Hi, welcome to another one of John Gorn's podcast where it's John meets interesting people,

just people that interest me.

I hope they're going to interest you as well.

My guest today is somebody I knew years and years ago in Coventry.

He was a leading councillor.

Then he ran off to Devon and he became an MP.

His name's Kevin Foster. He served as Minister of State for Transport,

he says here, from September 22 until October 22. That was under Liz Truss. He was also

under the Home Secretary Priti Patel, or Dame Pritchie Patel, as Parliamentary Undersecretary State for Safe and Legal Migration,

which is one of the reasons I want to talk to him, from 2019 until September 22.

He lost his seat at the general election, which is no surprise, as a load of Tories did,

but I'm delighted to say he joins me now from

Torbay in Devon. Good afternoon, good morning, Kevin. Hi, Gondsey, how are you, mate? I'm all right.

It's a long time, no see. Tell me then, what's it feel like, first and foremost, to be an MP

and then not to be one? Is it like having your legs cut off? Well, it does feel a bit odd. You know, you go from, you know, loads of emails. And, of course, an election campaign, you know, you have about four or five weeks where, you know, you're up, out, doing stuff every day. To then, yeah, you know, next morning, right, what do I do next? and, you know, there's things you have to do like lay off your staff, which is not a nice thing to do, particularly some of mine were in their early 20s and they have to go off and try and find another job. And then think about what comes next. So you don't lose the passion for issues. I'm still involved in campaigning, still take an interest. But, you know, it's in a, it's in a different way. Why did you lose? Oh, God, you know, how long you got? Let's go through all the issues in the, uh, in the past home. Was it in being the leader? I think that was part of it. You know, I, I'm making a cigarette. I was no fat. I didn't rate Mr. Sunak. And I don't think he was a leader. You know, he wasn't a particularly in my dealings with him, particularly effective person to deal with. We can see, I think we had that 18 months under his leadership where I can remember having had issues about people not going to get an NHS dentist.'ve had some people come to see me who, you know, were in pain when they chewed. And, you know, a lot of us were saying, come on, there's issues like this we need to deal with. And we were getting stuff like, well, he's given a speech on AI. Well, fascinating, but that's not really going to change anything. He reminded me a bit of the Gordon Brown situation. I used to always say Gordon Brown was a number two. He was never going to, I don't mean to be rude. He was never going to be a number one. And while I had a hole in my underpants, and I felt that about Rishi. I feel that about Stama. I don't think he's a leader. I think he's there because you lot were so terrible,

and also reform were breathing down your neck.

And because there was about 9,000 people voted for reform in your constituency.

Yeah.

They were in a lot more people voted reform than the Lib Dem majority was in the end. But I think, you know, we've got to take on the chin as the Conservative Party. You know, we can't go off and blame Nigel and blame voters. You know, that's a path. That's a, we're on Arlington, nothing if we do that. You know, we need to look at the last Parliament where a lot of colleagues fought and bickered, thought it was all about when their next promotion was coming. And one of the

comments I make, Gawney, when I'm talking to a conservative audience, is some of my colleagues

last year left government with surprisingly long names and lists of title when compared to a

surprisingly short list of achievements. And that really spoke to what happened in the last parliament.

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