00:00Poor Theresa May faced, not only did we have the meaningful votes on her Brexit deal,
00:03she also had a couple of confidence motions against her as well.
00:07And the chief of staff at the time, Gavin Barwell, set up a war room
00:11where we were all given lists of Conservative MPs to ring up
00:16based on perhaps what our policy area was or how well we knew people,
00:20what special relationships we had.
00:22Just a side note, I had almost exclusively Brexiteers of the slightly more swivel-eyed kind
00:29and so I had some pretty difficult chats with them, as you can imagine.
00:33There was sort of no point wasting the minutes on my phone plan, to be honest.
00:39And you have a list, you have a big spreadsheet, someone will hold the pen on that
00:43and it's almost always colour-coded.
00:45And it will literally include, there'll be a column on like, have they tweeted support?
00:50They might have said privately, this is where I'm going to vote,
00:52have they also put out a statement or done something on the media or tweeted their support?
00:56You know, we must it with the Prime Minister at this difficult time or whatever.
00:59And one of the really telling things, I think, and this will come into some of my advice later on,
01:04is that there are MPs who are saying,
01:07I've never really spoken to the Prime Minister before and I heard from him
01:10or I really was considering either abstaining or voting to refer him to the Privileges Committee,
01:17but I got a call from a senior number 10 person
01:20and I got a call or two from members of the Cabinet and it has changed my mind.
01:25So these operations can work, but they are so resource-heavy, they're time-consuming.
01:30This is also where you are making trades, don't you?
01:31Because I used to, on my side of the table, I used to get the consequences one of these ring
01:37rounds.
01:38Because one of you...
01:39And we've got a lot of knighthoods coming.
01:41One of you fellas would have promised all sorts of stuff.
01:44And then the next reshuffle conversation, firstly, I do actually, when you said we checked the timing of the tweets,
01:50I do remember one of, like, losing my rag in a who should we appoint to a job conversation
01:54when somebody was trying to argue for somebody completely inappropriate for the job
01:59who would have been a total disaster in a job that was actually quite important
02:02on the basis that they'd got their tweet in two minutes earlier than the other guy.
02:05There have been some heavy things given away in these conversations this weekend as well.
02:09It's not just a gargantuan waste of time, it's also not looking after your future self again
02:14because you're just storing up a whole load of other favours that you now need to pay off somehow.
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