Paul Johnson

For whatever reason, the stars aligned to allow the particular political party to put across tough messages.

Oh, God.

I mean, I'm not going to give a single answer to that, I'm afraid.

Look, I mean, they've all done some and some.

I mean, I think that there have been some moments of a particular disappointment.

I thought it was particularly disappointing that the last government,

You know, did things which were really as I mean, I'm sure I know Jeremy Hunt would completely disagree with this, but we're really setting traps for the current one in terms of cutting taxes and having completely incredible spending policies when they should have been looking for the for the long term.

I think the two the 1990s conservative government.

whilst Ken Clarke has got quite a good reputation and he did quite a lot of good things, absolutely slashed investment spending to an absolutely extraordinary degree.

And we're starting, I think we're continuing to pay some of the costs of that.

We've had a series of really stupid tax policies.

I mean, Gordon Brown was the one who started fiddling around with capital gains tax we were talking about earlier.

But

It was a perfectly good position in 1997.

We spent the last 30 years trying to fix something that Gordon broke.

Clearly, austerity went too far in a whole range of areas, and we've been trying to fix the justice system and the prison system and so on as a result of things there.

A lot of the Thatcher reforms –

A, had this terrible effect on inequality on parts of the country, but actually were also responsible for, at least partly responsible for, the economy growing faster than other countries for quite some period of time.

I mean, there's no straightforward answer.

Lovely.