Welcome to “The Rest is Politics” with me, Rory Stewart, and me Alastair Campbell alongside our first serving Prime Minister guest on “The Rest is Politics”. We’ve had a former Prime Minister Tony Blair, we’ve had a hopefully future Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, we’ve had a former future Prime Minister and William Hague and now we have you. And one of the reasons we have you is that I’m well aware that you’re a regular listener to “The Rest is Politics: and you particularly enjoyed the interview with William Hague, which is the one interview which Rory Stewart has managed to secure so far.
PM Edi Rama: I think it was the best episode of the series, because it is not at all something you can get often nowadays, a so gracious, so insightful and so humble man coming from so long life in politics.
What did you see as his insights?
PM Edi Rama: It was very insightful about uh the state of affairs nowadays, it was very insightful about Russia, about China, also very interesting. It was very insightful about the inner struggles of someone, who is in politics and who has this permanent challenge to be in or to get out and when is the time to get out and how much you can stay in and so on and so further. So if I would say it all, I’d say although he didn’t beat Tony Blair, in the life after politics, he seemed happier than Tony Blair.
So let’s follow up with this, Prime Minister. So you, I mean you you’re an extraordinary example of this. You’re unusual very unusual as a politician. You were a very leading artist, serious professional artist and a serious international basketball player, as well as sportsman before you became a politician. How do you think about politics? How do you know when you’ve been in long enough? How do you know when your mind is beginning to become adversely affected? What do you think are the strains of being a politician?
PM Edi Rama: First of all, I have to set the record straight. I was not a serious international basketball player. I was a mediocre national basketball player and the reason why I played basketball, first of all was, my asthma, because my parents thought that it was good for me to play basketball to fight my asthma, which was true. Secondly the reason why I was taken and make all the way to the national team was because I was particularly tall. In that time particularly short Albania and thirdly yes I tried to be up to the task, but I would not at all accept that I was an internationally serious basketball player. I’ve played few International games from the bench, but at the end it was a fantastic experience of understanding teamship, understanding leadership, understanding solidarity and also conflict and so many things that sports gives to you. While me being here today as Prime Minister interviewed by Alistair Campbell is another miracle of life, because I would not have been in politics, if Alistair Campbell would not exist, and if Tony Blair would not exist, and the Third Way would not exist and if new Labor would not exist. So that time I saw myself, I had a mirage of myself being in somewhere in politics was when I was in Paris, buying a newspaper at the aftermath of the victory of the new Labor. And then things happened in a way that I was back in Tirana to bury my father. Living as an artist in Paris, it was the same day that was a reshuffle of government. So what could not happen anywhere else, but can happen always in the Balkans, is that you go to bury your father and become a Minister of Culture and then the rest is known.
Yeah, what’s a little bit on that then, so your father was a sculptor in what seems to be a sort of Socialist realist style? He studied in Moscow, he came back to Albania and he did kind of big Socialist heroic sculptures. Is that right? Very much the product of the Albania of the time.
PM Edi Rama: Yes my father was one of the most prominent official sculptors of the regime. He was part of this group of sculptors that basically made the most important monuments, professionally absolutely respectful, but ideologically and also in terms of methods, absolutely something that I was fully against. So with my father we had a very strong, but also a very intense relation in the sense that I didn’t like anything he did and he didn’t really want me to do anything I did, because he was afraid of me ending up badly. But I value very much this relation, because he was a liberal, he was a liberal person. He never tried to impose me doing anything,
Yeah, just following up on this a little bit. Was he somebody who you think was genuinely passionately committed to the idea of international communism? Did he genuinely believe in Albania’s policies in the ‘70s in relation to China or was he more pragmatic, so he understood where power lay and he wanted to make his art and so he compromised? I mean, when you interacted with him as a young person at the dinner table was there a lot of ideological conversation?
PM Edi Rama: I believe that there were many like him that came from a poor or let’s say not rich families and had the chance to get out, look the world, be in the Soviet Union, have their studies, be inspired by this, you know, revolutionary flame, coming back to build “the paradise on Earth” and then slowly realizing they were actually participating in the building of “the hell on Earth”. And so I don’t think that he was any more passionate, when I could have let’s say conversations that I could analyze in a certain age, but I think it was a very it was a very strong combination between inertia and an amount of fear, an amount of practicality, because at the end you know we were totally isolated from the West, from the East, we were North Korea of Europe. So many of them, people that when they were younger embraced communism as an inspiration, as an ideal, turned to be practically people that were, you know, that gave up in their own silence. But on the other hand this was part of me being involved in the anti-communist movement in the Arts Academy and which was practically the seeds of what then became my political career.
You didn’t really answer Rory’s question about whether you think politics has changed you and whether… because Rory talks a lot on the podcast about how he felt that his political career almost dehumanized him. It dehumanizes a lot of people in politics as to whether you think it’s changed you fundamentally and also whether you know when you’ll be ready to leave and move on. You’ve now won three elections which is pretty rare in the modern age.
PM Edi Rama: I maybe… I don’t think Rory got to this conclusion while he was still in politics. I think after leaving politics, he started to realize that he was somehow handicapped and started to see that something was missing here, something was missing there from the pieces he knows he had before entering politics. I don’t know. I have to make this check-up when I get out. But I think that in one way doing art in the same time helps me to keep some balance to keep some sanity and in the same time, yes, politics makes you more and keener to forget about sentiments and more and more taken by results, results and of course there is something kind of kind of barbarization of your soul.
I should say Edi doodles endlessly while he’s in meetings and his wallpaper is just a collection of his of his of his best doodles.
But you’re quite but you’re quite a serious painter. I mean I’ve been looking at some of your work and you’re still doing serious painting or less serious than previously?
PM Edi Rama: Listen, the more serious part of my paintings in my art is the part that I didn’t do it seriously, which is a part that I did while I was engaged in politics as Minister of Culture, sitting in the government meetings. I’ve never entered a government building, until becoming Minister of Culture. As an artist I never wanted to enter a government building or an office or whatever. I’ve never had an office life and so I couldn’t stand the long hours of the Council of Minister. So I was doodling and doodling and doodling all the time. And my colleague, the Minister of Education was near me, telling me after every session: “Can I take it? Can I take it? And one day I go to visit him and I for some other reason and at the end it says: Do you want to see my art collection? I said: “Do you have an art collection? And he had a whole portfolio with my doodles and seeing at them all together I realized that there was something there. And I go back to my office very sad. The guy was under some charges at the time and I said to my assistant: “I am afraid I will prove that he is a thief. He has stolen all my art.” And she said: “No, you have much more.” And she opened the shelf, which was full of doodles I was doing all the time in office without even … And then, she conspired with a friend from the academy, former friend in the Arts Academy, they brought some doodles in an exhibition and then this started to get to get out. And then a German collector came to me to see me, because he saw the book I did.
Just for our listeners, just so that they can understand what you’re talking about. So when you say doodle people imagine it’s like they take their byre pen and they draw a little smiley face in the bottom of their meeting agenda. But your doodles are completely different. Your doodles are for example a Google diary sheet and you will have written some numbers across up, but then over the top is the most extraordinarily complex pieces of art uh incredible numbers of different colours. I mean there are I see vegetative forms, birds…
PM Edi Rama: Because it’s part of hours and hours in office, meetings and meetings and while I am focused on the on talking with the people that are in front of me or are in the phone my hand and my eyes continue to do their job, to somehow keep me balanced. And that’s why they’re …and their sophistication depends a lot on the length of the time I spent in office or the length of the meeting. So…
I’m also very proud to be… I’m on this wallpaper, on a horse with a mobile phone in one hand and a sword in the other.
PM Rama: It was… this drawing of Alistair in my wallpaper was premonitory of the incursion “The Crusade” would make against Boris Johnson, because uh his iPhone and his sword and his horse …
That’s very beautiful. I have a wonderful friend who’s a great political supporter and who sent me… there’s a Rembrandt picture, that maybe you know, of a young man in a polish Cossack horse costume riding on a on a horse through a legendary landscape with a crumbling castle in the background and he sent this to me also to try to inspire me to write against Boris Johnson. So maybe there’s a cavalry theme coming through.
I don’t and so Edi, you raised Boris Johnson, not me.
PM Edi Rama: No, I simply … every time, because this is Alistair on the horse with his sword and his iPhone in front of my eyes many times and every time I used to see it, I used to just pity Boris to have behind in someone so obsessed to kill him as soon as possible.
So your assessment of… Now of let’s just go through a couple of current themes and then come on to your assessment of where we are as a country and where you are as a country? So, first of all you’ve had this extraordinary situation with Iran cyber attack that you’ve had to respond to pretty vigorously. We’ve also got the issue of the spike in Albanians crossing the Channel in small boats, which has become a problem for both your government and ours. And then I think also just briefly on what your assessment of Britain in the world is now? We’ve had this British Week in Albania, lots of good cooperation, but I’d be interested in your take post-Brexit and finally your assessment of Albania’s place in the world, which you know you have massive progress, but you’ve also got big challenges you’re still facing? So take us through all of that?
PM Rama: The Iran thing has to do with a heavy cyber attack on us that we worked very thoroughly to understand, who was behind it and the attribution is not based on assessments that come from, you know speculation, but is based on a forensic on proofs and on the hard work of some super special teams that we had with us from Microsoft from US even UK expert have to look in it. So we had 100% proof that the Republic Islamic Republic of Iran was behind it so we had to retaliate with the severance of our diplomatic ties.
And why would they do it?
PM Edi Rama: Because we think, we have sheltered here some thousands of refugees that are not amicable to their regime, to say the least, and we did it in a fully humanitarian basis. They were in Camp Liberty in Iraq; they were massacred and raided every two weeks every three weeks by the Iranian service and kids and women were killed. So we accepted to shelter them. Albania has always been, you know, keen to give shelter to people in trouble. We have done it during the WW II. Albania was the only country to have more Jews after the war than before and with the clean record of no one Jew delivered to the Nazis by an Albanian family or citizen. Then we sheltered half a million of Kosova citizens. You know because you were part of that that epic moment. And then the Afghans, the Afghans that were left behind in that mess of Kabul Airport and the getting out of the NATO forces without really having had a plan, what we will do for them who worked for us there who stood for us who believed in us and I I found this was not good not, it was not right. So we opened the doors to some thousands of Afghans and so it’s in our DNA, let’s say. And we don’t regret it and we’ll do it again and again and again because, you know, in the same time, we have been once in need to be sheltered from others. We left Albania not from Islamic or Taliban religious regime, but from an atheist regime. We were thousands with the boats going to Italy, to ask for help, for food, for shelter, and we are here today in this new stage of our history, because someone helped us before.
In small boats?
PM Edi Rama: The small boat is a sad story, frankly, although it’s an unclear story, because there are numbers we see in the British media that do not really match with the numbers we see in our own sites or this increase… There was a very interesting article on “The Guardian” that was somehow questioning these numbers, but beyond that we need to know where these people come from? They are Albanians. Yes, they are Albanians, but are they from Albania or Albanians from Kosovo, or Albanians from other Albanian areas. They are coming from Albania or they are coming from France? Or they’re coming from Greece or from Italy? We had the same situation with France some time ago. We had the same situation with Germany some time ago and when Germany declared the safe origin and simply didn’t accept anymore to put the people in an asylum seeking procedure by giving them funds, social assistance, house and so on, they moved to France and now they are moving towards England. So it’s very important to understand. But this being said, we are cooperating with the British authorities, we are setting some operations to tackle the traffickers, because the terrible part of it is that this goes …this is a very lucrative business for traffickers.
Do you have any understanding why it is suddenly just these numbers have gone up in the way that they never have?
PM Rama: There’s always… it’s always a like a rumour coming out and then some are going and then some relatives there are calling and then the noise is that that in Britain you have now some opportunity because there is a vacuum created there, and we can feel it. So this is how it works.
I just wanted to sort of shift around for a moment and talk a little bit about perceptions of Albania and the way Prime Minister that you are perceived internationally in Britain. So you reprimanded me, because I think you heard me talk on the podcast in an earlier session, I was referring to corruption in Albania and organized crime in Albania and all this kind of thing. So you then got in touch, I think through Alistair, to say that I was providing a very negative portrait of the country. But I wanted to see your reflections on this, because obviously we read media, we go online, we read about Albania and certainly, even as a even as a Minister, I’m afraid, you know, when we were dealing with the Home Office and the prison system, Albania did not have a very strong reputation on these things. So it would be interesting to know a little bit about what is correct, what is incorrect and help us navigate ourselves.
PM Edi Rama: First of all, you should have known already after so many episodes that when Alistair passes a message, there is always a spin. I didn’t blame you and I never deny that we have problems with corruption and we have also problems with crime, because we are not yet in a stage of a modern country that provides for the citizens all the service and all the standards that make corruption unnecessary, because corruption at the end, when it comes to the developing countries, is an alternative to the state. It’s a service that is given in a not legal way, because the state is somehow being late or being lazy or being unable to give this service.
Can I interact for a second sir? This is a historical question, but was this organized crime and corruption a big issue under communism before ‘89 or is it something that largely occurred because of the breakdown of that system in ’89?
PM Edi Rama: No during communism we never heard about the world corruption and corruption came with the new vocabulary. In my memory I don’t recall to have heard the word corruption. Crime, yes. There were some, you know, petty crimes, but no organized crime. The organized crime, by definition is transnational. So it has to do with trafficking, it has to do with smuggling; it has to do with a lot of activities that imply borders, imply interactions. So we didn’t have that. But we didn’t have many other things during communism. For example, Albania was, I think the country with the lowest heart attacks in the world.
The lowest heart attacks?
PM Rama: Yes, because our cholesterol was zero. This was because we didn’t have too much to eat and we were on vegetables, no meat, no alcohol, nothing. So we were a country with no heart attacks. So heart attacks and cholesterol came with democracy.
This is the Britain of the future.
PM Edi Rama: So corruption and the organized crime came with the democracy. So, these are part of this path. This being said, I think we have done incredible work and you know we have we have achieved incredible results in fighting exactly this type of corruption, because corruption in the scale of undermining the law for big profit is everywhere. The problem with the developing countries, which you don’t find in developed countries, is that corruption touches everyone. So it touches you as a citizen, when you want a service. It touches you as a as a father or a parent when you want your kid to go to a school he or she deserves. It touches you as a young guy getting out of university, when you want to have a job. So corruption interferes everywhere and I think we have beaten corruption in many ways in that level. The cyber attack was very heavily damaging, because it shut down the digital services. We have today 95 percent of the services that until recently were given in long lines, implying a lot of bribery, while now it is everything digital. So you don’t see anyone, you don’t need to talk to anyone, but by using your iPhone you ask for a license, you ask for permission, you ask for your medical status, you ask for more than a thousand things and you get them online. So this means that all this part of corruption is gone.
But how far or where you were when you came in three elections ago, where you need to be in these and other issues for example to be considered seriously for entering the European Union? How far along that road you think you are?
PM Edi Rama: If we see Albania today with the eyes of from where we started, is like day and night. If we see Albania of tomorrow from the eyes where we are, it’s night and day. So we need to make a lot yet and to it’s a long way.
And how … you had a very good relationship with Angela Merkel. Has that continued with Scholz? Do you still feel the Germans are very supportive?
PM Edi Rama: I have to tell you one thing and this is not a joke, but a real thing. When I met Scholz in Angela’s office and I sat in front of him, for some minutes I was in a very strange state of mind, because I was thinking it was she, presenting herself as a man in front of me. Same, same, same posture, same place of the hands, same way of looking, same way of reacting, same pace of the voice. The moment I realized it was not her, but it was him, was when he said: “I’m very committed to bringing Albania and the Western Balkans to the EU during my mandate. She would never say that.
But she was doing it.
PM Edi Rama: No, but because it needs time you know it needs a lot of time. And then I said: “Okay, but how many mandates are you going to win to do that?” No, I mean he’s a lot of continuity. I think it’s totally unfair to criticize him based on the comparison with Angela when she left. And I believe if people try to remember Angela in her first months in office I’m sure she and Scholz would be the same again. So she was not the Angela we know now, as she was much more fragile, much more insecure, much more, you know. So I think he has all to be Angela all the way.
Prime Minister, tell us about Angela at her peak. I mean you’re an admirer of her. What do you made her… do you think she’s the greatest European politician of this decade?
PM Edi Rama: Well maybe in this decade it is very easy to be the best in Europe as competition is not very big. Yes, I think she saved the honor of Europe and the honour of our civilization the moment she stood very strong in front of the huge wave of refugees in 2015. This was amazing. Against all polls, against all public opinions, against all the fears and the unknown she stood and this was an incredible moment of feeling the privilege to know her. And then I think, yes she was great in a sense that she never spoke wishful thinking, she always prepares herself, she always sticks to the facts, she always try to be truthful. She never … and I think Angela Merkel was someone you could not charm.
You couldn’t charm her?
PM Edi Rama: You couldn’t charm her. She was someone that didn’t need and didn’t feel the need to be charmed. She was very gentle very kind but being uncharmable is the highest level of the respect and of the self-awareness and the dignity. I think it’s amazing. She was not someone you could charm.
So the four points, the four questions I laid out earlier, you dealt with three of them, but not Britain. So you mentioned there of those qualities you’ve just outlined for Angela Merkel, how many of them would apply to our recently departed Prime Minister?
PM Edi Rama: He wants me to bring the horse, you know? You you’re talking about paintings, you know, there is another famous painting with this deaf young lady in the horse. So Alistair now wants me to be the young lady with the innocent face of a poor Albanian Prime Minister, who tells how horrible Borisn Johnson was. But I’m not gonna get in your trap.
No? But the answer is that you wouldn’t say any of those things about him that you said about Angela, otherwise you’d have said that. Tell us about recent French leaders compared to recent German leaders. How do you think they rate compared to German leaders in their conduct in the last decade?
PM Edi Rama: I think I think Emmanuel Macron has another problem. People, especially in France, they really don’t know, who he really is. And it’s a pity that he cannot transmit when he is in public, how interesting is, how human he is, how much respectful is of people he is, how curious he is to listen. It’s really incredible you know to have the President of France write text you out of the blue and say: “How you see things? Tell me, what do you think?” Like this. So it means that he’s someone absolutely a lot, maybe not absolutely, but a lot different from what the French think that “he’s an arrogant boy, that doesn’t really feel for people, he doesn’t really care about anything else than the rich.” It’s not true at all. He’s someone with a vision, with ambition, but I don’t know what’s missing that doesn’t make the right connection with people.
You mentioned the Tony Blair’s government’s role in relation to Kosovo and we’ve talked before and I’ve been always very interested in your assessment of Kosovo in terms of where the Balkans was then and where it is now, but also your view that Putin looks on Kosovo.
PM Edi Rama: Putin repeats the word Kosovo many times especially since the war started, he speaks about Kosovo many times, because in his mind, his idea of the of the international law Kosovo is the mirror, where everyone who participated in its liberation should see his own hypocrisy, while talking about Crimea. In his mind Kosovo is the biggest example of how the Western world, America and its allies, “broke brutally international law” and the Crimea, in his mind, is the detector of this big hypocrisy.
And more than Iraq, you feel? In his mind?
PM Edi Rama: For Iraq, he has of course the conviction that was in breach of international law, but when it comes to Kosovo it’s much more to him a twin case of Crimea. So a land that was taken from one state in the name of the people living there, while Crimea is the land taken back to the state where it belongs in the name of people living there.
Prime Minister, just on that one for our listeners, particularly American and British listeners; the situation the Western Balkans is something that people talk about, but there’s very little covered. Is it something that people should be anxious about? Is there anything that policy-makers in Washington and London should be focused more on?
PM Edi Rama: In this in this moment, I’m less preoccupied. I was very preoccupied in the beginning, because the Western Balkans… first of all I think that European Union is the only geographical reality in the history of the maps with one outside border and one inside border. And within this inside border is the Western Balkans. So you cannot enter the Western Balkans without entering EU and you have to enter the EU and to get out of EU to be in the Western Balkans. And you cannot get out of Western Balkans without re-entering EU. So it’s like having a stomach within your body, but somehow circum-scripted with the border.
And Prime Minister, I am sorry. I’ve to just interrupt for a second for our listeners, just to remind them that we’re talking here about some of the tensions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo.
PM Edi Rama: Now, within these borders, within EU, Russia has its most obvious influence, from Republica Srbska in Bosnia to Serbia itself, to Montenegro partly, and to North Macedonia. So let’s say in this Slavic Orthodox world there is a lot of Russian influence. And to give you an example, in Albania, Vladimir Putin’s popularity is 0.7%. So, only 0.7% of Albanians think that Putin is right, whereas 99.3% think that Putin is wrong. While in Serbia 80 percent of Serbs think that Putin is a hero, showing his balls to the West. And I was preoccupied, because of course Putin would try to use his influence to disrupt the Western Balkans and this could happen in a certain way easy, if the West would push Serbia beyond a certain limit to sanction Russia. Serbia cannot sanction Russia, because physically is impossible. They cannot live a day without the Russian gas. Secondly, because of the public opinion. Asking from Serbia too much, too fast could have been disastrous for the Western Balkan, because this would disrupt process we have started the Western Balkan, the process of rapprochement, collaboration, building peace and the Open Balkan initiative. Serbia made a long way on the other side, because it was a huge surprise they voted three times against Russia in the United Nations, even to expel Russia from the Human Rights Committee. So as far as this sanction thing will not be will not be so pressuring to break it, I’m not much preoccupied.
Are you happy about being within the context again of getting to the European Union that you and Serbia, in a sense, have to develop in different ways, but at the same time, and is your relationship with Serbia good?
PM Edi Rama: It’s not a matter of being happy. It is a matter of finally having understood that you don’t pick your neighbours and your neighbours are there to stay. So the choice is very clear, either you look for trouble and troubles will hit you and will make your life more difficult, or you look for peace and cooperation. So working in this second direction we can see much more benefits for the future and we can build the peace we need. While the first direction has taught us for hundreds of years that the end is cruelly unjust for the next generations.
We talked about Russia in the Western Balkans, but of course people will also talk about China and Hungary and I’d be very interested to see whether there is… you know often if you were reading an article in New York Times, if you talked about Western Balkans, you would put Russia, China and Hungary together as potentially anti-western forces operating the Western Balkans.
PM Edi Rama: Listen, because of our history, in Albania we have a very particular situation. In our history, we had Stalin here standing in the main square until 1990. So our guys thought that Khrushchev was too soft that the Soviet Union empire was a bunch of traitors that abandoned Stalin and with that they gave up the cause. So they left the Soviet bloc, they left the Warsaw Treaty and they went to China. And they went to China and we got with Stalin also the worst of China, the Cultural Revolution of the 60s. So this made Albania a place where nor Russia and either China are really seen like the saviours, like what we desperately need. And practically we are a country that is 100% renewable. Our electricity is fully based on hydro production, so we don’t have Russian gas. We don’t have Russia here in any shape or form only with an embassy that has removed lately, because we named the road of the embassy “Free Ukraine” and their envelopes were delivered to the address: Russian Embassy, road “Free Ukraine”. So now they have moved to another address. I heard from the mayor that he wants to move the name to their place. Let’s see what will happen. China is also not very present in Albania. We have a normal relation but not that much. But beyond that I have to bring the attention on one point. In Europe they speak more and more about geopolitics, they speak more and more about Western Balkans, speak more and more about not letting what they call “third actors” to fill the void. And guess what. The pandemic comes and they are all in their moment of uncertainty and chaos, and they gather and distribute vaccines within the EU countries and not a single dose comes to us. So we are, as I said, in the middle of Europe, and we are connected to the European life in all ways, with people living in Europe, with TVs from Europe and we felt like fish out of water. And what we did? We ran to Türkiye, to China and to Russia. And it was Türkiye that provided vaccine for Albanians. It was China that provided vaccines for Serbia and other parts. It was Russia that provided some to others. So without these three, these “three heads of the devil”, let’s say, we would not have survived. So, now…
So the European Union, you would argue, made a mistake?
PM Edi Rama: The European Union made a shameful mistake and then they started to bring vaccines. And I said to them, when we were back in the Council, “Don’t do it again with the energy crisis. If you have a package to support the countries of European Union with extra money to mitigate the huge cost of the energy, don’t let the Balkans out, because it will be another example of saying something and meaning something else and doing something completely different.”
So you still desperately want to get into the European Union, but what is your assessment of Britain’s role in the world.
PM Edi Rama: Listen, it is the first time in our history that we have chosen with our own free will where we want to be. For centuries we have been where we didn’t choose to be and where we were not asked. Under different regimes, in different places, but never where we belong, which is, let’s say, the Western civilization. And in 1990, when the anti-regime movement succeeded, the slogan was “We want Albania like Europe.” So being in Europe is for us to be in a safe place and to be in a place where people count, not where others decide for you. Sometimes you know it’s embarrassing to have to answer the question Britain is leaving you are entering and it feels a bit like you know divorcing and telling to young men in love, “don’t marry, it doesn’t work.” You know, everyone has to go through the marriage to realize that maybe it’s not so amazing. So divorcing has never stopped others to marry,
And some marriages work.
PM Edi Rama: There are even cases when second marriages work. So maybe Britain will come back one day to remarry with Europe. It looks like impossible today, but maybe one day they’ll rethink of it, because you know being alone surrounded by water, it’s not always so amusing.
Prime Minister, I’ve been fascinated by this visual image you’ve given us which is this Northern Renaissance painting by Hans Baldung, called “Knight, death and the maiden” and for the readers, who are listeners and who haven’t seen painting, essentially it’s a knight on a horse…
It is the second time on a row that he is talking about our readers, right? Rory! This is a podcast to listen. Books are to be read, ok?
I need to get this straight away of my head. So we have a picture of early 16th century, we have a knight on a horse, we have a maiden grabbing onto the knight and then we have the death with its teeth grabbing onto the maiden’s skirt. And you were you were expressing yourself as seizing like the maiden onto Alistair Campbell, the Knight, as he rides away with death trying to chew onto your skirt. I wondered what direction you think you and Alistair can write in the future? If not against Boris Johnson, what would be an exciting direction for the two of you to go on your horse?
Are you doing a full term?
PM Edi Rama: I don’t know. It’s all to be seen and the great thing with Alistair, which I think it’s shown also by this podcast, is that he is very successful in things that he himself even does not expect before. So I’m sure that you’ll find something else to do when it comes to do something together and I’ll be very pleased to embark with him on his horse, but please not to kill another conservative prime minister. This is something he can do on his own, not with me.
Thank you for your time. Thank you. I didn’t realize that is what got you into politics. I’ve never heard you say that before, but that was the whole new Labour thing “Third Way”?
PM Edi Rama: Yeah, this was the most … this was the biggest inspiration. It was like a mirage. I didn’t decide at that moment, but I envied Tony Blair, I envied this young politician coming and breaking the old house with this completely new spirit and this wave of change and this rock star type of communication and all this and then I started to follow and follow all the way and practically the first thing I did when I became leader of the party, I started “The Third Way” thing and “the one man one vote” process and many more. And I’m and I’m happy to see that “Third Way” still works for them who are not afraid of it and especially for them who are not in denial of it. It has been so painful to see the Labour Party going in very incomprehensible denial of what the achievements were from of the new labour and I hope now they can recover.
Well, thank you so much, Prime Minister. Thank you for your time. We really appreciate it.
PM Edi Rama: Thank you, Rory. Thank you, Alistair. It was an honor to be in this …
…“One country’s chart topic podcast.”
PM Edi Rama: This wonderful version of the House of Commons. If the House of Commons was like your podcast, I’m sure people would be enchanted again of politics.
Would you like to say a final word to the supporters of Burnley football club, your English team?
PM Edi Rama: Burnley Football Club? I was so shocked when Alistair told me yesterday that they are doing well, as they are fourth or fifth in the championship. I said how the bar can be so low? I don’t understand.
