Relatively Speaking

Istudied PPE at Oxford, and when I’m asked what my degree taught me I always think of Harold Macmillan. Macmillan was a former prime minister, who was once Chancellor of Oxford, and he said to our College, which was St. John’s, that what freshers year taught you is when someone is talking rot. That’s always been my lodestar for what a good education means: if you know when someone’s talking rubbish, you know what’s good sense and what is not.

But political ambition predated my time at Oxford – I got the bug actually when I was about 12. Whether I regret that or not now is unclear, but everything I did at Oxford, and thereafter, was geared at getting into Parliament.

Politics and economics at Oxbridge is quite a well-trodden degree – but it’s often pointed out to me that the current prime minister wields his English language skills and classical education, and that that gives him an advantage. Well there might be truth in that, but there was an element of history in my papers too. My history tutor – who I knew for years afterwards – told me something I’ve never forgotten: “No economist ever makes a good banker. If you want to be a good banker, you have to read history.” I think

So in terms of my degree, I feel I learned enough – and I also learned a lot from the practical politics of the Oxford Union. This was at a time when the then Labour government under Jim Callaghan was falling to bits, and Thatcher was on the rise. So the 1979 elections slightly ate into my revision for finals – God knows how I got a degree at all.

It’s interesting to note that Theresa May studied geography, but I think in the end formal education isn’t what it’s all about. Whether you succeed in politics is more to do with your disposition and what you’ve done in life. The problem is I think a lot of people are going into Parliament now without any particular experience – and definitely too little international experience.

I was lucky to gain both in the oil industry. In that industry my best friend was Ian Taylor who died last year – and that friendship, together with the skill I’d acquired in the oil industry, did come in handy in particular when it came to getting rid of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya in 2011. Ian was buying and selling crude oil into Benghazi and we were able to go to the then prime minister David Cameron and explain that if he didn’t follow our strategy, he’d lose the war. Gaddafi was oil, and our approach helped bring him down.

If young politicians ask my advice about appearing on television, I say it’s the wrong question. The trouble is most politicians today don’t think about Parliament first and media second. They have it absolutely the wrong way round.

What I think does matter about being a minister is time management. If you’re not careful, and you don’t administer your day, you can easily be organised by your private office: one of the golden rules of being a minister is always to make sure that you control the diary, rather than let the diary control you. So that means you need to look ahead, particularly for travel and set priorities – and make it clear to your private office that the priorities are as they are, that you will see some people but not others. You also need to explain that you want time to think – or time to call in one of the teams in the foreign office responsible for an area and get into an issue in more depth. So, planning, and not allowing yourself to be just told what to do as a process, is the way to do it. The media doesn’t help any of this. Believe it or not, I’ve never been on The Andrew Marr Show, but I think Andrew has completely lost his way. The questions have become so staid and obvious, and it’s a programme whose time is up. It’s junk because Andrew keeps asking questions to which there can be no clear answer, doesn’t delve deeper and it’s all about trying to trip up the politician. It’s a dead programme.

I did use humour quite a lot in my career –on Have I Got News For You four times in fact. That was absolutely terrifying – they can’t prepare you for that at Oxford!

With Lord Jonathan Oates

Idecided to write I Never Promised You A Rose Garden at the end of the Coalition. I went to Ethiopia in 2013 with Nick Clegg, who then was deputy prime minister. That trip brought back for me a lot of memories about running away from home when I was younger. I needed to get it out of my system.

I’d decided that the issues around mental health were things that I’d like to share. Growing up, books were my lifeline: they were a way of realising that I wasn’t a completely dysfunctional person. Right from when I was about six or seven, I just consumed stuff. I had a big Dickens phase, a Graham Greene phrase, a Saul Bellow phase. Since my book was published, I’ve had lots of letters and emails from people. Readers say they like the cliff-hangers, and the sort of Dickensian way I have of leaving something hanging at the end of a chapter.

I’ve always loved language as well. The King James Bible was something I’d grown up with. My dad was modern in many respects, but when it came to language he saw the King James Bible, alongside Shakespeare, as the standard for beautiful language.

I’ve been asked whether my eclectic tastes and interest in language in any way contributed to my liberal political philosophy. I think the more you understand, the more you can be prepared to put the boot on the other foot. That’s why I find the Conservative Party difficult, because so few of them grew up with that depth of understanding.

My mum was a teacher and taught English at primary school level. She loved English, and loved language. She gave me a great gift once when she said:

“There’s no such thing as a bad book. It’s a good book for you.” That helped because there was a lot of snobbishness about Enid Blyton, and the sort of books I was reading when I was six or seven.

Later, I was in the same halls at Exeter University as Radiohead singer Thom Yorke. We clicked over a bottle of whiskey, perhaps because we were both quite intense. We ended up sharing a house.

When I stood – unsuccessfully as it happens – for President of the Student Union, Thom offered to help me and said:

“I’ll be your artistic director.” He was a student photographer and he did some moody images of me which was the best part of my campaign.

So my book is largely not about politics – it’s about a journey, and running away from home aged 15. It’s about finding that however hard you try, and however much you pray, you can’t change the world on your own by pure force of will. You can change the world, however, by standing together with other people. That means persistently campaigning and fighting and doing lots of really boring stuff: knocking on doors, fundraising and putting leaflets through doors.

The other thing which I think is really important, particularly for people in their twenties who are suffering increasingly with mental health problems, is that you are far more precious than you’re probably willing to believe. Things can get better. Even when all the obstacles feel really insurmountable, stick with it and let people help you. One of the tendencies when people are suffering with depression or poor mental health is to push people away.

One time in my early twenties when I was really suffering badly, a friend of mine who I used to share a house with knew I was not in a good way. He also knew that it wasn’t the moment to push me because I wasn’t ready. In the morning when I was on my way to work, I was feeling so down and depressed, and I opened up my briefcase to find he’d put a note in there which said: “Please hold your head up, and be happy. You are a very precious person.” That struck me hard. If he’d tried to tell me that to my face, I couldn’t have dealt with it at that time. That’s my message to people who know someone suffering mental health difficulties. When you feel you’re being pushed away, just find unobtrusive ways to show you’re there.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is published by Biteback Publishing, priced £20.

With Emma Swift

Ten Thousand Hours in a pandemic year. I play essentially Indie folk, and at my age in the 1960s, I would have been playing the folk clubs – and today for people like me the bulk of our income is made touring. But when touring stopped that has meant mass unemployment in my sector. So I decided to make this an online-only release.

Of course, people who are creative are not very good at administration – it can be challenging and deeply boring. I find it very difficult to switch gears and it’s really hard for me to write if I’m also thinking about record distribution and invoices. But it definitely doesn’t hurt to know a little bit about all that – and anyway you’ve got to do it. I’m capable of organisation and chaos –depending on the day of the week.

Thesepast few years have taken everybody for a spin. In some ways my job’s been easier because I don’t have to try and tour and I’ve mainly done my record Blonde on the Tracks, a collection of Bob Dylan covers, online. I studied English literature at the outset, and then I became a journalist and also worked in a government department. But I quit all that and moved to Nashville, Tennessee to do music.

I was always a bookish kid and then grew up into a bookish woman. One of my songs on the new album is a cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘I Contain Multitudes’ – and I think I was responding to the references to Walt Whitman, and to Edgar Allen Poe. I can still recite ‘Annabel Lee’ – so my education gave me the foundation to what I do now.

I’m often asked about the direction of the music business. With Blonde on the Tracks I chose not to stream it at the beginning of the release, because we’re