party to play a role that upholds democracy rather than feasting on its destruction. for more, go to cnn.com/fareed and read my washington post column this week. and let s get started. angelo american institutions this week pushed back against actions by their nation s populist leaders. first, the british supreme court found prime minister boris johnson s suspension of parliament to be unlawful. then the u.s. house of representatives launched an impeachment inquiry into president trump. i want to talk about both events with my first guest, david cameron. this is the first u.s. television interview for the former british prime minister, the man who called the brexit referendum. his new book is for the record. david, pleasure to have you on. great to be with you.
egregious example, but his misbehavior fits a global trend. after all, boris johnson engaged in a political maneuver, suspending parliament, that britain s supreme court unanimously ruled was unlawful. india s narendra modi has spoken and governed in ways that have terrified its minorities. duterte has praised judicial killings. and leaders like erdogan in turkey have argued to change the constitution to insist on one-country, one-man rule. many scholars have chronicled the democratic recession. across the globe, enthusiasm for autocrats has grown. between 1995 and 2014, there were large increases in the share of people who would like to see a strong leader who does not have to bother with
positive about nato. and that is very important. and the economy and the tax changes have been positive. so british prime ministers and former british prime ministers, we should try to find things where we can agree and we can work together rather than emphasizing a lot of the differences we might have. he s done something extraordinary, though, in wading into british politics. when boris johnson was not prime minister, he openly and loudly supported him, kept talking about how he d be good. why do you think he finds that commonality? well, i think, interestingly, both of them are quite establishment figures, and yet kind of raging against the establishment. they obviously have some commonalities and there are some similarities in what happened with the brexit vote and what happened with the election of donald trump in 2016. but, look, i want the relationship to work, whoever is the prime minister, whoever is the president. and so, i think i mean, donald trump does go about
but the attempt was a genuine one. tony blair, your predecessor, says the country is clearly genuinely divided and confused about what exactly it means to do brexit, is it hard, is it soft? and that s why there should be a second referendum. do you agree? i think the first thing that ought to happen is for the prime minister to go back to brussels, to negotiate a deal, for us to carry out the outcome of the referendum, which is to leave and become, as i put it, friends and neighbors and partners with the european union, but not members. it s not the choice i would make. i threw everything into the campaign for us to stay. but the result went another way. if we can t get that deal, we are then still after three years stuck. and one of the ways of getting unstuck is to have a general election or to have a second referendum. so my view is we shouldn t rule those things out. they may be necessary to get us out of the situation, but the first major for prime minister boris johnson, and
getting a deal in brussels in order for us to leave as friends, neighbors, and partners. but you say in the book that boris johnson didn t really believe in brexit, that he actually adopted this position purely for his political advantage? well, what i explained in the book is when i called the referendum and wanted boris johnson on my side, i said to him, you know, you ve never previously supported leaving. you ve been a euro skeptic, you wanted reform. you think my deal of changes, important as i thought they were, were not enough, but that s not a reason for leaving. he made his choice and i talk about that in the book. but now he s prime minister. he has this huge responsibility. i want him to succeed in getting a sensible deal with the european union and taking that to the house of commons and passing it. but i think the one thing we ought to avoid is leaving without a deal. i think that would be bad for our economy, bad for the united kingdom, bad, actually, for the european