I think there's absolutely one universal characteristic of getting older is you don't think things are quite as bad as the younger people think they are.

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantin Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

Our brilliant guest today is an author and guardian journalist Simon Jenkins. Welcome to Trigonometry.

It's great to have you on the show. Before we get into the conversation itself, tell everybody a little bit about who you are, how are you way where you are? What has been your journey through life?

How long have you got? We've got an hour so far away. No, I left university. I think I wanted to be an academic and I wanted to use academia as a way into politics because I was interested in politics.

I'm sort of mildly left to centre then. I didn't like academia. I dislike universities very much. I spend a year and a half in one after graduating and chuck that in.

I begin very interested in politics because to me it's the sign of a living person. They're interested in politics. But I was a journalist from student days and I always loved journalism. I still do and I've done it ever since.

In that time I've done other jobs. I've done other sorts of, I've been editing as well as writing and journalism. I believe journalists should do other jobs as well because it gives them a taste of what the rest of life is like and written books and architecture history and so on. But journalism is a way I can't stop having an opinion.

Great. Look, you've had a distinguished career, of course. One of the things we were talking about before we started is Francis, the depressive character that he is was giving you all doom and gloom about where we are and talking about how we're in a political crisis and you were sort of going, well yes, but so give us the book. Give us a historical but to that perspective.

I think there's absolutely one universal characteristic of getting older is you don't think things are quite as bad as a younger people think they are. I mean you think everything's bad because that's what old people do. But there is a sense in which you've seen it before. And I always remember my parents saying to me no one could understand the interwar years in Britain who knew about the second mobile.

You just you you had to know or experience that the pattern of events to judge the past and this business at the moment of endlessly judging the past or re-judging the past. I just find very offensive because we aren't there. We're here. We're not an obsession to judge. We're in a position to record and see what's happening. But it's easy to say every I mean when I was a student, we thought our politicians were rubbish. Absolutely rubbish. And looking back at them, we think they were tight and so these are great men.

And I'm sure it's the same today. I genuinely think that the present generation of politicians in Britain are the worst ever. I couldn't disagree with that.

The worst in the second century. But I then stopped and think to myself, you know, I was a student in the heath government. We thought they were useless. The labor government country was a terrible mess in the mid to late seventies, a real mess. That show was hated. I think she was actually a very interesting premise that she was hated.

It's a part of the duty of Democrats to hate their government. The sign of a good Democrat democracy is it votes its government out of office regularly.

So I'm fairly sanguine about the state of the world. And I do think that I've always thought democracy was never necessarily good to trap. I mean dictatorship is much more popular form of government really.

But at the same time things do get better. I'm with Stephen Pinker. Fewer people get killed every year.

More people survive and don't die of starvation. There's a genuine sense that mankind progresses. I don't get hysterical about global warming. I think it exists. I'm sort of a liar.

But I suppose I'm a mild optimist in my general out of kind of world.

That's very interesting. We is very rare to have a mild optimist in the chair Simon. And while you are mild optimist, what is there to be optimistic about at the moment?

Do you think? Well, it does you go to you really about the 14th century occasionally.

You know, I mean, the self-pidels say, what year would you most like to have lived in? I mean, I can choose a few.

I'm certainly 1492. I'd love to have been around then when they're discovering America and Christianity was trying to think in a brutal way.

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