Daily: The man who ran Britain

The Bunker – News without the nonsense

Podmasters

News, Society & Culture, Politics, Government

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2021

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What does it mean to be indispensable? From Major through New Labour to the Coalition, the late Civil Service giant Jeremy Heywood was to a key advisor to four Prime Ministers, and Cabinet Secretary to two. Theresa May described him as “the greatest public servant of our age”. His widow Suzanne tells Ros Taylor about her new book What Does Jeremy Think?, what it took for Jeremy Heywood to manage crises from Black Wednesday to Brexit, and how he handled the duty of pushing through policies he himself feared were wrong. “Jeremy had been in training to get the best result out of Brexit for Britain for almost all his professional life…” “It was only while writing the book that I realised how close the UK came to a total banking collapse during the Financial Crisis.” Presented by Ros Taylor. Produced by Andrew Harrison. Assistant producers: Jacob Archbold and Jelena Sofronijevic. Logo and branding by Mark Taylor. Music: Kenny Dickinson. Audio production by Alex Rees. The Bunker is a Podmasters production See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Stan. I'm at. Nice to meet you. So you took up photography where? I've always loved
0:05.5	photography but I turn it into earning a living at 60. I enrolled on a day course.
0:11.8	Well college. I loved going to college. It's good you can retry. I'm enrolled on the day course. But college?
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0:55.3	look after theirs with dental life. Pick up dental life in the pet food aisle. Hello and welcome to the bunker I'm Ros Taylor. What does it mean to be indispensable? The man we're talking about today worked for Ken Clark and Norman Lamont. He was in number 10 during the early years of the Blair Premiership. He helped see Gordon Brown through the financial crisis. David Cameron said,
1:25.2	we were so lucky to have him and Theresa May described him as the greatest public servant of our time.
1:31.1	I've even read comparisons to Thomas Cromwell and yet the name of Jeremy
1:35.1	Haywood who died in 2018 was unknown to most of the public. With me to talk about him is Suzanne Haywood, his widow, who's co-authored his memoirs in a new book called
1:46.0	What Does Jeremy Think?
1:48.0	Hello, Suzanne, welcome to the bunker.
1:50.0	Hi, thank you very much for inviting me on today.
1:53.0	The great irony of the book's title is that while everyone wanted to know what Jeremy thought,
1:59.0	like all civil servants, his true political views had to be a completely private matter.
2:04.0	Am I right in saying that you don't even know how he voted?
	...

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