Steve Bannon:
Margaret Thatcher is the inspiration for Donald Trump’s policies in the White House, Steve Bannon, the US president’s former chief strategist, has said. Mr Bannon also said now is “the moment” for Boris Johnson, who quit as foreign secretary over Theresa May’s proposed Brexit deal, to challenge the Prime Minister to lead the country.
Mr Bannon, who ran Mr Trump’s successful campaign in 2016, said that the president’s policies were based on “pure Thatcherism”. Mr Bannon told Chopper’s Brexit Podcast on The Telegraph’s website: “What we are trying to do is get a piece of action for the little guy. That’s better jobs, better wages, there is also entrepreneurial finance, giving access to capital, that is pure Thatcherism. She is the inspiration for that – her and [Ronald] Reagan, but more Thatcher.
“People have to understand, if you want wealth creation, if you want a vibrant robust economy, that comes from entrepreneurs.”
Mr Bannon said Mrs Thatcher, who was prime minister from 1979 to 1990, and her legacy do not get “enough credit and I don’t think we talk enough about it for supporting entrepreneurs. I think her ideas resonate through Trump.”
Mr Bannon, 64, a former executive chairman of website Breitbart News, was appointed Mr Trump’s chief strategist when he entered the Oval Office in January 2017 but resigned last August. He said that he still talks to Mr Trump’s staff in the White House.
Mr Bannon poured scorn on Theresa May’s Brexit paper which was published earlier this week, and questioned her leadership. He said: “Theresa May has got a lot of great qualities – I am not sure if it is the right leader at the right time”.
The publication of the White Paper was “the flood tide, the moment” for Mr Johnson, who is yet to speak publicly after his resignation, to act. Asked if now was the moment for Mr Johnson to lead the country, he said: “I believe moments come. It is like Donald Trump… people dismissed him.”
He continued: “Now is the moment. If Boris Johnson looks at this… There comes an inflection point, the Chequers deal was an inflection point, we will have to see what happens.”
He described Mr Johnson as “one of the most dynamic people on the world stage”, adding: “I’ve always found him incredibly engaging. He’s a big ideas guy. I believe he looks like a doer.
“For someone who was foreign secretary to actually resign over this, I thought his [resignation] letter was terrific.” He added: “People respond to bold action, the bold action can have hard edges on it, and the bold action doesn’t have to be perfect, it can be a little shabby sometimes.” In the interview, Mr Bannon also gave details of the advice Mr Trump gave to Mrs May about how to get the best deal to take the UK out of the EU when she visited the White House.
He said: “Trump gave her some pointers and pulled her off to the side and said: ‘Hey, if I was doing this, here is how tough you have got to be because these guys are not going to let you go’.
“He gave her the precis [of his book The Art of the Deal] which is ‘overshoot your target, be tough and get on with it – because if this drags on it is going to be bad’.”
Mr Bannon urged people who support
Brexit to campaign for a clean break from the
EU, saying: “I keep hearing that The Daily Telegraph is getting thousands of letters a day, when they traditionally get a couple of hundred.
“I think letters are one thing, but I think you are really having to get empowered. People are going to have to really get up on it and let people know that we voted to leave and we demand to leave.”
Mr Bannon warned that “the elites” which run the country were deliberately slowing down the Brexit process to stop Britain leaving the European Union.
The wins in 2016 for the Leave campaign and for Mr Trump were “surprise victories by the deplorables – middle England and the little guy in America. The nullification of both is underway by the elites.
“You see and hear from the City of London, from the Goldman Sachs’, from the CBI, they have been trying to slow walk this.
“[Financier George] Soros tried it for a while, putting money into it. They want another vote, they want to vote again, and you have seen this in the watered down White Paper that the Prime Minister has come up with, it has been a nullification the entire time – they are trying to buy time.”
The Government was trying to make Brexit look like “it’s a second law of thermodynamics, some more physics” when it could be tackled with “grit and determination”.
He added: “What is going to happen, I think they are going to slow walk this until the fall [autumn].
“And there is some sort of crisis and they are going to delay Article 50 and hope that it peters out over time and people forget about it.”
Mr Bannon tried to reassure Britons concerned the UK would get a bad trade deal with the US: “You are our mother country, we are going to be tough negotiators but I think it will be a fair
deal.”