And actually, by having ministers who are better trained and better supported, who have got the ability to say, no, this is how it's going to be, as Churchill once said, you know, action this.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a bunch of what your measurement of failure is. I think the trouble is we were committing to doing stuff, which in anybody's estimation was going to take years. And I thought, actually, Michael Gove cotton onto this quite early on by doing the leveling up program, which was much smaller infrastructure projects of five to 10 million quid in many, many more places so people could actually see that if the government said on the 1st of January 2019 was going to do something and the ribbon was cut two years later, that was progress. It was tangible progress. Whereas things like HS2, or you could argue the sort of third runway at Heathrow.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I know, and he was doing the journalism course in Cardiff at the time, and of course I was state for Wales at the time. So, you know, the big tele in the company, whenever they looked up, I was on it and he was thinking, oh God, can we flip over to S4C or something?”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're close, you know, our family's close, which is great. So we do laugh about it. One of the things he said, which is quite, I thought, quite telling after that, was that the people he shared a house with at university in Cardiff had sort of universally got in touch with him and said, Christ, I'm really sorry. We didn't realize we didn't think. That was quite telling that, you know, because he was worried that they might be frustrated. Actually, they were quite apologetic. They just said, we didn't think. It never crossed our mind that there was anything wrong with, you know, slagging off the...”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think some people deal with that better than others, but I don't think people should have to deal with that. I think if we talked earlier on about the appeal of politics as a career choice that you can be really proud of and really aspire to, that's the sort of thing which will put people off. And then all you're left with is ideologues and, you know, PPE students or whatever it is, you know, and people who just think that politics is a game. Politics isn't a game. It's something which affects everything we all do and we should have the best possible people for it. So yeah, he sort of stepped out of the shadows. And I don't know whether I was more embarrassed or he was.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, we all want to do jobs that make our families proud of us. And the idea that a particular career choice could be so shameful that our children can't tell their friends what we do. And judging by the number of people, a lot of Labour MPs said the same thing to me at the time, I think we need to reflect on that.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Referring to a piece he wrote in The Times a while ago and had called a huge reaction from all sorts of different political colors. And I didn't know what he was going to write. All I knew was going to write it. And he was quite sort of shy about it and said, I just field a few things need saying. And so when I read that piece and I realized that actually throughout his sort of university time and less hope at school, but university time, that being the son of a conservative minister wasn't a badge of honor anymore. It was a badge of shame. Maybe it's always been like that, but I do think we should all be sad by that.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, we'd been in office for 15 years nearly, they knew that this was the last chance saloon for a lot of them, their parliamentary careers were coming to an end. You know, they might have missed out on a ministerial role or whatever it was. So people were sort of going their own way a bit and plotting their course for the future. Some of that they thought might be more advantageous to them if they were with a different leader. It was becoming a bit of a free-for-all. I don't blame anybody necessarily. I think that's what happens when you get to the end of a long term in government. I wish it didn't happen. I wish there was a better way of concluding your time in office. But it did get ragged.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It only goes to show in a way that politics goes in cycles, and I think that when I look back, there was no single moment. I think we'd slipped to about seven or eight or nine points behind the opinion polls towards the end of Boris, and then by the end of Liz, it'd gone to 20. And then the next two years, it never budged. It didn't matter what we did, what we said good or bad, it never budged. And I think that just showed that we'd reached the limited public patience. You sort of don't know you're there until you reach it. Anybody who was involved in the 2024 election will tell you that actually it wasn't the choice of date or the speech in the rain or anything like that. It was just somebody else's turn now, you know, sort of you've been there a long time. You know, I know you, you know, individually they were saying nice things to us as candidates saying, look, I know you've done your best, but actually we think it's somebody else's turn on the carousel. So it wasn't a particularly complicated thing. And I think because a lot of colleagues really...”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, well, I think it did work on me because during COVID, actually, I think when it was pretty bleak out there for everybody. And I think in leadership positions, I think trying to maintain that sort of careful balance between public realism and optimism at the same time. Boris was pretty well equipped for that, come back to the reasons for his demise in a moment. I think in the end, there wasn't a single point. It was accumulation of things which led to the sort of resignations that there were, including mine. And I remember, I think I did about six media rounds in the last few weeks of Boris's regime, and every single one I didn't mention government policy at all. I was literally defending one party gate allegation after another. And it just got to a stage and he said, bloody hell, this can't go on. And by then, I think it was pretty obvious that Boris was going to get done over. He was either going to get done over by the 1922 committee and the...”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody you will talk to about Boris will say the same thing that he does have a sort of hypnotizing effect on people. He has a magnetic personality. He can use humor in the darkest of moments in an incredibly effective way.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rwanda, actually not everybody's sort of favorite piece of legislation, but nonetheless we were doing our very best to get it on the statute book and we were Frustrated that we thought that there were forces at work who were trying to make that as difficult as possible. And I think number 10 probably were taking a rather more sort of objective view about what was going on than I was. I was obsessing about the noise. And they were quite rightly focused on the outcome. And that's what that diary entry referred to.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Chairman 1922 committee who would commence the process to have a confidence motion in the leader. And there was every weekend there was another sort of Sunday newspaper, speculation about how many letters Brady may have received. Brady was famously discreet about that. As it happened, when he wrote his memoir, I think he fessed up to the fact that I think there were about 13 or 14 letters in. Our assessment was nearer 20, but he was the one keeping the numbers. So we weren't a million miles apart. And this is intended to be, again, complementary about Rishi's attitude to these things, which was to rise above the tittle-tattle, to keep our focus on the things that really mattered, not to get dragged off course by people who were just sort of making noises off. And he used to quite frequently sort of take me to task on that and tell me to basically wind my neck in. And I think that I felt that it was particularly over.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stuff is in order to trigger a vote of no confidence in the Prime Minister and leader party, there had to be, I think the number was 53 letters into Graham Brady.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Friendly. There are two things, Rory, one of which is my attempt to be faithful to the concept of a diary, by the way, which is how I felt on a certain day, not with the benefit of hindsight. And when I look back at stuff, I think, God, did I really think that? Or did I really say that? But I was putting pressure on myself to be, no, this was, if it looked like it was written at half past eleven on a Wednesday night after a particularly punishing day, it probably was. But to your main point, I think in at around that time, can't remember the date exactly when it was, at around that time, it was becoming more and more obvious that there were not particularly subtle attempts to undermine the regime. There was lots of talks of leadership bids, letters into Graham Brady. There was lots of talk in some quarters about defections. We got to defections later in the process. I'm going to interrupt for listeners. Explain.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“General lack of solidarity. But fail to understand that almost everyone is Tell a friend. Who tells a journalist or even Understand that moment. What's going on there? When you're saying And you need to tell Doing”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To explain, and let's just take An example of Part of the job Why Suella is not his friend? The problem we have is That the whips office is seeing the real sweller, but number ten sees the more housekeeper.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much more outspoken. On Suela, for example, which he was sort of working around gently. You describe her as overpromoted. You say, I really need to see the P.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For listeners, one of the lovely things about the diary is that Simon's now adopting a sort of frightfully Position, but actually the diary is frequently”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm going to have to currently the leader of the past. I'm going to have to give you the same answers I've given everybody else. My big regrets”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were numerous considerations around how the government should look overall. And we were very keen, I can't remember the precise, but we were very keen to make sure that nobody could say at the time that particular sections of the party had been cast aside, even if people might have raised an eyebrow, we need to be able to say, no, we were above that kind of thing. This is the broadest possible church we could put together. You know, sometimes those things work really well. Sometimes they don't.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So default to a sort of very defensive position here, but there were always extensive, in fact, they seem to go on forever sometimes with the advisory team around Rishi. He didn't get involved, as I suspect, in your day. You know, Tony probably didn't either until quite a long time down the line. We were always on the second or third incarnation by the time we got to dragging Rishi upstairs into the room. What were you thinking of?”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looking back at it, I've said this to a few people who came my way and said, you know, why'd they been overlooked? And I remember saying, you know, my phone didn't ring for nine years. Count yourself lucky. Maybe politics is unique in this regard that you have got multiple considerations when you are forming a government. And I remember when we did ours when Rishi was elected in the November of 22, I think it was, that I thought he was correct at the time. Don't forget, we were just coming off the back of that difficult 49 days with Liz. And Rishi did want to make sure that the government that he put together consisted of a broad range of people, some who'd supported Boris, some who'd supported Liz, some who'd supported other leadership candidates, as well as all of the other criteria that you're trying to include when you form any government.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that there is a missing of the various rather probably ill-thought-out solutions that I've come up with. I do think that the way in which we select, all parties, this is, by the way, the candidate selection could be, I suspect, improved in that I think we should spend more time going out looking for people and less time relying on people coming to knock on our door and saying, by the way, please may I join your party become an MP. Commendable though that is, we get some brilliant people. But I do think we're probably not maximizing the gene pool as much as we should. We're not going out and saying you would be a brilliant member of parliament. Have you even thought about it? I don't think we do that at all”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the reasons that you read out were probably clever by heart. Yeah, exactly. One of the most fascinating things about the last few years for me was seeing how reshuffles work or don't work. Well, you've been there a million times. I mean, because they're not very simple. Having a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces and you always ended up with more pieces than you had spaces for on the table and you had all sorts of other considerations other than talent, geographical spread, diversity. There were people who were perfectly qualified but didn't want to do a job, who were not perfectly qualified, who did want to do a job. Nothing was simple about a reshuffle. And there's a consequence of which you always ended up in a suboptimal position. And there were some brilliant people who didn't get on the ladder. And there were some less brilliant people who did. I suspect that's possibly the same in other.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Labour was in office, social media did not exist. It was not something that anybody had to contend with. Now it is. And I think that that has made some of these changes all the more urgent because some of the pressures which are being imposed on MPs as a result of a very different media focus and relentless media focus. And there was, you know, even when we started.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to think sometimes with the changes that we occasionally talked about in Parliament, whether it was sitting hours or the way in which the workload is set out by the party managers and by the web's office was not very conducive to progress. And I think we all thought there was some like some magic pill, there was some magic reform that we could instigate at anyone, which would transform everything. It's much more evolutionary than that. If you actually look at the changes which have been made over 10 years, say if we take the period of time, Rory, that you and I were involved, there are numerous small changes which have actually made things better. Whether they've kept up with the pace of change in the rest of the workplaces of the UK, complicated by COVID is a different point. I still think there's a long way to go. I would add to that. I mean, for example, the current government, the last time...”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bloody hell, this is worse than I thought, but actually I think that if this even turns the dial a little bit in favour of a more contemporary workplace, that'll be a good thing.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it is. And so, you know, by shining a light on it, which I've done, knowing that it'll be uncomfortable reading for some, I think in some ways, unless we do that, we're never going to correct these things. We're just going to continue to bury them. And I think that if we are to make Parliament an attractive place where anybody can think, do you know what? I've just retired from my business or I've just done 30 years in the NHS or in the Army or whatever it is. I'd love to go and do that. I think there's a lot of disincentives for people who are looking. And people have been saying to me for years, God, I wouldn't do that job for all the time. So unless we address this, unless we give people confidence that actually it is a good place to work, it is an honorable profession. And by the way, there is support. So if things do get difficult, there's somebody to turn to. And it might not be a whip. I personally think it probably shouldn't be a whip. I think there's parliamentary authorities and miles better than they used to be. And unless we do that, that is a very real problem. So I know on the one hand people will be thinking.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A small comfort, I suppose, in the overall sense of things. But ungovernable was deliberately provocative because I think a lot of people thought, well, I must be talking about Tory Party. Actually, I was talking about Parliament. I was talking about, look at Keir Starmer comes in last year on the back of a huge majority. And already, and I have such so much sympathy for his chief whip, Alan Campbell, there are scandals and he's had to suspend the whip from people and then, you know, my Amesbridge triggered a by-election. These things are not unique to one party or another. And I think there are similar. That is about the...”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Civil service expected to do other than to try and make sure that the difficulties that come with that are compensated for. And I just feel that we probably didn't quite provide the support and the mentoring and the training after people had been appointed. And I think that contributed to some of the more colourful crashes that people were involved with further along the way.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prime Minister might give you a ring and offer you a job in a department multi-million pound budget and a whole array of civil servants at your disposal and oh you're doing the media round tomorrow morning so you better be in Horstree Road at 5.30 and again you know somebody will tell you what to say but don't screw up I think that that put an extraordinary amount of pressure on some really good people and I think a lot of the stuff I talk about in the book where the wheels fell off are not because people were malevolent or trying to get one over on the on the voter it's because there wasn't sufficient backup and support to help them i mean most people who go into a ministry job and job as a minister as you recall they don't have a day's training not even an hour you're just expected to pick it up and then we have the nerve to complain oh well you know the civil service rule the roost well i'm sort of not surprised we're putting people into these roles and then what is”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is a huge problem. And it used to worry me daily that we were being asked to opine on HR matters for which we were willing and we wanted to do what we could do to help, but we weren't necessarily, you know, but we're a bunch of MPs. We weren't necessarily HR experts or financial advisors or drug counsellors or all of the various other things which came our way. And you're right that what used to trouble me was that people might be elected, and particularly in the landslide election, where people get in who really weren't expecting to, sort of paper candidate type things. And they come in. And instantly, often quite young, often then suddenly given quite a lot of money by way of a budget to hire staff to run an office in the constituency and in parliament. And they're basically told, right, you're on your own pal. Get on with it. Don't screw up because if you do, we'll be all over you like a rash. And then, oh, by the way, in a couple of years,”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of it is quite mundane. I mean, it is the single sentence that encapsulates the role of the whips office is to get the business of the government done. So it is our job to make sure that legislation gets from the starting point to the finishing point in both the commons and the Lords. That's really what we're about delivering them, you know, the manifesto commitment. There's a whole load of other stuff and some of its HR. A modern workplace as far as it was possible to do in somewhere like the Palace of Westminster, but he wanted us to be a modern and welcoming and empathetic workplace. And so the idea of sort of, you know, dangling people over the Thames and forcing them to vote, that wasn't our style.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Isn't that the problem facing all of us? I mean, I think we could say that other political parties meet that challenge equally and comedy writers over the years have always depicted, and it's always been quite annoying. Labour MPs or Labour politicians and conservative politicians now probably reform and lib dams with a certain, there's a sort of certain character when you see them appear on screen, you think, ah. That's the lib dem, you know. And it's easy and cheap and lazy. And it's not always accurate, actually.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think probably quite early on, I didn't vote much at all. I think I'd probably thought of myself a story. I think I was one of those people I sort of hold my hands up in, you know, in shame now, who thought that who said this, but it definitely wasn't me, that I tried socialism, I tried capitalism, but capitalism was more fun. And I think I was sort of in that category. I just thought that, you know, to be a Labour member of parliament required you to be almost permanently angry about everything all the time and to be a conservative member of parliament meant actually you could have a sense of humour and you could go to the bar at half past six at night and nobody would have a go at you so i think my my judgment my judgment was probably a very very cheap man”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get more common ground between Alistair and me actually because my mother's side and family were, my mother was born in India. She was daughter of Brigadier, a royal engineer based in India. So that was her background. But my father came from a farming family based in Wiltshire. So farming was never very far away from the horizon. We very much saw ourselves as rural people. And politics wasn't really, you know, it wasn't something we ever talked about. I mean, I don't think I joined a political party till I was in my 30s.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you for painting the picture of it like that, Rory. I mean, almost everything that happened in my life happened by accident. I ended up in the countryside lions job, you know, love it though I did, completely by accident. I was covering for somebody's maternity leave up in the Midlands for a bit and then I took over as the chief press officer because the one before me had got sacked for some reason and they suddenly said, no, you're busy. So I said, well, not particularly. They said, right, you know, do this job for six weeks. And I ended up, I think, seven years into it. And then I got to the end of that in 2000 and about 2007, 2008. It was literally a case of where the hell do I go from here? Nobody in my family had ever been into politics or sort of followed the party.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before I answer that, I should say, was Alistair's intro portrays me as this sort of right wing head banging folks hunting Tory. And yet within a few short years, I was then described by the express as the wokest chief whip ever. So I don't know whether I made the transition or the rest of the world did. But anyway, but thank you for painting that.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a higher intellectual plane who knew what was happening, and therefore could speak on behalf of the 55% as it turned out who actually wanted to leave the EU because they'd missed it. They'd been conned, they'd been led down the garden path by Boris Johnson, whoever it might have been. I thought that was a very condescending argument. So I said right at the outset, if this happens, we have to go with it. My voting position wasn't really based on a very deep knowledge of what the economic consequences might be, but it was based on the fact that I knew that almost every single thing we did in our lives, every single day of every week of every year, was deeply intertwined with Europe, either legally, socially, economically, or politically, and therefore unpicking that was probably going to be to the conservative party's very great discomfort for a very long time.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think going back to 2016 when all of the, and this had been brewing for some time clearly, and I think it was entirely legitimate that the question of the membership of the European Union should be put to a public vote again. I can completely understand why David Cameron was persuaded of that argument. For me, at the time, and I remember without any great sort of sense of genius foresight, I remember thinking if this is going to be a referendum, there's a big question whether that was right or not, but we'd gone into it on the back of a referendum, so I suppose that was logical. I remember thinking that the one thing we have to do in a democratic society is observe the democratic will of the people to sound rather pompous. We can have an argument whether the people got it right or not. I used to find that deeply condescending. I think the idea that there was a section of society represented by some which is...”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there might be a really simple geographical explanation of that, which is simply one of scale. Britain is a very, very dense compared to the areas you're talking about, it's very densely populated. I sometimes used to ask myself, is there such a thing really as rural Britain in terms of population anymore? And the answer is less and less because as every village, every town is within an hour or two of a major city or conurbation and COVID probably accelerated the pace at which people were moving about, working from home, living in rural areas, first generation rural residence is something which I think has been transformed recently. And I just think whether it's Australia, whether it's America, I just think scale makes a big difference to that because there is less interaction between rural and urban in some of those large countries. And there isn't ours.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Population that we think. And I just think it's a mistake. You know, people talk about farming as if farming is the only thing. Or they talk about landscape management as if that's the only thing. All of these things are deeply intertwined.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think one of the things which has been at the heart of this is that it has been tempting for politicians to try and sort of subdivide rural Britain into, you know, you're either a farmer or you're a rural business or you're somebody who supports hunting, whatever it might be. And each of these categories they've tried to separate. And I think they've made a fundamental mistake in this. And the fundamental mistake is that actually all of these things are deeply intertwined. And they are very much part of a sort of DNA makeup and not necessarily of people who just live in the country. I think, again, the idea that these passionately held beliefs about farming or country spills, whatever it might be, only exist in rural areas. There are people who identify with and sympathize with that dotted around every conurbation, every city, every village, every town in the UK. So it's a much more fluid.”
2025-04-07 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 128. Whips, Chaos, and secrets from Westminster (Simon Hart) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source