Inside Downing Street with Gavin Barwell

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2021

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

British politician Gavin Barwell served as Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Theresa May from June 2017 to July 2019, one of the most turbulent periods in recent British political history.

As the Prime Minister’s senior political adviser, Barwell was at May's side as she navigated tumultuous Brexit negotiations, met Donald Trump, learnt about the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, met Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer to broker a cross-party Brexit agreement - and ultimately made the decision to stand down as Prime Minister.

Joining Dan on the podcast, Gavin poignantly reveals a historical first-hand account of how government operates during times of crises, resignations and general elections. Taking us beyond the corridors of power, they discuss the prominence of political advisors, the shifting of power and the decision-making that goes on behind closed doors at 10 Downing Street.

Gavin is the author of Chief of Staff: Notes from Downing Street

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everyone. Welcome. Welcome to Dan Snow's history hit. We have some a little bit more recent
0:05.3	history. I like to mix it up as you know on the podcast if you go deep history. We do the
0:09.0	Stone Age here. We go all the way back. We cover a lot of ground and I talk to a lot of historians.
0:13.2	I talk a lot of archaeologists. I talk to veterans of great historical moments with more recent
0:17.7	history. And sometimes I talk to practitioners. I talk to people who wheel power, the politicians,
0:23.7	the civil servants, the ambassadors and diplomats. And today I've got one right here on the
0:28.4	podcast, Gavin Barwell, he's a politician, he's the former Downing Street chief of staff to the
0:35.0	Prime Minister Theresa May. He was a member of Parliament until 2017 and then he helped Theresa
0:41.0	May run her administration until Chetzleave office in order to get the old Brexit deal over the line.
0:47.2	This is not just a miracle. It's called podcast not all about gossip. Who said what? When about Brexit?
0:51.6	Because I'm at the end of my tether. I can't cope with all that stuff. This, if you've heard
0:55.8	me listen to politicians before, hopefully it's a bit more general. It's a bit more about power,
1:00.3	about the people, about what it does to you, wielding power. It's a bit more about us as history fans,
1:05.3	trying to understand about the human element in these great historical stories that we're so familiar with.
1:11.9	We happen to be talking about Gavin Barwell at the beginning of the 21st century, dealing with the
1:16.0	crisis of Brexit and other problems. But I think it's fun to think about some of the things he says
1:20.6	in the context of some of the other great moments of history that we hear so much about in this podcast.
1:26.3	So I hope you'll forgive me talking about some very recent history indeed. If you want to do a deep dive,
1:31.3	you want to go back to some of that, you know, a bit more, if you medievals your thing, the ancient world,
1:36.1	at all, but at all, tongue china, go to history hit TV, all the podcasts there, all without the ads,
1:42.0	it's the only place you can get all the podcasts, the whole back catalogue, thousands of us over them now,
1:45.9	crikey. It's also a place where you can watch history documentaries, record numbers of people who are
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