Lord Michael Farmer - From The City To Politics: The Role Of Religion And The Importance Of Family In Promoting Upward Social Mobility

Full transcript: Lord Michael Farmer on London Real

2:18 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Lord Michael Farmer, the businessman, philanthropist, former Conservative Party treasurer and member of the House of Lords.

2:36 You started your career as an account clerk in the London Metal Exchange in 1963 at age 18, earning 8 pounds a week. Today you are one of the founders of the Red Kite Group, a metals trading and investment firm with 2 billion dollars in assets. In 2014 you became a baron and took a seat in the House of Lords and have been active in championing policies that strengthen families, fight homelessness and domestic abuse and advocate prison reform. You’ve also used your 50 years’ experience in the City to inform good practice and new regulations for the financial markets, while also being a staunch advocate of Britain leaving the European Union.

3:12 Lord Farmer, welcome to London Real. Thank you very much, Brian. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Pleasure to have you here.

3:19 I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. So much to talk about. I want to talk about the House of Lords, to your policies, to the City, to the role of religion and family. But in doing some research for this, I started thinking about my own childhood and my own family, and, you know, one of the realizations I had was that those years affected who I became as an adult. And one of my earliest memories was my parents getting divorced when I was seven years old, and my sister and brother had different reactions, but my reaction was people can’t be trusted and I’m gonna have to rely on myself and people potentially are paying for me.

3:59 So the seven-year-old Brian became self-reliant, probably to a dangerous degree, and went on to do these things and put myself in these situations to test myself, I think. And I went to MIT and I went to Wall Street and I went to the City, and when I look back at that behavior, I’m always wondering how much of that was because of the family. And I know you had a challenging upbringing. I know your father died when you were four years old, and I know, you know, your parents were both alcoholics and you spent time at the state boarding school, and I know there was a Simon and Garfunkel song that you kind of used to think about and refer to called “I Am a Rock”, and I was wondering if you could tell us about that song and maybe a little bit about your early years.

4:43 Yes, fine. Thank you, Brian. Yes, “I Am a Rock, I Am an Island”. It’s quite actually similar, the sort of feelings I had as what you were describing for yourself. I mean, I think a divorce, a parental separation, is known in the bright circles as an ACE, adverse childhood experience, and you only need a few of those, I think four adverse childhood experiences, to, when you grow up, to have quite serious problems during life.

5:19 And in fact if you’ve got four or five of them you could well end up in prison, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, my father was an alcoholic, he died from it, from falling over, brain hemorrhage, when I was four, so I didn’t really know him. My mother was an alcoholic, you had the neglect and shame associated with that, and the poverty, actually, we lost everything. And actually my sister suffered more than I did because she was at home and I actually did go to a boarding school where you have stability, you have peer relationships which are stable, you have almost foster parental relations if you’ve got good masters.

6:06 You don’t always have good masters, because in those days there’s quite a lot of beatings going on and that sort of thing. But there was certainly, when I grew up, I mean, I did actually come to a recognition in my teens that my mother, with the alcoholism, which was bad for me, very ugly, I hated it, but then I suddenly, I had one evening when we were having an argument about the television channel, with only two television channels in those days, and she was drunk and in the end she was swearing at me and I thought, well, actually she needs to go to bed. And I was 15 or so and I just went over, I said, I said, “Mommy,” pick her up, and I just moved her over to the door, put her outside the door, closed the door and put my foot against it and said, “Go to bed,” and she went to bed and she didn’t remember a thing in the morning, of course, but from then on there was this sort of different relationship where I recognized that actually here was somebody who wasn’t to be criticized, she was to be helped, actually.

7:19 So you needed sympathy and I think it was good for me and she certainly, I think the drinking reduced thereafter. But you sort of grow up and you are aware that you’re alone, you know, apart from my mother, and there is this “I am a rock, I am an island”. So you start work, I started work at eight pounds a week, and one way and another I sort of climbed up the ladder. But you, “I am a rock, I am an island”, don’t go near people, they hurt you, you know. And actually when I became a Christian at the age of 35, one of the first things that I think the Lord said to me was join the Samaritans, you can help people.

8:09 So I joined, or I tried to join the Samaritans, but I had a a training course and there was a lawyer actually in charge of it, I think his name was Jonathan, and I was sitting with a group of people and he started off, “My name’s Jonathan and I like people.” I thought, you what, you like people? I said, people are horrible, people hurt you, you don’t want to let them come near you, and that was my attitude. Don’t, you can’t trust anybody, you can’t rely on anybody, you’ve just got to do it yourself.

8:42 Rather like you stated. Yeah. And I looked up the lyrics of that song and I mean I almost started, you know, crying when I was reading it, because it says, “I’m a rock, I’m an island, I’ve built walls, a fortress deep and mighty that none may penetrate. I have no need of friendship, friendship causes pain. I am shielded by my armor, hiding in my room, safe within my womb.

9:04 I touch no one and no one touches me.” Exactly. That sums it up completely. But that’s how I think a lot of children today grow up, with the you know, the proliferation of family breakdown and this sort of Western hyper-liberal individualism that’s sort of encouraged by governments, by their policies, that the value of committed strengthening relationships is just not perceived. And in fact it’s, I think there have been conscious policies against it, against the family.

9:50 Yeah, and we’re feeling the ramifications of that and we will feel it again in 10 or 20 years if we don’t make those changes. Oh, it’s happening the whole time. I mean, my campaign in the House of Lords is all to do with families and getting the government to understand the importance of strengthening families. I mean, it started off with the Ministry of Justice actually asking me to do these two prison reviews, and it was on their own statistic, which I was very thankful for, that the prisoners who receive family visits are 39 percent less likely to reoffend than those who don’t, and the reoffending rates over here at that time when I did the review was 43 percent reoffending rates.

10:40 Intergenerational transmission of criminality was over 60 percent from parent to child, and in fact in the female line it was even higher than the males, over 60. So it’s shocking, and it was a, and you know, and here was a sudden statistic which said actually families are important. You know, and it’s, you know, when you get into Parliament there’s very much, you can’t come along with an opinion, you have to have the research and the data behind it, which is something one of the things I learned to my cost to begin with.

11:16 I can’t just stand up and I think this, I think that, you have to have the research. And here was this wonderful statistic which no one could argue with, and it was the Ministry of Justice’s own figure. Let’s talk about your work in the House of Lords, but first maybe we have to talk about what is the House of Lords, because many of our, you know, audience in America might not understand. They probably have seen Question Time in the House of Commons and they don’t know the difference between the House of Commons, the House of Lords, but maybe you can give us a quick, you know, history brief on them.

11:48 I’m not sure I can give you a quick history brief. The House of Lords goes back to almost the original parliaments. They were all made up of all the very well-to-do and the aristocracy. I mean, that’s what Parliament was packed full of. Today it has obviously the whole process of spreading the vote out, so the elected chamber it now has prominence, priority over the role of the House of Lords, which has become more scrutinizing, revising and amending legislation which gets passed up to it from the Commons.

12:37 However, I mean, the House of Lords still does have power to reject legislation, although there is a Salisbury Convention which says that we can amend and send back, and if the Commons sends it back again then we’re in this process of ping-pong, it’s called, and in the end we have to give way, but that’s only on policies, on bills, which are connected to the government’s manifesto at the time of the election. So it’s worked on the argument that they were elected on these promises and the House of Lords shouldn’t stand in the way. If the government brings a bill in which was not in the manifesto, then actually the House of Lords still has the power to reject it.

13:22 And in the current state of affairs the House of Lords has a majority in opposition to the government. So I mean that’s just telling you the current position. But to get into the House of Lords you’re actually appointed by the Queen. In reality the Prime Minister gives the Queen a list, there’s there has been vetting and all sorts of other things going on. But the members of the House of Lords are obviously many political people who have been ministers or members of the Commons or being maybe in local council or even in trade unions, whatever.

14:06 You have medics, medical professors, academics, a lot of legal people, a lot of lawyers, ex-judges, etc. So the age profile is much older. I think the average age is actually over 70, 75 almost. But there is the wisdom there, and it is a place where you can have a reasoned debate. There is a requirement for courtesy.

14:37 There is a we’re not allowed to say “you”, we say “the noble Lord has said this” or “the noble Baroness has said this”. You know, we have these, if you like, slightly old-fashioned ways of talking to one another, but it maintains a courteous relationship where debate can take place. And I mean, I heard there was a saying whereby it said, basically saying, it’s better to debate a subject and not to have an agreement than not to have a conclusion than to have a conclusion without a debate.

15:19 And I think the House of Lords is one of the few places you can have that reasoned debate. So if you read Hansard it’s very different to the debate in the Commons. Yeah, and it shows, I mean, and again the House of Commons are elected by the people based on geographies throughout the United Kingdom, 650 constituents there, and then House of Lords 797, I think, appointed for life, and because you have that life appointment you can, and you have that wisdom, you can kind of go deeper and really construct policies over time that mean a lot to you that you can then send to the House of Commons, whereas, and this is maybe a generalization, the House of Commons people there, they really have to look out for their constituency, they have to help administer that and do what’s in the best interest and also worry about elections every four to five years.

16:06 Absolutely. And so it’s almost like you have more time to do more important long-term work. Absolutely right. I think it’s a huge advantage. I mean, when I was advised, you know, the Queen was giving me a peerage, I thought, well, this is very nice, and it’s very nice for my wife, she’ll be, you know, Lady Farmer and sort of, but actually within a day I suddenly thought, I could speak.

16:33 I can stand up and speak, I can talk about families, I can talk about the things which matter to me. And there is that, you’re absolutely right, that sort of not relaxation but that comfort that knowing that you’re there for as many days as a good Lord gives you on this earth and you can do your work there even if you’re in opposition, even if you’re a, you know, a lowly backbencher, you can still stand up and speak and you can still influence. I had a little experience when I came into the House of Lords.

17:08 You have to do all sorts of all sorts of filling forms and all sorts of other things, and I was talking to one of the, you know, the clerks of Parliament there, filling in forms about personal interests and things like that, and I said, look, you don’t really need to worry about me, I’m one of the lowest or below because I’m a back puncher. And he went, “Excuse me, my Lord, you’re one of the people who makes the laws which I have to obey.” And I thought, right, and you put me in my place.

17:43 And where does that humility come from? Does that come from working in the City and being in a metals, you know, exchange ring at 18 and being yelled at and having to go through all of that? I mean, how much of this City work prepared you for this, or is that a completely different ballgame? No, I think being a Christian prepared me. And being a Christian, I became a Christian at 35 and I’ve been in the City for 17 years by then.

18:10 I got married when I was 30. And that really sort of changed, and frankly if you’re a Christian, you know, you believe that God is involved in your life and there have been occasions in my City work, in running a hedge fund and having very big positions on for instance the copper market, I mean with the dominant position sometimes, so globally, that one was humbled. I mean, I’m just using that mixing. It’s a subject we can talk about a bit, but you had an instance at one point where I think there was an American hedge fund that knew your positions and decided to maybe squeeze your copper position or maybe another metal.

18:56 Yeah. And you lost 30 percent of your fund net worth in 12 days. Yeah, that was 900 million dollars in 2007, in 12 days. Yeah, and I was sleeping one hour a night and I was a Christian and I was sort of thinking, what’s going on here? You know, I’m a Christian, I’m, you know, I’m doing Bible studies, I’m going to church, I’m praying, and then somebody said to me, it was a minister, he said, “You know, Michael, God is sovereign, he is sovereign, and he’s your father.”

19:32 And I saw thinking about, I thought, ah, okay, so he is God Almighty, omnipotent and omniscient, but he is my father and he gives me good things, so there’s something going on here which I don’t understand and I just should relax and just behave in the way that, you know, I think his word guides me to behave, which actually requires humility. You’ve got to close out positions, you’ve got to talk to investors about losses. We actually gave back a lot of fees which we could have kept, but we did that, and in fact one of the investors said, “Michael, if you hadn’t done that we would have been off.”

20:10 And it was that sort of thing going on, but it was a very humbling position. And then afterwards I was thinking about, well, what was the good that came out of this? I thought, what was it? And then I thought, humility, that’s what it was. There I was doing very well and even though I thought, you know, one sort of humble Christian guy doing good things, actually there was this in here, actually I’m not a bad guy, I’m doing pretty well actually, look at me compared to everybody else, thank you very much.

20:44 And then all of a sudden you’re humbled, and actually humility is a great gift, it’s a great gift and very difficult to receive because we all have that inherent pride within us, you know, all of us do. We all want to be somebody, you know, and to actually be given the gift of humility or to go along that path of growing in humility is a very gracious gift of God, I think. A 900 million dollar gift. Yep. Expensive lesson.

21:19 Yeah, sure, but worth every dollar. Yeah, more so, I say. Yes. Tell me about the City, because you know, I left the City almost nine years ago and you’ve spoken about these kind of false idols in the City, you know. Again, back to me, when I was seven years old I just thought that if I accomplished something, maybe I’d have some worth, maybe.

21:41 I think that’s what I was doing, and I taught myself that money would buy me happiness, and I was in my head for, I mean, for 40 years, Michael. And at one point I was watching my quarterly income, and they paid us quarterly at ICAP, and I realized that as my income went up I became less happy, and it took my four-year degree at MIT to realize there was a reverse correlation and I better do something different with my life or I’m going to be upset. I was alone, I was depressed, I was drinking myself to death, I had no family and no friends, and I thought, I got to stop doing this.

22:15 And I started doing this, which is taking me on a different adventure, but it’s hard to get out of that feeling in the City. What do you see there, especially as a Christian, and why do so many people get stuck in it? Well, I think you put your finger on it, it is money. I mean, when I started, when I was 18, I was, you know, I had no clue really, and I just worked hard, and, you know, I was sent to Germany to learn German, worked in a German firm over there.

22:44 It was when I was 21, great experience, came back and then climbed the ladder, became one of the youngest sort of ring traders in the open outcry market and sort of climbed up and realized, actually, when I got into this very sort of powerful firm that sort of was a global physical trade and merchant of metals and particularly copper, then I realized actually money was at the heart of it. It was really rather like an eye-opener, and when one, in my sort of mid-20s that actually it was all about money, and I’d been so naive not to realize that beforehand. But once I realized that, everything was sort of, you could, all your thoughts worked, you know, what’s the risk, reward, you know, how much can we lose, how much profit can we make, et cetera.

23:38 So you sort of learn these things. But then becoming a Christian, you know, I was doing well, I mean, we were we married five years, started having children, we, you know, I was doing reasonably well, and then all of a sudden this whole area of being a Christian and working in the City. I remember I used to travel in on the train and I’d be thinking about God and be reading the Bible and be thinking about all sorts of questions and talking this sort of stuff, and then I’ll get in the elevator in the City, got there, God would be gone, the whole day would be gone, get in the lift at the end of the day because God will come back now.

24:24 And it suddenly occurred to me after a while, God’s not with me, I’m not with him in the workplace, it’s all about money. And then that whole area of developing, growing, you know, in biblical understanding, you know, the studies, etc., listening to sermons, but praying and talking to other Christians, that, you know, I was thinking, well, the City. Now I had often had people saying to me, how can you as a Christian work in the City? You know, it’s all about money, how can you do that?

24:59 And I had to think about that, and then what it did was it sort of cleared up the idols that are in the City, and I think particularly it became very clear to me, money is obviously an idol. You described it yourself, Brian. It gives you everything, apparently. It gives you the freedom, it gives you the house, the health care, the holidays, the reputation, you know, I mean, you know, it seems to be the God to bow down to. All right.

25:29 You’ve also got the company, the whole corporate culture where you’re climbing that ladder, it’s a competitiveness of one another, and there’s a bowing down to the company. When I actually joined well, when I was with Phibro Salomon at the end of the eighties, they invited me onto this global board governing all their trading, and I was going to be in charge of base metals, and I was invited to this board and I just thought, well, okay, I’ll think about it, and there’s a sort of little bell ringing in the back of my head and I thought, well, I’ll go away and I’ll come back to you tomorrow, Marty, and I’ll tell you. And I still prayed about it and and then in the middle of the night I woke up and I just thought, I need to tell him I’m a Christian and I need to tell him there’s more important things than the company, there’s more important things than money.

26:36 So the next day I went up to him, I said, look, Marty, I’m very happy to do this, but you need to know something. This is a managing director of Salomon Brothers? This was, yeah, the boss of, in New York, and he was a Jewish chap and he, and I said, look, I’m a Christian, so number one there’s God, number two that’s a family, and then there’s a company, and you may rest assured I will work hard, but there’s that priority, and, you know, these things are important to me and I won’t sacrifice them.

27:11 And he actually said to me, “I have Talmudic studies every week,” and I said, well, very good, you know, but I mean it was sort of a sort of bouncing the conversation about. But that whole area of prioritizing God and family before work was quite difficult and you had to concentrate on it and you had to be disciplined. So City lunches. Okay, you were a kaipa, ICAP, I mean, I know they used to love, well, they, you know, love City lunches, I mean they were the thing, and I just had to learn how do I not have City lunches where you’re drinking and talking and, you know, et cetera, and in the end that you have to learn to say no.

28:06 And that was a big thing for me to learn, is to say no to these things and to go away on a weekend company get-together, strengthening one another, where there’s all sorts of things might could be going on. Just say no, I’m with the family, and it didn’t hurt me saying no, didn’t hurt me. Yeah, I said no a few times to some of my clients and they respected it. Yeah, I said if you want to do that, there’s a bunch of other brokers that can take you out there, but I just don’t do that.

28:38 Exactly. I’m, we can do other things, we can go play squash, we can go do this, we can do that, but I don’t want to do that thing. Exactly. And surprisingly it was okay and they respected it if they understood it. My colleagues maybe not as much, but you were able to find that line in the City.

28:54 Yes, well, in the end I was ending up as a sort of boss, so I had to discipline myself really. But even beforehand you know, it was just I was saying no and they respected that. And I as a Christian, I said to other Christians, you know, don’t be ashamed of the Lord, you know, don’t be ashamed of Jesus. You know, if you keep your head above the parapet, but as a Christian, you know, don’t be ashamed of him, because if you are, I mean in Marcuses, if you’re ashamed of me, I’ll be ashamed of you, you know, which is a very tough verse, frankly, but just be upfront about it, and then I found that he was there and he was protecting me.

29:44 I mean, you know, people did respect, you know, I mean, we were called the God Squad at times, so Financial Times called us a God Squad in the City and that sort of thing, and I think you know the, I’ve heard people sort of respected us you know, because we had the sort of, I guess, more integrity than they thought City people should have. Maybe they thought you had an extra member on your team too, looking out for you. Exactly. And let’s talk about religion while we’re here, and I want to get back to your policies in the House of Lords.

30:17 How did that happen for you? Because I don’t think you grew up with it. No, well, I didn’t really, although boarding school there was chapel, and I mean I was aware of the Christian faith. I had an aunt who was a missionary, actually, and she tried to have some influence, but she’d been a missionary in Kenya and in Nepal and leprosy things like that. I didn’t see her that often and she was considered by the rest of the family as a, as you know, a quirky person, sort of thing.

30:48 She’s giving you a Holy Bible. I think she did, yes, that’s right, and the verse inside of it was, I think, Psalm 119, verse 18: “Lord, open my eyes that I may behold wonderful things in your law.” And as a child I used this leather-bound Bible, it was a valuable possession, I didn’t really read it except for this verse, and I never quite knew what it meant, you know, but there was that prayer, “Lord, open my eyes that I may behold wonderful things in your law.”

31:14 And that’s what he did, he’s been opening my eyes ever since, and I can behold wonderful things in his law. So I sort of grew up just, I would say, like anybody else. All right, except I was an island, I was a rock. I was an island but worldly, I think. I mean, in the 60s you had the, you know, promiscuity coming along, drugs, thankfully I never really got involved in it.

31:40 It was early drug days, certainly. I, you know, my father was an alcoholic, I started drinking a bit, but actually I had a very good piece of advice by a commissioner. You know, you said in the City you had these commissioners in there, they used to be ex-army and they used to have these uniforms and they used to be messengers around the City. There was a chap called Sergeant Simmons when I was in my early twenties, and I think he saw me coming in with a hangover one day and he just said, he said, “Michael,” he said, “just let me give you a word of advice.”

32:10 He said, he said, “Just stick to beer.” He said, “Avoid the spirits.” Stick to beer. And I thought, well, that’s good, somebody gave me a piece of advice, nobody else gave me anything like that, and it really stuck, and I thought, okay, I can see the danger, I’ve got the danger in my history, you know, so I’ll, and that’s what I did and I think that actually helped me a lot during the 20s, my 20s, when I wasn’t a Christian. In the late 60s when it was all kicking off in London, absolutely.

32:46 What do you remember about the late 40s, 50s, 60s in London, like what comes out? I mean, it was hard times for the City. Yeah, well, late, I mean, I was born in 44, but I mean those days, and I didn’t live in London then, we lived in Berkshire, but, you know, there were hard post-war days and Britain was paying back debt to America and it was a hard time, rationing still went on, but, you know, in a way there was still that I won’t say purity, but there was simplicity of life and the family life, and those values were still there in society, whereas when you get to the 60s, with particularly the pop culture and this sort of liberalization and this gradual acceptance of, you know, whatever goes, this philosophy I always used to think, just do whatever you want to do, just don’t hurt somebody else, however you define that, but that sort of culture started developing.

33:58 So I, you know, I was, but I was by myself, so I was, you know, I was rocking, I was in Ireland. So actually when I got married at the age of 30, that sort of changed our lives and moved outside, and then the first baby came along when I was 35, and it was at that point I became a Christian, which, you know, was a bit of a Damascus Road experience. And how did that happen, because that would have been the last thing we would have ever predicted that happened to Michael Farmer at that time?

34:32 No, that’s right. Well, I used to, yeah, I mean what, I mean there were a number of things that happened. We lived in the fields, I mean we had a house out in the fields in Buckinghamshire and just, you know, cutting the grass, going for walks, just what I would call creation. You call it nature. This, the rhythm of it, the cycle, the the fruitfulness of it, seeing the apples on the apple tree, seeing the wheat grow every year, seeing the harvest come, seeing the seasons change, that was a big slow influence coming in, that, you know, one was thinking about, what is this place, you know, you know, the stars in the sky, the moon, the sun, what am I, you know, this is all this conscious human being which is hugely complex, the whole place is so hugely complex, you know, we’re only finding out how complex it is today, and yet it works, it works, it’s extraordinary, you know.

35:40 So I had that sort of going on in my head the whole time, I suppose, this exposure. I mean, the Psalms say, you know, the heavens declare the glory of God, there is this speech that pours out from creation to every human being no matter what language you speak, you understand it, and no man has any excuse, it’s there, and I think that was pouring in on me, and then we had the first baby and I was thinking, who’s this? Who is this person? What, you know, and it was just this new baby being formed, this new human being coming from sort of nowhere, and so that was really another thing, and there were a couple of other things.

36:28 Local minister of the church quite some way away, he knocked on the door one night and he said, “My name’s Nick Maloney and just come to see how you are.” This, we’ve been there a few years and nobody else ever knocked on the door, we were right outside. I’d come and have a cup of tea and anyway got to know him a bit and he never mentioned God, but I thought afterwards, well, nobody else has ever knocked on the door and asked us how we are. And then there was somebody we were trying to help who was having difficulties in their marriage and we asked my wife asked our doctor, actually, how can we help, because we didn’t know how to help, and I didn’t think he was a Christian, but the doctor was an old man, he said, try and encourage her to mix with people who go to church.

37:12 And I came back from work from the City and I said, what? Try and encourage a mix of people that go to church, that’s a very funny thing to say. And then I thought, well, actually they’ll probably try and be kind, they’ll probably try and help her, actually, that’s probably pretty good advice, actually. And there were these sort of things going on which then comes a dramatic moment, so I think it is a Damascus Road experience, that, you know, basically in the middle of the night just heard one word, which was “Michael”, just clear, clear, it was quite clear, it was just “Michael”, and all I said, I didn’t have any choice, was “Yes, Lord”, and in front of my eyes was Jesus Christ as the Son of God.

38:04 I mean, it was just this sort of white knowledge, certainty, Jesus Christ the Son of God, and and I thought then, I thought, this changes everything. This just changes everything. I have to find out, I have to learn who is Jesus Christ, what does this mean, you know. I thought, well, I better start going to church. I thought I’d better start reading the Bible, I better, I have to find out, I have to learn.

38:37 And I always say that when asked about this, I said if you weren’t convinced that this was the Lord speaking, when I was thinking I have to go to church, you know what thought next came into my head? When you go to church, don’t let them make you treasurer. You have to learn, and guess what they did? I went to this little church nearby and, you know, it’s a little church and here I am doing reasonably well in the City. “Michael, would you like to be treasurer?”

39:06 I don’t know, and before I knew where I was I was in a teaching church in the City of London as well, and one learned as a Christian you never cease learning about God, he is beyond beyond learning, so you’re always on that journey. And were you always comfortable telling this story or did it take time before you could share this? I’m sort of cautious about it because what I don’t want to do is to sort of give the impression that it is this sort of experience you’ve got to have to be a Christian, because I mean there are many other examples in my own family, but that’s where people come to know the Lord, they have their eyes opened gradually often.

39:55 Certain, you might say that I had, you know, at school, you know, chapel experiences, in those days you had scripture lessons, so I had some background knowledge, I mean it didn’t just come from nowhere. And so I’m just cautious about that, but that’s what happened. So I sort of thought, think, well, that’s what happened, so I should actually tell it as it is, because otherwise I’m concealing something which actually happened. Yeah, yeah, and it did change my life, it completely changed my life, and it’s been great ever since.

40:38 You’ve got that you know, fundamental relationship again, you know, it’s like when I was talking about the City, whereby where’d you go, you know. I remember a story, when I went to Romania with a friend from the church here in the City in the late church rescue days, there was a pastor in a church in Lugoj near Timisoara and they were being quite badly persecuted, and we heard the story of this other pastor who had been put in the security headquarters, arrested and kept in isolation for a number of years, actually, and after the revolution this pastor actually was with an American visitor, I think a pastor, walking around Bucharest, and they came into this square and there was the security headquarters and he’d been talking about how he’d been in this cell by himself, you never knew whether you’re going to live or die the next day, and he just went up to this building and put his arms around the cornerstone and he said, “Lord, what good times we had together in here.”

41:54 And it’s that position where sometimes you have to lose everything to have everything, you have nothing but the Lord. It’s a great position spiritually to be in, but it’s not something any of us want particularly. No, not at the time. I’ve had some moments of those. Yeah, they’re the greatest teaching moments and some of the greatest success comes from them, but they are very dark at the time.

42:17 Yeah, yeah, that’s right. And when you joined the House of Lords, I think you had a similar experience where you said how much can religion be spoken about in here, and I think you came to a similar conclusion, that you had to be just as open as you were in the City. Well, it’s a prayer, but it takes guts, frankly, you know, so where do I get guts from? “Lord, give me courage.” I mean, we we were, I was involved with what was called the suicide bill, it was the bill allowing help for people who wanted to kill themselves, and I forgot my name at the moment, but we were sort of a little group, a few Christians in it who were sort of getting together policy and sort of constructive plans against not allowing this bill to go through Parliament, which actually succeeded because in the end the Commons voted out.

43:26 But at one stage I was warned by another member of the House of Lords, “Michael, when you stand up, do not mention God.” And I was actually shocked. If you mentioned God they will stop listening and they will think you’re irrational. And I was really quite shocked and it sort of it troubled me that, and in fact I spoke to some quite well-known Christian leaders about it and they weren’t all that helpful, actually, it was almost like, well, you should be talking to the spirit of the age, the culture of the age, which a lot of the bishops seem to do, I mean frankly.

44:05 One very rarely hears them mention God when when they stand up and contribute to debates, and it’s quite difficult there, but pray about it. So, you know, and I mean there was one occasion we had talking about palliative care with people who are dying, and there’s a lot of debate going on about making the comfortable, drugs, visit, family visits, all that sort of, all the whole area of palliative care, and I said, I’ve now said, well, we’re missing the whole area of spiritual palliative care. You know, who speaks about eternal life more than anybody else in the whole Bible?

44:56 It’s Jesus. That’s why he came, that we might have eternal life. And here are people on the edge of eternity, shouldn’t they actually have some spiritual palliative care to give them comfort and faith and encouragement that actually eternity awaits them? Yeah. So there are opportunities, but it’s difficult.

45:20 Okay, so you choose your battles. Yeah, but you let everybody know you’re a Christian. Yeah, so you do get the you do get the hostility as well, you get the opposition for being a Christian there. Right. You know, it’s my mom took me to a Presbyterian church when I was a kid into Sunday school and I remember being dragged into church, you know, and I had that experience and then I grew up in a world that didn’t necessarily promote, you know, religion, you know, at least in America in the 80s and the 90s, and it’s only been through this show where I’ve started talking to people that have different views on religion that I’ve started just be more open-minded to it.

46:01 I had Jordan Peterson in here who said, you know, some of the tales from the Bible are in our DNA. I never thought about that, you know, Cain and Abel, it’s actually almost a lesson of life, it’s almost like the religion is almost technology to teach us humans how to live better, and it’s spent thousands of years refining itself. And so I’ve started to look at it in different ways. Rupert Sheldrake has a book called Science and Spiritual Practices that says when we’ve thrown religion out the window we threw out all these incredible practices like fasting, pilgrimage, aggregation, singing together.

46:34 He’s like, we’ve lost all of this great connection that made us human for so many years. And so now I’m just becoming more open-minded to it, and now I have children and I’m thinking there seems to be something that religion does. Yeah, that’s powerful, that’s not spoken of. Actually, I mean, it’s interesting, a bit of a cartoon the other day saying 3,000 years ago God sent the most important information down from a cloud on a tablet to the human race, you know, it’s just sort of lining it up with what goes on today, and, you know, there you have Moses with the Ten Commandments, you know.

47:18 But yeah, I think you mentioned Cain and Abel, but, you know, I actually go back to the chapter before Cain and Abel, because I think that does explain, you know, people say to me, you know, why is so much suffering in the world, and I find a lot of Christian leaders very weak on this. Well, it’s difficult, it’s a mystery, God, you know, et cetera, and I thought it was a pro, I was a puzzle this, I don’t know why, why is it mystery? And I thought, and then I read, kept reading the Bible, and I kept going back to Genesis 1, 2, 3.

48:03 You know, Genesis 1, in the beginning God, and God speaks and creates and it’s good, et cetera, and then there’s Adam and Eve. You know, it isn’t a science manual, but it’s full of theological truths. In the beginning God is a big one, all right, and he creates everything is another big one, and we are his creation is another big one, all right. It’s just these truths that, and, you know, we don’t get hung up with days or ages or eras or whatever, it’s that, that’s what it’s saying.

48:34 And then you’ve got this Genesis 3 where, you know, here you have the garden, here you have the epitome of his creation, men and women, Adam and Eve, and you’ve got this one prohibition, don’t eat of the apple, otherwise you’ll have the knowledge of the good and evil and you will die. And then there’s a whispering, “Look, actually, you know,” which comes from the human heart, “actually if we eat the apple we will be God, we will be like God.” He’s just kidding, we won’t die, we’ll be like him.

49:11 And so there’s this fall, if you like, and then God says, because you have the knowledge of good and evil, and he repeats it twice, and we do have the knowledge of evil, we know that, we just look at the world every day, you look at the history, I mean, do we have a knowledge of evil? We all have evil within our hearts, we have good within our hearts as well, but we have evil. He says you cannot live forever and you’re out of my presence, and you’re going to have pain in childbirth, you’re going to have broken relationships between yourselves and between you and creation, you’re going to have thorns and thistles, you’re going to have work, sweat of the brow every day, get the bread on the table because it’ll go moldy, you can’t last, you’ve got to go and get some more, you’re gonna, and then you’re going to decay and you’re going to die and go back to the dust of the earth.

50:11 And I thought about this and I thought, that’s how it is, isn’t it? Life’s a struggle. It’s been a struggle for me, it’s a struggle for you, Brian, it’s a struggle for everyone, it’s a struggle for everybody, and actually if you put it like that you think, well, that’s how it is. And then I was thinking, well, you know, we’re trapped in this time and space and we just got 70 years, 80 years, 90 years, whatever, and then we’re back to the dust of the earth.

50:40 And then of course you get the Christian gospel where God intervenes, you know, he comes in in the form of his son to save. What’s the big thing about Jesus? What’s the host of heaven glorifying him for? What Simeon going, a Savior has come, somebody who can save us from this, actually from this suffering. So when you say you’re going to have suffering in the world, well, God said it would be, you know, and there is, and we all die in the end.

51:11 And he dies for us on a cross there where he takes upon himself our rebellion, and it’s through faith in him, this trust in him, that we have eternal life. So you have what I think is like this bronze ceiling here, great big thick bronze ceiling, we’re trapped in this time and space for this short time and there’s no way out, no way out at all, except now there’s a little door which is cross-shaped, just a little door, and that’s where Jesus went through into eternity to be with the eternal creator of everything, and all who believe in him follow that. Nothing of our own we bring, just to the cross we cling, you know, we just walk through as children.

52:02 Unless you come to me like a little child you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven, so we’re not bringing any good works, we’re just bringing our faith and trust in him. So I sometimes think when I die, which isn’t going to be too long away now because I’m in the decaying stage, and when I die the next conscious moment, the next conscious moment is going to be face to face with Jesus Christ, and I’m just going to fall on my face as the reality of eternity, the reality that actually this is going to go on forever, just starts seeping in, just, and I will just say, “Oh Lord, you did it, you did it.” And that’s what all Christians will do, will just, and be there forever, this great promise to be with him and be transformed to be like him, so we will want to be like he is, which I think is a great gift of grace.

53:11 You see, the great gift of grace that comes from the cross, we’re washed clean, and he says, for freedom I’ve set you free, and you think, well, freedom, what’s all that about? And then I woke up, C.S. Lewis helped me on this all over, but you sort of get come into this world of light and I suddenly realize it’s like the House of Lords, I’m free to do anything, I’m actually free to be bad, but I don’t want to be bad. Sometimes I am bad and then I have to say sorry, you know, and I help.

53:42 I don’t want to be, but you’re free to do all these good works. You’ve got, it’s like all these flowers and things around you, you can pick any one of them, and this wonderful world of light and it spreads, you know, limitless in life, you can, you know what, all the relationships, you know, how can you help, what can you do, but you’re free to do these things and by giving yourself you’re actually finding joy, you’re finding meaning, you walk, you know, you’re having adventures with the Lord, it’s life becomes great. And this is the past six years of your life in the House of Lords, I mean you’ve, yeah, you’ve followed your passion and you’re trying to spread light to the world with your work with the prison reform and around the family structure.

54:27 I mean this is your time. Well, I must give credit to my helper, Dr. Kalani, who worked for, she worked for the Centre for Social Justice, which Iain Duncan Smith has started up, but and they did report, she actually was instrumental in writing a report called Breakdown Britain in 2007, which really greatly influenced me when I saw the damage done to families and how they would, it was just breaking apart. And what is that damage, what do people need to know about the family structure here in Britain?

55:01 Well, it’s, I mean it’s this, it’s the individualism which has been encouraged by governments, you know, that we all have our rights, it’s a sort of me generation and I mean the whole lessening of the emphasis on marriage, the committed relationships, the sort of lifting up of single mums. I’m all for supporting single moms, I think they do a great job, and but do they want to be a single mom? Wouldn’t it be better to have a father there? I mean all the single moms that I know, it’s a struggle, I mean it’s more of a struggle than it should be.

55:51 You’ve got children, you’ve got work, you’ve got, you know, money, you’ve got all these problems. I mean they say that in divorce, when you have a divorce it’s something like, I won’t get the percentages completely correct, but it’s something like the man gets 12 percent better off and the woman gets 12 percent poorer, and she’s of course the one with the children, generally the primary carer. So the repercussions of family breakdown, we see it across every department of government, actually.

56:25 Loneliness, you know, people living by themselves, housing problem, you need more houses because people are living by themselves rather than together, rural communities, the suicide with farmers and things like this, again for loneliness, fat family breakdown. You see it in the defense area with military families where you’ve got no emphasis, and you saw it, you see it in the care system, how many children going into care? Why? Because of a bad family background, you know, where it’s just broken down, it’s chaos.

57:07 And when you have too much of a generous social welfare structure it can encourage the woman to kind of marry the state. I know we see that happen in the U.S. a lot. Yeah, and that might work financially but it’s still missing that core human structure. Exactly. That ends up saving people, I mean that results in crime and, like you said, more housing, taxing on the economy, it’s hard to overstate.

57:30 And I mean, just, I had a personal experience with this. So nine years ago I met a woman who had a young daughter and she was a single mother in this city, her daughter was six, seven years old, and at one point I saw this and I saw me, this was me as a kid, so and I thought, it’s time to do something about this. So we created a family and I adopted her and now we have this family structure and now she’s done incredibly and I can’t imagine to think what it would have been like if she didn’t have that father figure or that family structure.

58:00 Exactly. It’s so important and yet it’s not talked about. No talks about, someone talked about it, it’s forgotten somehow and well, fathers aren’t, fathers aren’t mentioned. You know, it’s one of the sort of campaigns where we’re trying to get you know, to raise the profile. You look at gangs in London, Croydon police did a little survey of the arrests they made of gang members in Croydon, they found that 75 percent of them didn’t have fathers at home.

58:33 So where do they get the security, where they get, you know, the peer, you know, it’s all the family. So, you know, that there are big problems, and what you’re mentioning is that the state encourages dependency on it, you know, so single mums are held up as a sort of icon that should always be supported, and we, Dr. Samantha Callan and myself, we’re very much into the whole area of prevention. You know, government policy is generally doing something about it when it’s happened, maybe domestic violence or whatever, it’s all trying to put sort of plasters on great big gaping wounds.

59:21 So just you throw more money at it, the answer is throw more money at it, that’s the role of government? Well, actually what we’re saying is the role of government should be for the common good, you should have policies which prevent it happening. You should, you know, put in their policies which can strengthen families where you’ve got family help. I mean at the moment we’re very much involved with setting up family hubs throughout the UK, which will be a center in the, you know, each town or city which anybody can walk into, be non-stigmatizing.

59:59 It’s a family hub where there’s lots of services centered, all the people there know where to go. You go in there and you say, well, you know, I’m a single mum but my son, I think he’s just started taking cocaine, he’s 13, he’s got getting involved with county lines or something, what do I do? You know, she’s probably got all the stigma, the fear of talking about that, social services. So, you know, what we’re trying to do is create this, and the government’s taking note of it, they actually mentioned family hubs in the manifesto, this country-wide system where people will have somewhere to go to help with their family problems.

1:00:40 It may be, I got a son who started hitting me, what do I do? Right, yeah, right. So it’s a different type of almost prescriptive treatment as opposed to, like you said, throwing money at it after the problem, where it’s usually five or ten times bigger. Yeah, and it does, absolutely, well, it’s preventative, you’ve got, you’ve got council, you’ve got people who can help, people who can, you know, the son and the mother can meet, you know, a sort of counsellor together, or them, there are whole services that can move in before you get a situation where the social services move in in a big way and separate people.

1:01:21 Yeah. You’ve done some interesting work looking at families where there’s a potential separation, whether, and it’s, you know, it’s interesting because there’s a high level of emotional contact or a low level of emotional conflict, you know, in my parents’ divorce it was all calm, you know, there was no violence, they didn’t say things about each other, and yet it still felt very damaging, and you’ve done some studies to find out that sometimes keeping the unit together can also be somehow beneficial for the children in certain circumstances. Yes, the keeping the unit together, you mean the third thing?

1:01:56 Yeah, well, wherever you can you should, but what you’re describing is that low level sort of passive conflict which is there the whole time, children sense that, and that’s that can be just as damaging, as actually it can be sometimes more damaging when it’s unresolved than the bus stop flare-up and somebody’s saying sorry, right, all right at the end, at least the child can see a resolution, whereas if you’ve got that passive aggression going on somehow that can be actually quite damaging and needs to be handled. I mean, the whole area took domestic violence, as a domestic violence bill coming through Parliament very, very, very shortly, again it doesn’t have much emphasis on prevention at all, but there are different sorts of domestic violence, one of them sort of situational violence, it’s called, which is quite common, where, you know, it’s Friday night and, you know, the blokes come back from work, he’s tired, the woman’s had the two children there or something, they have a few drinks and it all ends up, well, you never appreciate what I do, you think you earn all the money and everything else, and they all start slanging each other and then hitting each other or something, and the next morning, what have I done?

1:03:23 You know, and there is that sort of preventative stage, you know, that actually you’re starting something, but it can be healed with a bit of help, with a little bit of understanding, and then what do you do, you’ve kept the family together, the children, etc., it’s a stable social unit which is productive, economically it’s productive, instead of it breaking apart where you actually end up with maybe children in care or the mother in a refuge, you know, and the whole thing a disaster and a lot of expense for the state. Right, multiple sources of housing, potential, you know, crime if there’s a child involved, and it starts adding up after that. So preserve early on with preventative measures and also try not to lump everything together, because a domestic violence thing could, you know, expire out of control and you’ll be classified as this serial violence person.

1:04:24 Yeah. Tell me about what you’ve done with prison reform, because it’s pretty fascinating. I find with the female prisoners as well and as the males, where you mentioned it earlier, but when they have that contact with those domestic visits it really changes their reoffending rate. I know you’ve been really pivotal in trying to push that through. Well, as I say, it was the Ministry of Justice’s own statistic that started it, often.

1:04:47 They actually asked me and Samantha to do the male estate review, just the men in prison, so I wasn’t looking outside, but how to strengthen their family relationships, and it was interesting that the whole area of family relationships was not really being considered in the rehabilitative program of the prison system. Rehabilitation generally meant employment, training, education, which is what, so people will learn to be scaffolders and things like this, you know, they had an education, but you had this revolving door, you know, 43 percent going out, coming back in again, and, you know, that was a very high rate and a huge cost to the state. So starting the review and starting to visit prisons and talking to prisoners, you know, there was this, it became clear to me that men often went in there and they sort of thought, well, I’m here for 10 years, she’s going to go off with some other bloke, she’ll take the children, there’s nothing I can do, so you just give up.

1:06:10 And in imparting to the men a sense of responsibility is what I found was necessary, and I mean to give credit to the Ministry of Justice, they it was their review, I was doing it, I had officials from the Ministry of Justice, from the Prison Service on my expert panel, I had the charities, I had ex-offenders I had all those people helping me to do it, and Samantha and I very much, with her, you know, wisdom from knowledge of Westminster, how it works, working with the grain of government. I’m a Conservative peer, so you’ve got to produce a review which can be made to work, can be implemented. And in fact they sort of recommended to us, you should, one of your recommendations should be a regular implementation meeting thereafter.

1:07:12 So I’m still having them now with MoJ and Ministry of Justice officials, of people, how are you getting on? They are implementing every single one of the recommendations. I remember I was walking along the road with Rory Stewart. He was prison minister at the time and he said, he said, “Michael,” he said, “how did you do it? How do you do it?

1:07:32 I’ve never known anybody do a government review and they implement every recommendation, 19 recommendations.” Well, yeah, with the female it’s 35, something like that. But how do you do that? By building a coalition, by using the science, bringing everyone on board, going with the grain of government as well, going what can they do, you know, so is this recommendation workable to the Ministry of Justice? I mean you’ve got the whole, like, money things.

1:07:58 I mean money didn’t really come into it too much, but there’s, it’s a shift in the culture. So I said three legs of a stool, you’ve got education, you’ve got employment, the third leg is family relationships or committed relations, significant other, a lot of men didn’t have family. You’ve got that three-legged stool, if you haven’t got that leg it’s going to topple over when they go outside, and I call it the golden thread, which should run through the whole rehabilitative process of prisons, and actually they’ve taken it on board, the civil servants taking it on board, there’s a gradual understanding which has started, funnily enough, for the Ministry of Justice, but it’s starting to spread through government.

1:08:42 I mean at the moment we’re learning that there’s a cabinet-level family minister being appointed who is, whose job is to coordinate policies concerning families, cross-departmental, you know, government departments, so instead of being silos where you got the Ministry of Education not wanting to work with the Ministry of Work and Pensions or something, and all their own little silo, you’ll have an actual policy of no, you need to work together here at local level, local council level, and at government level to produce workable good policies. You put a lot of time on this. Well, I mean, look, I’m in my I, you know, there’s one of my verses, Psalm 90, it’s the Psalm of Moses, it’s great, in the middle it says, “Lord, teach me to number my days that I may have a heart of wisdom.”

1:09:46 And that really hit me when I, you know, as I got older, and I thought, I’ve only got so many days, and you depend on the Lord, and the Lord’s given me the helper from Samantha who’s got huge knowledge, I’ve got allies there like the Centre for Social Justice and other allies in Parliament, and you just meet with ministers, you argue, you’re trying to put, you know, the importance, and it’s, and the culture’s shifting. I think it’s slowly shifting, every department, we even talk to the Treasury. Do you know what stable families, if you have more stable families, would mean to the productivity of this country?

1:10:24 That is why, why is the UK so poor in productivity? Could it be connected to also the graph which shows we have a lot of family breakdown? You know, the bloke in the office who’s getting a divorce, is he going to work very well? He’s going to be stressed, he’s going to be anxious. Yeah, so it’s slowly.

1:10:44 And one praise, you know, when Rory Stewart said how did you do it, I actually didn’t, I just went like that. I don’t know if you understood it. You have this kind of this light and energy about you, especially when you’re talking about this stuff. Do these feel like the best days of your life? One is thankful for all the days of one’s life, I think.

1:11:10 I mean, I just, you know, I won’t say, you know, at the moment we have ups and downs and good and bad, one does, but one is with the Lord. I mean, I’m gonna keep coming back to him and you know, every day is with the Lord. You know, I was saying earlier, you know, somebody said to me, there’s a prayer in the morning, “Lord, what adventures are we going to have together today?” Well, I think I’m having an adventure at the moment talking to you. Yes, we are.

1:11:40 Yes, we are. Tell me about the current culture we’re seeing of kind of the wokeness, the left. We’re seeing a lot, America seems to embody it, and I’m looking at a country I used to live in and it’s hard to even fathom what’s going on there. I used to live in California, I used to live in New York City and Wall Street, and, you know, we’re seeing, like I said, this wokeness, almost this Marxist revival, and how do you see that affecting some of the things we’re talking about today, which is the family and religion, and are they two different things, are they in opposition?

1:12:11 What are your thoughts? I would say yes, they are, as they are in opposition, I would say. You could describe what’s happening today as sort of cultural Marxism. I think one of the marks of Marxism is there have, you know, life is a continuous conflict, there is always a conflict between the victim and the oppressors, and it’s as simple as that, and but what it does is it narrows, it narrows down the field of freedom, actually, freedom, and what you’re thinking, freedom of what you’re saying.

1:12:57 So it becomes very bland, it becomes, you know, woke, as you say, and you’ve got no platform, etc., you’re getting is very narrowing down as to what human life is. Of course you’ve got the sort of Animal Farm or 1984, all these sort of things where you know what, well, who decides? And you’ve got this idea of sort of purest thinking, you know, there are those who have purest thinking and everybody else has to learn about it, so there’s a sort of dictatorship of the purest thinkers.

1:13:41 And I think it’s actually, you know, I’ve come to the conclusion that the main enemy of this is actually Christianity, because where where I was talking about before, that freedom you get, we aren’t called to judge, actually, we aren’t called to wag our finger at the world. Jesus didn’t wag his finger at the world, Paul didn’t. Paul said we should behave like this, we should care for one another, we should, you know, behind them, we should build each other up, etc., and other people will see us and want to join us.

1:14:20 He didn’t wag his finger at the Greeks and said, you know, you shouldn’t have slavery or you shouldn’t have homosexuality or you shouldn’t do any of these. He never did anything of that, so Christians aren’t called to do that. I think once one accepts the world is as the world is, which is what Genesis 3 says, all right. So but just we should be light and salt and we have that freedom, that wonderful diversity that is creation, of the human race, the human character, the human gifts.

1:14:53 And coming back to debate, you know, about the House of Lords, you know, instead of being shut down, the debate, I mean I was I was the main opposition, actually, in the House of Lords to the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Bill, which was no fault divorce in other words, and the main review which the government was basing this law on had been produced, actually, by Exeter University, but and it was very much, you know, we should have no-fault divorce, we should, it reduces conflict at the time, that sort of thing. So he had a lot of lawyers and the judges all for it. I mean, I was very much alone in a way, I mean there were a few friends on my benches, and when I was speaking, because they knew I was going to oppose it, when I was speaking in the second reading about this, the actual main writer of the review was blogging, you know, “We can’t let this bill be hijacked, we can’t let this debate be hijacked by a right-wing Christian evangelical”, and that was me.

1:16:11 Well, it was obvious, there was nobody else. And I mean the interesting thing is, would that have been written if I’d been a Muslim or would that have been written if I’d been a Jew? It was actually written because Christians are soft, they’re an easy target. And actually I quoted that back in the report stage, I think, of the bill. I said, you know, while I was speaking this was being written.

1:16:40 I said, I’m not trying to hijack a debate, I’m trying to have a debate instead of it just being closed down, and that’s what the woke is, it just closes down debate, which is a very bad thing for the human race. It just gets rid of all that diversity, that richness that actually Christianity and its exploration, discovery of what the Lord, I mean, did the Lord know the internet was there beforehand? Did, of course he did, and I’m very thankful that we we discovered it and we discovered things like Zoom before Covid hit us all, because that made a good deal of difference.

1:17:25 But it, you know, it just closes these things down. Yeah, the left wants to cancel, not debate, it seems, and there is this kind of thought police of whether you’re allowed to say all these things, and I don’t know who determines it but it seems to be determined, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a debate. And I had this conversation with your son George and with his wife, Candace Owens, as well, who are kind of on the tip of the spear in America to that, because they take a lot of the heat from that side that doesn’t seem to want to debate their points, they kind of want to just cancel them.

1:17:57 And we’ve had our own fights with censorship this year, over the past six months. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram has taken down some of our conversations with people when the narrative has gone against that of the left, and again it’s frustrating because I thought free speech was a fundamental human right. Yeah, well, I mean, I think Facebook, Twitter, and I mean thankfully I’m not on those things, but the whole social media area, the taking down of of people from these sites is, you know, they have this fact check, don’t they?

1:18:45 All right, well, who checks the facts and who’s making those decisions? And are these social media companies actually publishers? Are they censoring? It seems that way. It looks that way.

1:19:02 It probably is that way, and I think governments are waking up to the fact that they are publishers, not just a social media platform, and if they are a publisher they will be subject to completely different legislation, and I think that’s coming down the road, and, you know, it’s something that they need to be aware of. Yeah, I think you’re right, especially when all of those platforms seem to all have the same political persuasion and it slants that way. And look, we’ve seen some anti-trust action happening with Google, which might lead to this, but I mean, I’ll be honest, for eight and a half years I published conversations online and never had a single problem until April of this year and now things are regularly censored.

1:19:54 Why, why is that? Exactly. What’s presidential election, that’s why. Yes. And there, and like you said, where do these rules come from?

1:20:03 And there’s a community policy. Yeah, that’s very subjective. Hate speech. Yeah, that can be applied to anything. Yeah.

1:20:13 And like you said, fact checkers, who funds these people? It’s actually usually one degree of separation from somebody involved in a, you know, left-wing supporting group. Do you think government should at some point step in? And, oh, absolutely, I think they have to. I mean it is censorship and it’s, I mean, the anti-trust suit, I mean the whole area of the social media dominance, I mean it’s sort of getting like a sort of Rockefeller Standard Oil type thing, you know, where you’re gonna have to have a breakup of the dominance that’s there on the internet.

1:20:53 So I think governments, it is that, it is the duty of government, actually, because you’re actually getting these companies taking over the role of government in some respects, taking powers away from government, and, you know, I think we want, I sense it in Parliament, you know, we have debates with past laws and everything else, but actually what’s happening on social media, that’s actually affecting the life outside of here far more than what we’re doing in there, you know. Well, if you’re government you should be wary of that, because they aren’t elected, they aren’t elected, they choose themselves and they impose themselves, their values, on us without us asking them to. Yeah, and that needs to be challenged.

1:21:46 Yeah, they’re more powerful than governments these days. They are. And as opposed to the steel industry, the oil industry, which, and the telecommunications industry, which we broke up in the past, this pervades, you know, your own digital identity. Exactly. And our kids these days don’t know the difference between their identity and their digital identity, so it’s hard to even know how powerful those companies are.

1:22:06 Exactly. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens next. Brexit seems to be at a critical juncture. I’m just curious what advice you might have for the Prime Minister on how he should kind of finish this job that was promised the voters. Well, I mean, I’m not involved day to day with negotiations, I mean it’s at the end game here on the trade deal, and of course there’s this sort of posturing, cliff edge posturing going on.

1:22:32 I have been a Brexiteer, my fundamental thinking on Brexit was that the European Union, which has been gradually federalizing itself, was not fit for purpose democratically, you know. When the whole election, the vote was coming up, you know, I was going around asking people, who’s the UK Commissioner? Do you know what his portfolio is? And actually what’s the European Council do? And actually there’s another one there, there’s a European Council of Ministers, what do they do?

1:23:13 And how much power does the Parliament have? Can it create legislation? And the answer to every single one of my questions from everybody was “I don’t know”, which just implied to me that here we had 60 percent of our laws at that time being made out of a sort of Kafkaesque world in Brussels where you’ve got this bureau- you know, it’s just a sort of growing monster, and we didn’t know who they were, we didn’t elect them. You know, I mean, who elected the Europe, the President of the European Commission, you know, Ursula von der Leyen?

1:23:55 I mean, who’s ever heard of her outside of the fact that she was German defense minister, I mean at one stage and not a particularly good one if I understand rightly, but possibly shouldn’t have said that, but but nevertheless there’s that whole ignorance, and I just loved my two ladies from Hull, you know, this port on the east coast, the North, North Sea coast of England, when asked by the BBC the day after the referendum, you know, why did you vote Leave, and one woman said, “I like to look into the eyes of the people who make my laws.” And I thought, good for you, you couldn’t say it better. And that’s the sovereignty issue, that’s the whole independence issue.

1:24:44 So coming to today, I would, my own advice, I mean I’m not intricate in the negotiations, but to Boris is don’t come out of it with a botched deal where the European Court of Justice still has still has its strings attached to us, where we’re tied to Europe even though we haven’t we haven’t got any vote there or say there in a way. A WTO separation now is clean. It may be a bit of chaos for a few months and lorries parked up on the motorway in Kent, but that can be resolved, but everybody will know where they are.

1:25:29 And my view is we’re not going away, we’re an island off the coast of Europe, we’re not going away, we’re not sailing, we’re putting out flag and scenic across to America, we’re going to be here, we’re going to restructure our relationship with Europe and they will restructure it with ours, but what I would recommend is that they restructure themselves so they’re more transparent, they’re more democratic, so that, I mean, like the United States you’ve got, at least you’ve got a system where, well, I voted for the president or I voted for the senator and the congressman. You know, here the Commission and the President, none of us voted for. Okay, so I mean that’s that’s my view.

1:26:18 I appreciate that it comes down to sovereignty. Yeah, it’s very much sovereignty, and it’ll be much healthier for us. Otherwise I think Boris will have a millstone round his neck if he comes away with a botched deal, because the strife within his own party, the Conservative Party, which has been there for years, will still be there, and you know, so you haven’t healed anything, you know, it needs to be resolved and as clean a cut as possible, and then we can all move forward and hopefully the Remainers and the Brexiteers can get together again and make peace and work for the common good.

1:26:56 Yeah, I hope so. Yeah. Tell me about family. I was privileged to have a conversation with your son George and he really impressed me, he really impressed me. He was articulate, very passionate about the issues that we talked about as far as, you know, the left, freedom of speech, but also in a way where he was quite humble as well and wasn’t telling me what to do but kind of showing me his views and his path, and I’m just curious, how do you make a son like that, because my sons are three and four and if they grow up to be like George I would be very proud.

1:27:29 Well, that’s kind of you, thank you very much. I mean, frankly, my wife and I really had, didn’t have any supporting family, but it comes back to me being a Christian, I think. When did I become a Christian? Just before our first baby was born I became, my wife has become a Christian, she’s, and I was praying, “Lord, help us to be a team for you,” and we are, and that’s that’s super. So there’s been that Christian family influence of the church, you know, we went to summer schools together which George loved, you know, a great, we had a lovely country estate in Sussex we used to go to for a week, and you have, you know, a summer school, but the kids, I mean there was lakes there and, you know, woods and everything else, they had a wonderful time, you know, it was safe, and you know it’s just bringing him up in the Lord and praying with him and, you know, and with all my children, and you know, talking about things.

1:28:41 I mean I think one of the big big areas I’ve always done, my wife’s sometimes got a bit of annoy of me at the supper table, you know, is having a conversation like we’re having, you know, and maybe you know, having a bit of an argument where somebody’s disagreeing with me and I’m disagreeing with them, but at least you’re having that debate and that sort of stimulates the brain cells and I think that’s great, and just, you know, the Christian influence of love, forgiveness, recognition of when people need help, you know, it’s all those sorts of family values, committed relationships, it is the commitment and the good times and about what the marriage service says, ritual poor sickle well, good times and bad, you know, and it’s that commitment and that knowledge that somebody’s there even at a bad time, you know.

1:29:42 Did he always embrace religion? Because a lot of children might reject it if their father was so passionate about religion. Who did George? Yeah, no, I think he went through, particularly university and those sort of things, I think he probably went through a period where questioning. I think I would hope all children would.

1:30:00 I mean, it’s not, I’m certainly not trying to indoctrinate, I’m just, it’s my faith, it’s what I live by and I would say that, you know, every child needs to examine the world, but they also need to be seen the values, they need to be taught the values. If they have Christian parents and know those values, it’s children growing up today with no knowledge of Christian values because it’s again it’s become an area of education almost that’s not allowed, you know. So you’ve got this ignorance.

1:30:48 In fact I was hearing somebody in our Bible study group was this lady who’s very much involved in things, she’s quite a young Christian but she’s quite a lady almost of my age, and she said she was doing some flowers in the church and these two young men ran into the church, was on Saturday, it was only a small church near where we live, she was doing the thousands, they ran and there were sort of university types, quite well indeed, and they said to her, can you tell us about Christianity? So what is it you do here? We, you know, we just want to know.

1:31:20 And that and I mean, I’m cutting a long story short, but what she came away with was that they didn’t know but they recognized there was something there which was counter to what they were experiencing out there in the culture of this individualism and the me and my rights and everything else, that there was something else and they wanted to know about it. I thought, well, that’s interesting. Interesting. Yeah, interesting, craving it or looking for it. That’s right.

1:31:50 Yeah. Tell me about your daughter-in-law, Candace Owens. She’s a very powerful woman, she’s been on the show twice and she’s got an incredible strong voice and she seems to stand up to adversity, you know, like Joan of Arc, it’s impressive, and she’s about to give birth to your grandchild as well. What’s it like having her in the family? She’s lovely.

1:32:10 I mean, she’s, I think very humble, and I mean thankful, I think the Lord’s organized it so that she’s married into a family that doesn’t really know Candace Owens and we’re Brits and we live here, and in a way I sort of feel that I mean, her own family background was a bit mixed, I mean very, very close to her grandfather who was a huge influence, which is great, I mean she’s super, but I think we can be a sort of a place of safety in a way, a place of rest, you know, and we can be the family. I mean, I feel very, very much that that sort of family support will be good for her. She is a remarkable person and she has this, as you say, a strong voice, but a clear mind about certain matters, and actually the bringing matters down to earth instead of allowing, you know, this sort of name-calling, you know, Twitter sentence to rule the thinking, actually, hang on a minute, just let’s sit back, what’s happening here?

1:33:30 I mean, I think she did that with George Floyd, actually. Yes. After a while she just said, hang on a minute, BLM and everything else, but who was this guy? He actually held a gun to the stomach of a pregnant woman once, you know, and, you know, do we make the black criminals our icons? I think that’s what she was, I mean it’s courageous stuff, but it sort of goes, oh, okay, well, she’s got a point, and so there is that counter-argument which is so necessary, otherwise we’re all back down in that little bland narrow place where we can’t say anything that offends anybody else at all.

1:34:10 Yeah, but I told her, I think on our last conversation, you were the only person in the world that made that statement. You know, here’s a woman who was, you know, 10 years ago knew nothing about any of this space, wasn’t talking, wasn’t in the political sphere, and yet she’s the only person brave enough, strong enough, with a following enough that she could actually make a statement that made logical sense and open up a debate, at least, and no one else could in the world. I just found that fascinating and that she was willing to do it in the face of a tidal wave of controversy.

1:34:44 Yeah, I think she sat on the floor of a spare bedroom and just did it, 20 minutes, and, you know, that’s her, that’s great. You know, she’s a wonderful family member, I mean she’s fitted in, we all get on like a house on fire, which I’m very thankful for, and we’re very happy to be there. And for when they come over here, I think they find Britain a quieter place than America, and it probably is, and I hope it remains so to a certain extent. But anyway, no, she’s good.

1:35:21 It’s almost uncanny how aligned your values are between the fam- her family and your family and the religious aspect and all of that, it is kind of uncanny. Well, George and she, I think, you know, their eyes met across a crowded room and there wasn’t much anybody could do about it, but thereafter it just happened. It’s incredible. Right, it’s a beautiful thing, of course. I think she got out there and had some high-profile media battles with different rap artists and things like that, and I think Cardi B got involved, and they pull you in sometimes.

1:35:56 What’s it like to be called out by a famous female rapper in America? Well, I’d never heard of her, so I mean I wasn’t particularly concerned, although saying I was a member of some sort of aristocratic Ku Klux Klan arrangement in England somewhere, I mean I thought, yeah, well, I mean it’s ludicrous, so I mean it really doesn’t even need answering. No, and I’m glad today we cleared the air on what the House of Lords is all about, so hopefully she’ll watch this and she’ll understand.

1:36:29 Hopefully, that’s right. Tell me, just tell me about you, do you have daily practices that you do personally that are just non-negotiable that allow you to have all the energy you have to work every day? Do I have daily practices? Well, I mean what one gets into, rhythms, if you like, and I think being active, particularly mentally, also physically, I mean I walk a lot, I used to run, et cetera, but I mean obviously prayer in the morning to start the day off, reading the Bible, is important, trying to be with Christians or have exposure to Christians during the day, encouraging other things is quite important if you can, talking about the Lord at home.

1:37:22 I mean in Deuteronomy it says, I think it says at table, you know, just talk about the Lord when you’re walking down the road or when you’re where you’re thinking about, you know, and just what’s he doing, being thankful. Being thankful is a very important thing. You can, once you start being thankful and you start praying, and you can just go on and on, you can spend all day being thankful, actually, and it’s a very wonderful thing to be thankful. I mean, I just got a good girlfriend in a cul-de-sac here a bit, but I, and with George I think it was, we had a little cottage down in the country and it was a flat, we had a huge skyscraper escape, and I remember once being out on the little road outside us and there was this wonderful sunset, there was purples and blues and yellows and oranges and they were all changing at the same time, and I was going, wow, look at that, and there was a cat sort of rubbing itself against the leg, and, you know, when I was with George, and I said, you know what, George, I said that picture is just for us, if you’re further up there it’ll be a different picture, and I said, you know, that picture is just for us and, you know what, we can say, “Thank you, Lord, look at your artistry.

1:38:36 Why do you have all those colors? Why do you have that magnificent picture to look at?” And it’s to praise you. If I didn’t know the Lord I’d just look at it and say, oh, it’s a great sunset, and you know what happens, you’ve got dust in the atmosphere, the sun’s going down, et cetera, et cetera, but actually why should there be those colors there? Why should, I mean, who’s appreciating it?

1:39:01 The cow in the field is still chewing the cud, all right, the cat isn’t interested. It’s only a human being that’s interested, it’s only, and I can say to George, look at that and say thank you. And so it’s very important to be thankful at all times, and there’s so much to be thankful for. But otherwise I think you just, I think work, life, relationships, being involved with people, I think I’d be a bit sad if I was not involved with people, frankly. Okay.

1:39:33 If I were to ask some of your best friends, what is Michael’s superpower? How are you able to do everything you do? What would be the things they say, how are you able to do it? No, I do. What do you think they would say?

1:39:46 Because there’s a pattern of you, you know, accomplishing things that are important to you, whether it’s in the City or in the House of Lords. Well, I think, I mean, if you want to bring it down to, obviously I can say the Lord again, I mean because, you know, I pray, “Give me Christian work to do and joy in my heart as I do it.” In fact the end of Psalm 90 Moses says that, he said, what, you know, length of our days, what’s the purpose of it? “Lord, you give me work to do and gladness in my heart as I do it.”

1:40:16 So that’s, I think, a wonderful prayer to have, actually. But having said that, I think one’s upbringing, you do find children with broken families, etc., and maybe without a father as well, boys can be quite ambitious, if you like, or working hard, or just working hard, and I must admit, I mean when I was at boarding school, I mean because of the family, you know, my father but having died and the situation at home which wasn’t good at all, particularly not for my sister, you know, I misbehaved at school, I was beaten, and I was beaten once in front of the whole school, and you had that, that’s why, you know, you get the “I am alone” business and you’ve got to just do it yourself, and so there is that fight within you, and you either have the fight or you either have it in you or you haven’t knocked out of you, and I guess I always thought, they’re not going to knock it out of me.

1:41:28 So you’ve managed to kind of dance with that, “I am a rock, I am an island” feeling. Right, that’s what I’m trying to do, trying to recognize it. No, I think you are, it can be useful when channeled, but if it dominates you it will lead to a, not a pleasant life. But you see, being a Christian, what’s the heart of being a Christian? Jesus says, what is the law?

1:41:52 Yeah, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul and love your neighbor as yourself.” It’s all relationships. You’ve got the relationship that way first of all, which actually helps you with the relationships this way, and life is about relationships. Without them, what is it? You can be a billionaire, you know, you could be whatever, you can have, and you’ve got no committed loving relationships, you’ve got a poor life.

1:42:19 The richness comes from giving and receiving in relationships. That’s where the family and family policy is so important, because it brings something rich into society and supportive for society. Yeah, that’s so true. What was the best day of your life and the worst day of your life? I mean those sort of questions.

1:42:41 I was once doing a prison radio interview, now I’m just talking to you about your question, a prison radio, and it was, I was being interviewed by a prisoner and it was going out on prison radio, and he caught me at the end, he said, “Lord Farmer, if if you had to sing a song, what would it be?” I thought, no, I mean I wasn’t proud and I just said, “Zippity-doo-dah,” and I said, and you know, I thought those sort of questions. I mean, one of the worst days of your life, I suppose, is what you remember, is when you were really, well, I think it’s obviously when I was a boy, I mean actually when I was beaten in front of the whole school, because it was hard, it was very painful, it was very shameful, and, you know, I was crying my eyes out and so I mean one remembers that, it’s a big sort of scar, you know, but you come to terms with it and, you know, but certainly I would say that’s a memory that’s there, but sort of shame and the exclusion.

1:44:12 Yeah, anyway, there was quite a lot of that, but that was probably the worst day, that was a lot of other things, times when one was excluded because of the way one was, you know, these kids why they go into care because of the chaos back home, and you know, actually I was a story of the one of the government’s chief care advisors, Scotsman, and he was in care, moved from care home to care home, and when he was a teenager he smashed the place up, smashed the room up and doors up and windows up, and they said, right, you know, you’ve got to go and see the you know, the resident or whatever he’s called, the man who was, so this chap got his black bag, black plastic bag, put all his possessions in it and stood outside the door, and then he was called in and the chap said to him, he said, what’s that black pack?

1:45:07 Said, well, it’s all my possessions. Well, what was that for? Say, well, you’re going to send me off somewhere. So what are you talking about, this is your home? This is your home.

1:45:16 And he said that changed his life, that he actually had done this and yet somebody still accepted him and kept him, and I thought it was quite an interesting story. And then there is, I mean, the best day, I mean I think my, I can’t really say, my wife will say it should be my wedding day because I’m, I mean, you know, I mean one can be tried like that, I mean there’s a lot of good days. I mean I’m just thankful as a Christian, there are a lot of good days and it comes from good relationships.

1:45:52 Yeah, yeah. What scares you? If my deepest scare, one of my deepest prayers is, “Lord, don’t let me go, guard me against myself.” I know my own heart and I know given half a chance where I’ll wander off to, and I say, “Lord, guard me against myself,” and that’s what scares me. The world doesn’t scare me, I’m too old, I’m in the decaying stage, I’ll be under the sword before long, you know, so that doesn’t scare me so much, it’s it’s bringing shame on the Lord, it’s doing those sort of things which I can easily do, I mean it’s just it’s not difficult to do that, but he guards me, you know, and he does, and I think it’s something one needs to pray for, to recognize one’s own vulnerability and say, “Lord, help, this is the area, you know me better than I do, just guard me against myself.”

1:46:54 Is that also to keep you from becoming a rock and an island again? Yeah, I think he does, he’s done that wonderfully anyway. I mean, you know, the richness of human relationships, the richness of family, you know, that can’t be taken away from me now, I have that, but I still have that danger within myself. Well, it is a drift back into the individualism, you know, what I want to do. Yeah, yeah.

1:47:24 And you, yeah, and once, yeah, and you’ve been in the City and that’s kind of that extreme version of it where all the perks are coming, so you know how it feels. You know, I had an author in here one time and he said, Brian, you know, I always try to get rid of my ego, I try to dissolve the ego, but he said ego gets the book finished, you know, so it’s this dance, you know, you need to have it but you can’t let it dominate. No, no, that’s right, but that’s where I think again, you know, I pray, or I’m giving talks or something like that, “Lord, may I bring you glory, not me, and watch out for my pride,” you know, I mean, I mean, so one is kept humbled, to say, I mean, I’m not nearly as humble as I should be, I’m sure, but nevertheless there is that recognition that that is where the value is, that is where joy is, that being humble, giving yourself to others, I mean, I mean I don’t worry, I take a lot for myself and I serve myself a lot, so I mean I do, I don’t want to kid you on that one.

1:48:34 Right, but the humility is so important. What would we be surprised to learn about Lord Farmer? Something you do in your spare time that might surprise us, is there anything you do or enjoy in your pastimes? What do I do or enjoy my pastimes? Well, I can’t think of anything really that’s terribly unusual.

1:49:05 I mean, in a way I sort of feel I’m terribly normal, except you end up being not terribly normal because, you know, you’re in the House of Lords and, you know, doing all these other things. I think most people will be very surprised at how normal you seem. All right, okay. Yeah, but I mean, I can’t really think of the moment, I mean it’s you know, I just read books, I walk, now I’m, you know, try and keep fit to a certain extent, try and be aware of, I mean, the whole Covid thing is quite an interesting area, but, and I suppose just being involved with policy and, you know, with politics is something I was never really involved with and that’s that’s a whole new area which is good.

1:50:01 Yeah. What keeps you awake at night? Sometimes just the daily worries, you know, it can be a conversation with somebody the evening before or the day before something’s cropped up and you sort of wake up and oops, oops, what, you know, well that wasn’t good, and where’s that going, and it could be a disaster, and you have those sort of worries. I find in the night your brain just focuses on an anxiety and it’s just rolling over and you can’t go to sleep.

1:50:30 So what do I do? I pray, and to pray I have to force it, I have to force my focus onto God. I say the Lord’s Prayer very slowly and sink each part of it through very slowly and meaningfully and get rid of this other silly thing that I’m worrying about, and sure enough it gets at the end, and then I think of the cross, what Jesus did for me on the cross, and where he is and what he’s doing, and then at the end I said, “Lord, can I go to sleep?” And sure enough I nearly always go to sleep and the next moment I wake up in the morning and almost the first thing I say, “Thank you, Lord,” because otherwise, you know, you’re just beset by those worries that you know swirl around here and you can’t go to sleep.

1:51:18 Yeah, it’s almost like a lesson in humility when you do that, because yeah, it’s no longer about you and the ego’s worries, you’re putting it on the bigger picture. Yeah, well, you’re praising God, you said, you, me down here, I’m praising you, I’m gonna forget about that. Yeah. Lord Farmer, I was asked a few questions at the end. I’m gonna ask you, if you could pick up a a magic phone and call up the 20-year-old Michael Farmer, so 1964, I guess you’re in the copper ring, I guess, at the metals exchange, and give that young man some advice based on everything you know now, what would you tell that 20-year-old young man?

1:51:54 Would he listen? Wow, that’s fantastic advice. Lord Farmer, thank you so much for the time.

1:52:26 Thank you for your tireless efforts in the House of Lords, putting together this important reform for families, for prison reform and opening up these ideas. Thank you for speaking frequently, I mean frankly, about your faith. I always admire for someone who’s willing to do that. And you’ve got me thinking more about faith these days, maybe I’m getting a little older. My last nine years feel like I’ve had some guidance doing what I’m doing, you know, I’ve been taking on crazy adventures, I’ve been asked to put my own failures out there and to talk about that, I’ve been asked to serve others, and it’s been a completely different path, but it’s one like you said, it works, it’s rich.

1:53:00 I’m so much happier and richer than I was in the City, even though I’m making a fraction of the money I was in the City, I’m a richer man, and that’s just the truth. And so it means so much to hear you articulate those things back to me, and I’m still curious more about religion, so next time you’re going to church, I’d love to join you. So you could take me up on that. Yeah, I will, Brian, I will, I will. I would like to explore that.

1:53:26 So again, thank you, I appreciate you being super candid and wishing you all the best with the work you continue doing in the House of Lords. For people to find out more about what you do, is the best way to follow the House of Lords so far? Yes, I mean there’s, you know, there’s a website, theyworkforyou.com, okay, which actually would give details of all speeches and votes and things like that, that there is that website you can get hold of as well. Excellent.

1:53:57 But thank you very much, Brian, anyway, and thank you for your friendliness and relaxing manner. Well, it’s my pleasure. I don’t think I’ve ever had a whole family in my studio, but now with yourself and George and Candace, it’s a family affair, so I appreciate that, and congratulations on you soon to be another a grandfather again. It’s a beautiful thing, and I really appreciate your energy, and this has been just highly educational for everybody watching, so thank you so much, Lord Farmer.

1:54:23 I appreciate you and everything you do and all the incredible work you do for this country, so thank you very much. Thank you, thank you.