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You’re listening to a frequency podcast network production in association with City News.
Jordan Heath-Rawlings
We don’t typically cover politics in the United Kingdom on this show, mostly because we get enough Westminster democracy over here. And if you’re not invested in it, UK politics can be pretty boring. However, we figured we should probably check in after, you know and I want you to know how sad I am to be giving up the best job in the world. But then it’s the breaks. Therefore, I give notice that Liz Truss is elected as the leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party. Mr speaker, I am a fighter and not a Twitter. Now the British pound has fallen to its lowest level ever against the US dollar. These kinds of lines, when currencies fall abruptly immediately. That’s quite unusual. One tabloid newspaper betting that ahead of Lettuce had a longer shelf life and putting up a live stream of it. In the end, the Lettuce won. Given the situation, I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party. I have therefore spoken to His Majesty the King to notify him that I am resigning as leader of the Conservative Party. A source close to Boris Johnson is claiming he now has the backing of more than 100 Tory MPs. And under the rules of this leadership contest, it is enough for him to get his name on the ballot. And Rishi Sunak is therefore elected as leader of the Conservative Party. It is the greatest privilege of my life to be able to serve the party I love and give back to the country I owe so much to. The United Kingdom is a great country, but there is no doubt we face a profound economic challenge. I won’t even pretend to even partially understand what’s happened to our friends across the pond over the past couple of months. All I know is I need someone to explain it to me in detail, preferably in the most British way possible. So you’re welcome.
I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Professor Matthew Flinders is a professor of politics at the University of Sheffield. He is also the founding director of the Sir Bernard Crick Center for the Public Understanding of Politics. Hello, Professor Flinders. Thanks for joining us.
Matthew Flinders
I’m very happy to be here.
Jordan
Why don’t we start, first, I gather the United Kingdom is about to have a new prime minister. I guess I should say another new prime minister. Who is he and how did he win?
Matthew Flinders
Very interesting. You’re quite correct. We don’t quite have a new prime minister yet. We have Rishi Sunak, who has been elected leader of the Conservative Party. Tomorrow Rishi Sunak will go and shake hands with the new king, and that will be the moment that he, as long as King Charles agrees, becomes our next prime minister. It happened in the most curious way that you might say could only happen in the model of British politics. In the summer, we had an eight week election process for a new leader of the Conservative Party. This time we did it in three days, including a weekend. It’s amazing how much desperation can speed up the process. And to some extent, you’re right. I mean, the Conservative Party had reached and are still in to some extent, desperate measures they needed to avoid a leadership contest. And that’s what’s really interesting. Democracy was, to some extent, forgotten. Transparency was forgotten. Behind the scenes, in the dark and shrouded corridors of the palace of Westminster and the little snugs, lots of conversations happened to ensure that the leadership race was a one horse race. And that’s what happened today, that there was only one leader went forward. Penny Mordant pushed it as far as she could, but nobody in the Conservative Party wanted it to go to the broader party faithful, because, in a sense, that was risky.
Jordan
Right, and we’re going to talk about how the Prime Minister, or I should say the Prime Minister in waiting, I guess, will have to deal with that once he takes the job. But first, it’s been a long, long road to get here and there’ll probably be dozens of books written about the past couple of months in United Kingdom politics. So maybe I’ll just try to get you to run us through it. Take me back to when Boris Johnson was ousted and Liz Truss became prime minister. How did that happen and why her?
Matthew Flinders
The really interesting thing is that Boris Johnson was never really a core and accepted member of the Conservative Parliamentary Party. Now, that sounds ridiculous. He was a Conservative MP. He was the Prime Minister. But Boris Johnson was always an outsider. That’s why in his resignation speech, he had a very clear dig at what he called the Herd. The Herd had moved and left him behind. Boris Johnson was always angry that he felt he was never accepted and never respected. And, of course, the reason why the Herd never really respected him was because he was too high risk, he took too many chances and he was called out too many times. And in a sense, Boris Johnson’s time as Prime Minister was a death through a thousand lashes, as more and more problems slowly hollowed out the confidence of those around him in Cabinet and the broader Conservative Party to support him anymore. And in the end, he was pushed. And, of course, Rishi Sunak resigned because he said he could no longer trust Boris Johnson. And that triggered a leadership campaign that ended up in Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss just seven weeks ago, going head to head to be the next leader.
Jordan
Why and how did Liz trust beat Rishi Sunk at that point?
Matthew Flinders
Now, that is the million dollar question. And that, in many ways, is where we get into, dare I say, the problem of democracy. Both of our main parties now have a similar and fairly recent new system for selecting leaders of their parties. That is, once the parliamentary party decides on a shortlist of two, then those two people are offered to the broad paying, ticket holding members of the party in the population. Now, you might say, well, that’s all well and good and that’s democracy in action. But you have to remember, members of political parties, particularly in recent years, which have been dominated by political polarization, party members, tend to be more extreme than the normal, moderate, center based British public right. What happened with the leadership contest was very simple. This Truss explicitly played a game of making herself attractive to the wider Conservative Party membership, who are overwhelmingly old, white and to the right of the party. She dressed up in a way that was obviously copying Margaret Thatcher. The way she stood, her voice changed and she developed a lot of what we call red meat strategies, red meat policies that were clearly designed to be more attractive to those on the right of the political spectrum. Rishi Sunak refused to play the game. He wasn’t going to play that game. He sold himself as an experienced, sensible, competent, credible politician who had governed through the crisis. The problem was, the wider Conservative Party elected Liz Truss, even though Rishi Sunak was by far the most favored candidate by the parliamentary party. So it all ended up with a bit of a mess anyway once Liz Truss took power on the platform.
Jordan
To your point, that appeals to the further right hand side of the Conservative Party. What was the first clue that she might not have been the answer the Conservative Party and the country at large were looking for in that role?
Matthew Flinders
Well, the first clue, to be quite honest, was fairly obvious a long, long, long time ago. There is no doubt Liz Truss is an experienced and very successful politician who has dedicated her life to public service. But to be quite honest, those that understand how politics works and the machinations of Whitehall and Westminster knew that Liz Truss was really going to struggle because she didn’t have the combination of emotional skills and sensitivities that you need to be a Prime Minister. And actually, as soon as she became Prime Minister, she became known as being a cardboard cutout figure. Her performances in front of press interviews, she almost wasn’t allowed in front of the public, and the speeches she gave were incredibly dry and she just looked terrified and out of her depth. So the fact that Liz Truss lasted 44 days, and to put it mildly, it didn’t go well, wouldn’t really have surprised many people that had really tracked her career for the last five or ten years. I’m not going to get you to give us a dissertation on the United Kingdom economy and all its nuances, but for those of us over here in Canada, can you explain exactly how Trust just somehow managed to crash the economy in less than 44 days.
Jordan
It seems like she became Prime Minister, she met the king, we looked up and the pound was at an all time low versus the dollar. What happened?
Matthew Flinders
To be successful in politics, to some extent, you need to be hard headed, you need to be self confident, you need to know where you want to get to and you want to get there. And to some extent, one of the great problems of the British political system is it centralizes power. Massively. So what you had here was a new Prime Minister with a new Chancellor of the Exchequer, who were able to make fundamental policy shifts about economic policy without even telling other members of the Cabinet.
Jordan
How does that happen? I don’t understand.
Matthew Flinders
Because basically they just sorted it out in a room between the two of them that they believed in neoliberal trickle down economics, cut taxes, benefits would ripple down and everybody would benefit, the economy would relight. I mean, basic stuff that even if you believe in the economic model, my first year university students would say, even if you believe in that, anybody with any political antennae would know you’d need to do a lot of work to frame and create the context within which that sort of policy is going to fly. And of course, it didn’t fly, it crashed. I’d it was shocking. But what’s really interesting here is how, in many ways, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng were able to just make such a fundamental shift for British society on their own without telling anybody and without listening to any experts at all. And I think that is one weakness that might become a sort of a learning lesson from the whole inside. And of course, Kwasi Kwarteng did row backwards and pledge to work with the Office for Budget Responsibility, but by that point, it was just too late. Well, that was going to be my next question is did nobody around trust and those close to her realize that this kind of shift in policy was, at the very least, regardless of what happened to the economy, going to seem like horrific to the vast majority of working British people and Tory voters? Right, again, looking from the outside, it just seems like so avoidable such an own goal. It’s a 101 error. And to be quite honest, I’m spending a lot of time talking to the public, doing external events, and people are asking me, come on, there must be a more complex explanation for this. But there isn’t.
Jordan
What would you not want to do as a new Prime Minister in the middle of a cost of living crisis?
Matthew Flinders
You wouldn’t want to make your first main major policy lifting and removing the barrier on bankers bonuses. And yet that’s what she did. And the reason she did it is because the very centralized system, she could ignore those around her. She didn’t have to tell the cabinets, she just went in and made the decision. She went within weeks. It was a catastrophe.
Jordan
What exactly happened to the economy in the wake of that? Like I said, we know it kind of crashed, but what was going on there and what kind of political pressure did it put on Trust and the Conservative Party?
Matthew Flinders
What was going on was very interesting because actually, in many ways, the major economic reforms that were not major economic reforms were not even the budget were defined as a mini budget. They sent shockwaves across the markets because they indicated that the senior team, the two great officers of state, the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, simply did not understand the notion of market confidence, because if they did, they would never have made this sudden announcement without pre warning and floating the policy with the markets. What was really interesting, though, is, of course, the Conservative Party has historically been, it’s argued, the party of government based on its reputation for one thing and one thing only economic competence. You can trust the Conservative Party with your money. And whether that’s true or not, we could produce 10 dissertations. But it is part of the folklore of British politics, which the Conservative Party is constantly used against the Labor Party when portraying them as incompetent. What that one mini budget did was in seconds shredded the Conservative Party’s reputation for economic competence.
Jordan
It makes sense to me that after something of that magnitude, perhaps the Prime Minister would be under fire. But what I don’t understand I’m really hoping you can walk us through this, because over here in Canada, we kind of all saw it happening, but it seemed like it was basically chaos. Can you explain what actually happened to make Truss step down? Like I gathered, there was a huge semi confidence vote, but not really. Just explain what was going on there.
Matthew Flinders
Okay, so what happened was meltdown. Meltdown and various different levels of damage limitation strategy. One thing that went wrong completely was when the markets nosedived and the price of borrowing suddenly increased. Again, Liz Trust made a mistake. She tried to say that it was nothing to do with the mini budget. It was again to do with Putin and Ukraine. And again, that just didn’t fly with the British public. Every economist could show you the data and the charts and the evidence that showed the moments the quantum speech happened. Markets nosedived, and yet there was this attempt to tell the British public, no, it wasn’t us, it was Putin. Anyway, that didn’t work. So the next step in the damage limitation was get rid of the speaker. I don’t mean the speaker of the House of Commons, I mean the person that presented the mini budget that was so bad. So Liz Trusses, and this is interesting, Liz Truss’s, closest friend beyond politics and closest confidant in politics. The new chancellor quasi quarter was suddenly hung out to dry. He was basically used as the blame magnet in order to try and restore some confidence of governing credibility. That created a bit of space for Liz Truss, but it wasn’t enough. So the next stage was, if nobody trusts the Prime Minister, who can we bring in who is seen as competent, experienced trustworthy and who might be able to steady the ship? So Jeremy Hunt was brought in. Jeremy Hunt. And this is where it does start to get like a satire. Jeremy Hunt was on holiday in Belgium. I’m tempted to ask why anybody would have gone on holiday to Belgium, but he was on holiday in Belgium and he received numerous calls from Liz Truss’s office, which he refused to take because he thought they were prank calls.
Jordan
What?
Matthew Flinders
They weren’t prank calls. It was Liz Truss’s office, desperate to get hold of him, to ask him to fly home to become Chancellor the Exchequer, which he did, and within hours, basically was the de facto Prime Minister with Liz Truss. This is almost cathartic for me as a professor. I feel like I’m sort of getting it out of my system. Then it got to the situation where the Opposition put down emergency questions on the floor of the House of Commons, which meant the Prime Minister had to go and answer for this chaos. Okay. She sent Penny Mordant, who was then the leader of the House of Commons on her behalf, to tell the Chamber that the Prime Minister was too busy to take emergency questions. At which point and this is where we will never forget this moment in British politics, the leader of the House of Commons actually tried to reassure the Chamber that the Prime Minister was not, in fact, hiding under her desk. Now, this really then flowed into the final stage, which was the Conservative Party are very good, actually, at removing leaders when it’s clear that the time is up. There was a parliamentary vote on Fracking. They decided to use this as almost a confidence vote and they said that any Conservative MP who didn’t support the government would be cast out of the party in the middle of the vote. They decided it wasn’t really a vote of confidence because they were worried they were going to lose it. And absolute chaos erupted on the floor of the House and in the lobbyists. When nobody knew what was going on, what they were doing or why it mattered, the Chief Whip stormed off, screaming that they no longer gave a word. Beginning of an F, four letters rhyme to a duck. And we had hours where nobody actually knew the Chief Whip was even still in post or not. That was the end. The next morning, the Chairman of the 1922 Committee arrived at Number Ten to basically tell Liz, trust, your time is up. We can either force you to leave or you can decide to resign with a modicum of dignity, and she took the latter option.
Jordan
Thank you for walking us through that. The one thing I take from it is that it was exactly as ridiculous as it seemed to somebody watching from afar with no idea of the nuances of British politics, if actually for satire.
Matthew Flinders
The great problem is you can no longer do satirical comedy in British politics because nobody can believe it’s comedy. It’s just getting so ridiculous. Before we get to Prime Minister Toby Sunak and what he’s going to face, I want to first ask you about the few days in between trust resigning and a new leader being chosen in particular.
Jordan
You know what I’m going to ask you. There were rumors that, in fact, Boris Johnson would come back and get into the leadership race again, and I just have to ask, how can that happen? How could he have been back in the conversation after exiting mostly in shame, like, literally weeks ago?
Matthew Flinders
Right, well, the great Boris bounceback was actually a whole part of this omnishambles, and you’re absolutely right, he thought this was a new window of opportunity and that he was now recharged. Suntanned and the Blonde Bombshell was ready to go again and a lot of work went into his team to try and pull together the necessary parliamentary support to allow him to be in the race with Sunak. What I think is most interesting to go back to the basic nature of democracy and the role of the public is irrespective of Boris Johnson’s numerous repeated, catastrophic failures, escapades, bloopers and then party gate, which there is still a live investigation into vast majority of the British public, and large sections of the Conservative Party still love Boris. He has this incredible charismatic appeal and loads of people said to me, liz Truss has done the unthinkable. She’s managed to out Boris. Boris in terms of incompetence, let’s just get Boris back. At least it was funny. And in many ways, you know, the shadow of Boris Johnson still hangs over British politics. Will that make it more difficult for Sunak to govern once he takes the job? I mean, it’s clear that Johnson is just the dominant figure when people think of politics in your country. A great challenge for any future Conservative Prime Minister will be to manage Boris Johnson, because he’s a very large character, he craves attention and he’s brilliant. He’s absolutely brilliant. I know Boris. He’s brilliant at getting out there amongst the public and playing the media, and he will dominate the agenda. However, I think it’s very different right now for Sunac.
Jordan
Why?
Matthew Flinders
British politics is locked into an electoral cycle. The Conservative Party basically have 18 months or so, a little bit over 18 months, within which to demonstrate that they have regained their governing competence and that they are the natural party of government that can be trusted. The Conservative Party is a very broad church, but it’s also a very pragmatic church. So what I would expect now is even those Conservative MPs who really don’t like Rishi Sunak is that they will completely fall in line behind him as ultra loyalists because now he is their only hope for the next general election. The Conservative Party cannot bring in anybody else if Sunak doesn’t go well. So in many ways Rishi Sunak is in I mean, it sounds ridiculous to say he’s in a strong position facing the various economic and international challenges on the agenda, but when it comes to controlling his party, he’s actually, he’s more in charge than would normally be the case.
Jordan
Again, we have a similar system to yours, obviously, here in Canada, minus a whole whack of procedural differences. If this had happened in Canada, I’m 90% sure we would be looking at a federal election right now at some point. Doesn’t the lack of public input here become divorced from an actual democracy?
Matthew Flinders
That’s the big issue that’s raging right now. This second, as I’m talking to you, we have the second Prime Minister who’s been appointed now, and the relationship back to the 2019 general election, which Boris won for the Conservative Party is looking increasingly tenuous. I think what’s actually interesting is that the difference between Canada and the UK, though they have similar Westminster style democracies, is my sense is that British politics is that bit more aggressive, adversarial nasty, and in many ways the Conservative Party now is running scared. What might be good for the public and for democracy in terms of having a general election is in the complete opposite worth for the Conservative Party because at the moment they’re shredded and on their knees and well behind in the public polls. So what’s good for democracy is not good for the party in power. And the party in power can’t really be touched until it is forced to make a general election, which is going to be an 18 months time or so.
Jordan
Is this election now a walk in for labor? Like, are the Tories done? I know the polls have been horrific for them. What should labor be doing now?
Matthew Flinders
The next general election is an open election. The Conservatives might be on their knees right now, but you might argue so too are the Labor Party. And this is the great issue, all the issues around Boris Johnson, now Liz Trust, now Sunak, the domination of a date about Conservative incompetence. The Labor Party have obviously made great strides in promoting that narrative, that story. Soon people are going to say, OK, then, Labor Party, what are your policies? What’s your vision? What are you going to do about the cost of living crisis? And that is the million dollar question of the moment. The Labor Party do not have a clear, coherent or concise vision or an agenda for government. So the big risk at the moment is that we just have a vacuum in British politics that’s the answer that I thought I would hear. It’s not exactly heartening. Let me give you an answer that you might not have thought you’d hear. This is not about Liz trust. This is not about the Conservative Party, this is not about Canada. This is actually about something that goes far deeper into the roots and culture of British politics and society. What is happening now is, in many ways, the ramifications or the rollout of Brexit. The United Kingdom doesn’t understand where it’s going or what role it plays in the world today for the last ten years, if not 20 years, you might argue, since it’s 50 years since it joined the EU. The main debate in British politics that has dominated the vision thing has been about whether the UK should be a member of the European Union. There was an idea held by some that leaving the European Union would open up the sunlit uplands of new economic growth and prosperity for all, and it hasn’t happened. And that’s what’s lacking in British politics at the moment, is a positive vision of where the UK is going in the world and how it’s going to get there. And that is going to be the key challenge that will win or lose the next general election.
Jordan
Professor, thank you so much for this. I won’t claim to understand it fully, but I understand it a lot better than I did before we spoke.
Matthew Flinders
No former toys. It’s been great to talk to you.
Jordan
Professor Matthew Flinders at the University of Sheffield. That was the big story. I wanted to share a little bit of feedback that we got from our episode on the Emergencies Act, particularly from somebody who was angry that we didn’t discuss the convoy from the point of view of the protesters. This person said, I know us lowly country bumpkins from the prairies are less important than you city people. It is blatantly obvious what you think. I come from a farm. We cover agriculture issues on this show. Earlier in the same week, we had done an episode about the billions of dollars at stake for prairie farmers as their grain cannot be shipped to the West Coast. There’s a huge difference between sides of the political spectrum and the people who actually do the work out on the prairies. All that is to say, I am super happy if you want to write in and bash us or complain about anything you want, that’s what the feedback is for and we’re always happy to get it. But don’t conflate people’s political opinions with what they do for a living. And thank you to every farmer in this entire country. Now, if you would like to reach us for love or hate or questions or whatever, you know how to do it. You can find us on Twitter at thebigory FPN. You can email us like this person did. Hello, at thebigstorypodcast CA. You can even call and leave a voicemail angry or not, we don’t mind. We listen to them all. 416-935-5935 you’re listening to this podcast and a podcast player. Give us a rating, leave us a review. Do you know the drill? Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.
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