John Reid MP, Former Cabinet Minister

Please note 'The Andrew Marr Show' must be credited if any part of this transcript is used..

ANDREW MARR: John Reid was one of the lynchpins of the Cabinet under Tony Blair - headed more departments than any other minister and he ended up as Home Secretary.

I think it's fair to say he was no stranger to my immaculately upholstered studio chair, but when he left the Government more than a year ago he took a vow of silence on party politics.

Still an MP, but he's confined his comments to the fortunes, oh it's Celtic Football Club of which he's Chairman, and as of today he's also chairing a new Institute of Security and Resilience Studies at University College London.

John Reid, welcome back.

JOHN REID: Thank you, Andrew.

ANDREW MARR: Resilience Studies. What's all that about?

JOHN REID: Well it's quite funny because we've been talking all day about the effects of globalisation on the economy and we see how fast failure travels.

Well the effects of globalisation and our interdependence with other countries, the new network electronic communications means that we're also vulnerable in other ways - cyber attack bringing down the networks, pandemics, influenza, the First World War, DNA's now on the Internet, energy policy - all of these bring insecurities and potential threats to our country quite apart from...

ANDREW MARR: So this is the Institute of How to Bounce Back?

JOHN REID: It is how to sustain ourselves under such an attack and how to recover from such an attack because my experience in government told me that government departments and official bodies aren't always good at changing with the times and, therefore, what we want to do is to bring together practitioners and academics.

Rather than having academics sitting in that corner taking endless time to reach conclusions and politicians over here having to reach decisions by tomorrow morning, bring them together, analyse the threats, but also analyse their capacity with standard threats and then identify how to improve our resilience as a country and challenge on a non- partisan basis, a non-party political basis the status quo, the government of the day, the oppositions and so on.

So University College London have been kind enough to offer me an honorary professorship and chairmanship at the new institute, which I will try to build. They're a great institution. They're one of the top ten universities in the world.

ANDREW MARR: It sounds like a chair of known unknowns, if I can put it that way.

JOHN REID: It's... Well that's one of the things, yes. I mean we know some of the threats. There are some we don't know, and in many areas we don't know how we would withstand them.

ANDREW MARR: Now the last time you were talking in public I think like this, there were still people saying well of course John Reid might be the man to take over the government and all the rest of it. There was lots of talk about Blairites and Brownites and so on. Is that war over?

JOHN REID: Well I took the decision when I stepped down... And I was lucky because most politicians don't choose their own manner of going, their own timing of going.

I did and I believed when I stepped down that the most honourable thing and best thing to do was to give a period of silence because when you hand over the baton let others get on with it, and it wouldn't have been fair on my Cabinet colleagues or the new Prime Minister Gordon if people like me had been giving you know constant commentary.

That's why I did it. I'm now speaking because there has been almost 18 months since on the BBC I announced I was going and I'm venturing now after that part into a non-parliamentary area which is the University College London's Institute.

So that's primarily why I'm speaking out. In the interim I've turned down probably a thousand interview requests. If you ask me where we are today in politics, I think the instinct of everyone today, especially in the middle of this economic crisis, is that we should be pulling together and not pulling apart.

That's evident at the international level where Gordon has been leading the international efforts at coordination. I think it's evident incidentally at a British level. It's one of the reasons, along with the role that Gordon played in facing up to our economic crisis, that we won Glenrothes - 19,000 votes, that's a lot of votes - because there was an instinct that Scotland and England should pull together, not apart during the crisis.

And I also think it's true at the party political level. I think one of the reasons that George Osborne has put himself in a very difficult position, only one of them, is that there is an instinct to pull together during a crisis and he has broken that sort of bipartisan approach and gone into an area where he shouldn't be going, speculating about the pound. So all of that instinct is to pull together and that applies to the Labour Party as well.

ANDREW MARR: Some people might say that it's taken this crisis to get you to back Gordon Brown.

JOHN REID: No, well I learned very quickly that if you say anything, and I did within a fortnight of standing down said something in Parliament - it was helping Gordon, it was uniting with Gordon, it was over the subject of Hizb ut-Tahrir - and yet some people managed to misrepresent that as in some way an attempt to undermine him.

So my silence has been primarily because people from your own profession, if you say anything some of them will misrepresent it. And I said to Gordon when I stepped down - and incidentally we had a very good relationship at that time and beyond - that I would not pass comment on anything that was happening and that would stop people misrepresenting us.

Where we are now, of course, you're right - we are now in the middle of a crisis - and, if I might say so, Gordon having had a brilliant start as Prime Minister then had a dreadful sort of year where everything went wrong...

ANDREW MARR: Yes.

JOHN REID: ... and now where the tide has turned again has shown the qualities that made him the Leader, and I hope he learns from that as well. Boldness, leadership, decisiveness, imagination, taking risks on this, and that's had the reward of putting him pre-eminently not only in this country but abroad.

ANDREW MARR: Something happened to him and it went wrong and something else has happened to him, you think, and it's come back a bit.

JOHN REID: Well these things are always a combination of the personality and the events, aren't they? You know Harold Macmillan's famous for his "Events, dear boy, events." It isn't new. That's as old as Shakespeare. There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads onto greatness.

This great tide of recession came in. No-one actually knew what to do except Gordon Brown. He had a clear idea, he was decisive, he laid out his plans, he thought strategically, but he responded to the immediate crisis. He was bold and he was given recognition for doing that.

Now there's lessons actually I think for Gordon in that as well because if he acts like that in other areas in the future, I think he'll get the same response.

ANDREW MARR: And, therefore - I put it to you, this is what you say - the turf war, which went on - very, very debilitating to government between so-called Blairites and so-called Brownites - is that over?

JOHN REID: First of all, I've never accepted that there is a group of people called Brownites and a group of people called Blairites. If you're presupposing that they're always phoning and networking and so on, it isn't true.

I don't speak for anybody, Andrew, except me. I do not speak for anybody. Incidentally, no-one else speaks for me either. So I have kept my silence up to now for the reasons, honourable reasons I told you about. I'm now saying what I think.

It is what I think. My judgement is, however, that - others probably share the same views, but they have to speak for themselves - but I firmly believe that this is a time at which the country and the party and everyone else quite rightly expects us to work together at an international, national, party and inter-party level and, therefore, I fully expect that that will continue.

And it is also a set of circumstances that have allowed Gordon to show the type of decisiveness and leadership which has restored his fortunes.

ANDREW MARR: You mentioned tides in the affair of men. Prince Charles, a lot of talk about Prince Charles and the act of succession, which bars Catholics from being anywhere near the line of succession. Now there is some speculation that he wants to change that and that he's spoken to people like yourself about that.

JOHN REID: Well obviously I'm not going to confirm any details of any discussions I have with anyone. But if you're asking me whether we need to change the provisions of the Act of Settlement which discriminate against Catholics, and incidentally women, well the answer's yes. I think you know that is a widely held view because...

ANDREW MARR: And do you think the future King is up for that?

JOHN REID: Well I think that it's a widely held view that the Act of Settlement is divisive, discriminatory, that it's long outdated, and to many people it's offensive. And, therefore, if you're going to create a Britain in which we truly have equality, you can't have institutionalised discrimination at the centre of the state. Therefore we need to repeal or amend those provisions of the Act of Settlement.

ANDREW MARR: And without going into private conversations, but do you think that Prince Charles agrees with that position?

JOHN REID: I, I cannot speak for Prince Charles any more than I can speak for other people called the Blairites, but what I do think is that the country needs to change that. The country recognises it needs to change. He is a man who has shown great foresight and inclusiveness in every other area.

I don't underestimate the problems, particularly as regards the establishment of the Church of England - there are great problems with this - but I think it's now time to tackle it and I would hope that his foresight and progressive views and other things would enable him to contemplate this.

ANDREW MARR: John Reid, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

JOHN REID: Thank you, Andrew.

INTERVIEW ENDS

Please note "The Andrew Marr Show" must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

NB: This transcript was typed from a recording and not copied from an original script.

Because of the possibility of mis-hearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, the BBC cannot vouch for its accuracy

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