YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Tugendhat

lines on the record: 35
first: 2018-04-20
most recent: 2018-04-20
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

“You may be right, I always. I think I've got into politics for the same reason I got into soldiering, because when I was a journalist in the Lebanon, I used to go down south and watch the conflict between the different factions and the tail end of the Lebanese civil war. And you get to a point in journalism, and I don't know whether you've ever felt it, Nick, but you get to a point where you've done watching. Time to do something about it.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what they may well be right? I mean, I don't think those labels count in the same way anymore. I mean, it's an interesting thing, actually. This podcast is an example of it. Social media is another example. We're all much more individual. And I don't just mean politicians. I mean, as individuals, we're much more individual. As people, we're much more individual. We talk to each other. We self-associate in different groups. You know, it's one of the reasons why parties struggle so much, of course, is because the idea of grouping people together like that is much harder. It's one of the reasons religions are finding it harder. It's one of the reasons that most associative organizations find it harder to get people because we are much more individualistic as people in this country today. So I just don't know that that matters. I think what really does matter is that you do your best to serve the country and your community in the way that you see fit, and then it's up to others to decide whether or not they want you to serve more or so less.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, nobody who runs for political office is not ambitious. You've got to throw yourself forward, but there's a difference between being ambitious and saying, look, if I were offered it, of course I'd like to be Prime Minister. You know, I got into politics to change the world, to change my country, and to change the community I have a privilege to serve. I mean, that's why I got into it. But, you know, if you told me at the end of my political career that the summit of it had been chairing the Foreign Affairs Committee, I think, you know what, that's fantastic. I had a great opportunity to shape the debate on an area of policy that I care passionately about and to serve alongside some truly impressive people on a committee that's, you know,”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the problem is, you know, this is one of those questions that you're either dishonest or you're ambitious. And there's no right answer.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't but I don't think that groups are quite as defining as many people initially assume. I mean again it's one of the reasons I'm not a socialist because I don't think you can bracket people. You know, I think we're all in that great life of Brian Lyon. We're all individuals. And of course it's true I'm a Catholic. Of course it's true. You know, I come from this family and I have that background. But actually what I think how I act, they're down to me. And it's up to me to live up to the expectations that I set for myself and the expectations that I think we should set for each other. And so it's up to me to deliver what I think we should be doing, which is, you know, as a soldier, the best outcome in an operation I'm ordered to conduct and as a politician the best outcome for the country that I love.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I suspect less so, actually, for European citizens who come here now for various reasons, we all generate so much more bureaucratic paperwork today than we did in the 50s and 60s that I suspect it will be much easier to prove today. But if you look at the way people came in the 60s and 70s, whether they came from Igbo communities in Nigeria or whether they came from Sinhalese communities in Sri Lanka, many people will have come under the same permits as the Windrush kids to do the same sort of things, you know, to staff our hospitals, to run our services, and will not have registered their rights in the way that they should.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a bureaucratic bungle that started fifty years ago when people weren't encouraged to register and didn't go through the process. Look, I'm not saying that the changed rhetoric hasn't had an impact. Of course, it's had an impact, but it's an accumulated impact of which that is the end.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think blaming civil service is a mistake. I mean, I think you've got to take responsibility for the actions of those you lead. I mean, you've got to be a bit reasonable. I mean, I think somebody who's come in the day before can't be responsible for the things that happened a month earlier or whatever. But, you know, of course you've got to take responsibility for actions. But I think if you look at the environment of migration, for example, the truth is that how we handle migration changes with moods and changes with eras. And that's where politicians have a role. But we also have a role in making sure that as the moods change, the rights of those who've acquired them initially are not violated because that would be wrong.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They built the country that we see today a country that has ease with itself in many, many ways. I know, we've got issues. Of course we have. And you see that they've given all this and they've built their lives here. And to suddenly find that the answer is computer says no.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I am because this is another thing that you see forgive me that you do see in soldiering is bureaucracies are not mean. They're just totally unfeeling. And the job of politics is to try and make systems work for people, not people work for systems. That's fundamentally why I'm a conservative. Because putting the person at the center of it has got to be what we do. And when you see somebody who's come over at the request of the British people in the 1950s and 60s, you know, Britain at the time was bombed out. There are craters everywhere. I mean, you've seen photos of the Blitz-Ridden streets that lasted right up until the 70s in some parts of the country. And these folk came over and came from beautiful climates in many cases.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a hell of a move, and it's a hell of a move from there to sergeant in the Army of the Royal Marines. It's a hell of a move. Do you see what I mean? These are successes, you know.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's why actually when I look around the commons actually, there are some people who you can associate with actually in a funny way much more easily than others. So look, I recognize Angela Rayna, for example. Not because I'd ever met her before, but because many of the men that I had a privilege to serve alongside came from similar backgrounds. and I recognised the strength of character and courage, that it takes to move from some of those harder places in the UK where disadvantage is endemic. Into areas of success. And that success career is.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looking out into the desert, hoping that nobody would come, and for two or three hours I was discussing with one of my fellow soldiers his vasectomy, his relationship to his wife, and how many mistresses he had. The conversation, of course, then moved on as these things do once you've exhausted it into various other things. And we spoke about his relationship to his mother, to his grandfather who had brought him up, and to the reasons he had joined the Royal Marines. You really get to know people soldiering. It's not that kind of a thing.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's not true. That's actually the reverse of the truth in a funny way, because one of the things about soldiering that people miss is they seem to think that soldiering is a sort of command structure, like a pyramid where the person at the top gives orders to the person at the bottom. There's nothing more democratic than an organization where the mistake of the person at the top could lead to the death of the person at the bottom. And so the conversations that you have when soldiering are some of the most intimate and personal you could ever have. I mean, I remember my first morning in Iraq we were laid up, and so we'd been traveling at night, obviously, and we were laid up in a”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you wear the Queen's uniform, you are responsible for the actions of those who you stand with. And I'm not going to tell you about individual encounters. Forgive me, it's none of your business.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to smoke a lot more then. A very different, who was a doctor, who said, Well, to be fair, smoking is the least of your risks. It was, you know, you've got to focus on what you're trying to do and what I was trying to do was to support an Afghan governor to reach out to the communities around his area, to people who needed to understand that we were trying to help, or rather he was trying to help, not we, because it was the Afghan government doing it. And occasionally I had to give him political cover. He had to have somebody to blame. And that's politics too, as you know.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“David's got a great turn of phrase And he's a very kind man, and he knows it makes me laugh when he says that. Look, I was the only Brit working downtown, as it were, in the governor's office with the governor. So it was a pretty unique position to be so intimately connected to the new Afghan administration in Helmond.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's not but it is something I am acutely conscious of that. If something really matters to you, taking a risk to achieve it. Is not wrong, and you know By the time I was asked to go to Helmand, I'd been in Kabul for a year, and like many people, I'd completely fallen in love with Afghanistan, which is not hard to do. I mean, it's an amazing country with some fantastic people.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's not one of the other things that talking to the enemy taught me is sometimes they really do want to kill you. Don't want to talk. They may talk to you about one or two things, but they really do want to kill you. Look, when I was working for the Governor of Helmand back in 06, 07, there were a few people we worked with who... Didn't like the fact that the former governor, a drug dealing warlord, had been ousted. They didn't like the fact that the new governor had come in and they certainly didn't like the fact that the governor of Afghanistan was extending its influence down there with the support of NATO and in our case the Brits. And they took it out on us and they tried to kill me on a couple of occasions with suicide bombers twice.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spoke to people who were certainly connected too. It's hard to say. The problem is there isn't such an organization as the Taliban. There are many people who at some points have fought with the Taliban, then they fought with the drug dealers, then they fought with us, then they fought with the Taliban again. So did I speak to people who fought with the Taliban? Probably, but not while they were Talibs, otherwise they wouldn't have spoken to me. And I certainly worked with a guy called Mullah Salam, who became the district governor of Musakala, who had been a Talib and was, I suppose, in Soviet style, was brought in from the cold, if you like. You know, I worked with people like that. It is extraordinarily what you can help people to realize if you can engage with them. And I think that's one of the reasons I've always thought foreign affairs and diplomacy matters so much is because understanding is such an essential element of communication.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can talk to an amazing number of people, it's true, and you can sometimes persuade people to do things that they didn't think were initially in their interest, but you can sometimes convince them that it is”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's a common mistake, actually. The intelligence corps of the army doesn't do spying, it does analysis. Other units do collection, as it's called, which is what you would call spying, the intelligence cord doesn't. Fact, we're such bad spies, we wear uniforms that say intelligence corps on them.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was. You get to a point in the military career, and I was lucky enough to serve under General Richards, who was extraordinary. Where you realise that the orders start from somewhere and they don't start from you. And quite rightly they don't because the alternative, of course, is called a military coup. And so I'm certainly not in favor of that. But they do start from parliament and they do start from politicians. And if you don't like the orders, you've got two choices. Either get on with them or change them. And if you want to change them, you've got to make sure that you have the support of people to do it. And that's our system.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“David got there, realized that with the small number of troops he had on HMS Ocean he could put a few paras and a few marines ashore, and he could save Freetown. And he did Now, I don't know how many thousand lives that saved. But that changed the destiny of a country that would have otherwise been taken over by a group of people who thought that an acceptable form of doing justice was to cut people's arms off. Now the use of force is not always wrong, I'm afraid.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very simple way of putting it. Actually, he proposed effectively a five-year plan, which included an awful lot of training of vetted units, an awful lot of international aid, and an awful lot of political support and reconstruction and various other things. So actually he proposed a rather more overarching plan, if you'll forgive me, Nick, than that, not just the tactics. He is very much an inspiration for me. This is a guy who demonstrated that the use of force can really have a very good action. If you look at the operation that made his name, the operation in Sierra Leone, when he is a brigadier, was sent in basically under Tony Blair and Robin Cook's orders just to get the Brits out and let the rebel United Front do whatever they wanted to do.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, he's right now, as usual, David has an extraordinarily strategic thinker, and I'm deeply honoured to have him as a friend. And he is right now. I think we could have acted in 2011-2012, 2013, and when I was working with him in the MOD, we were working on various options that would have seen things change.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know You remind me of You remind me of that poem by Belloc. Do you remember it? Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight, but roaring Bill who killed him thought it right. And you know, you find yourself in a situation like this where, look, I'm really sorry, but Assad really does want to kill those people in Ghouta. That is actually what he is trying to do. I know this doesn't sound reasonable in Western circumstance, and so it sounds sensible to say there's no military solution to the civil war. Yes, there is. And Assad is doing it. That's exactly what he's doing. It's a military solution to a civil war.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and Jo and I spoke a lot about it because there is an element here where walking by on the other side of the road is just not right.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was one of those moments that, although we both disagreed with that, we both knew that knee jerk isolationism didn't make anybody safer. You know, if you look at Syria, and I started my career, as you may know as a journalist in Beirut writing a bit for papers out there and writing a bit for papers here as well, and I spent my holiday time, if you like, days off and whatever, in places like Damascus and Aleppo. And if you spent a bit of time there and you're starting to see what's going on, it's heartbreaking. You know, friends who I grew up with have been murdered or disappeared. Their family have been found or sometimes not found in countries in the regions around. And it's, you know, to watch it is just absolutely horrific.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we were both intimately involved in Iraq in different ways. She opposed it and worked on various aid elements to do with it for the post-war element. And I was one of forty thousand who crossed the line in March that year. serving as a soldier and you know we were both critical of it i was critical of it actually for strategic reasons i thought we should have focused on afghanistan and stayed and fixed that rather than diverted our efforts but”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, initially that seems to have moved. But exactly. I mean, that's certainly true. But a lot of people said something must be done in the sense of reinforcing the rules through the UN. I mean, these are things.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's a cultural thing born of our history that people are involved. And, you know, the truth is also that you go around the UK and all of us pretty much know somebody who has a link to somewhere else, their spouse, their cousin, their uncle, their grandfather, whatever, comes from somewhere else. And that link is very strong around the world. And so a lot of people in the UK, when something like Syria happens, I'm not saying that everybody wakes up in the morning and says, oh, Crikey, we really must do something about it in the sense of get involved. And, you know, we all know that the reaction to the gas attack was not universal in the UK.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's right. And I think it reflects the fact that fundamentally, you know, Brits are not Belgians. There is nobody in the UK who, when seeing things like this, doesn't wake up in the morning and think what should we do about it.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mr Speaker, this statement serves as a reminder that the Prime Minister is accountable to this Parliament, not to the whims of the US President. clearly we need a war powers act in this country to transform a now broken convention into a legal obligation”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think blaming civil servants is a mistake. I mean, I think you've got to take responsibility for the actions of those you lead. I mean, you've got to be a bit reasonable. I mean, I think somebody who's come in the day before can't be responsible for the things that happen a month earlier or whatever. But, you know, of course you've got to take responsibility.”
2018-04-20 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Tom Tugendhat One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source