Is Being a Politician the Worst Job in the World?
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 17 June 2024
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On July 4th—while the U.S. celebrates its break from Britain—voters in the United Kingdom will go to the polls and, according to all predictions, oust the current government. The Conservative Party has been in power for fourteen years, presiding over serious economic decline and widespread discontent. The narrow, contentious referendum to break away from the European Union, sixty per cent of Britons now think, was a mistake. Yet the Labour Party shows no inclination to reverse or even mitigate Brexit. If the Conservatives have destroyed their reputation, why won’t Labour move boldly to change the direction of the U.K.? Is the U.K. hopeless? David Remnick is joined by Rory Stewart, who spent nine years as a Conservative Member of Parliament, and now co-hosts the podcast “The Rest Is Politics.” He left the government prior to Brexit and wrote his best-selling memoir, “How Not to Be a Politician,” which pulls no punches in describing the soul-crushing sham of serving in office. “It’s not impostor syndrome,” Stewart tells Remnick. “You are literally an impostor, and you’re literally on television all the time claiming to understand things you don’t understand and claiming to control things you don’t control.”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the political scene and the fireworks and drinking a couple |
| 0:20.3 | billion dollars worth of beer. Over in the United Kingdom, citizens will go |
| 0:25.2 | to the polls. And if predictions are correct, they're going to vote the current |
| 0:29.7 | government out of power. The Conservative Party has run the UK for most of the past 14 years |
| 0:36.4 | an era of steep economic decline. Four years after Britain left the EU, some of Brexit's biggest advocates |
| 0:45.0 | acknowledged that it's been a disaster, in soccer terms, an own goal on a historic scale. |
| 0:52.0 | The economy has sort of flatlined basically since 2010. |
| 0:57.0 | Brexit's disaster. |
| 1:00.0 | We've staggered out of COVID and Ukraine war, the health services and bits, the education |
| 1:06.5 | some bits and everybody is genuinely fed up. |
| 1:09.9 | Rory Stewart is uniquely placed to enlighten us about what's happened in Britain and |
| 1:15.1 | what's about to happen. |
| 1:16.7 | He spent nine years as a conservative member of parliament and he quit the government before |
| 1:21.5 | Brexit took place. |
| 1:23.2 | Now Rory Stewart co-host, |
| 1:25.1 | the rest is politics, one of the most popular podcasts in the UK. |
| 1:30.8 | Roy, the Prime Minister of Britain, Rishi Sunak, has called an election, which is party the |
| 1:35.8 | Conservatives are expected to lose and maybe lose badly to the Labour Party. |
| 1:42.4 | Everything about that sentence is completely confusing |
| 1:45.0 | to an American. |
| 1:45.8 | So we have elections at fixed times. |
| 1:49.5 | Why does a Prime Minister call an election? |
... |
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