This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘How do you solve a problem like Elon Musk?’
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George Parker
Welcome to Political Fix from the Financial Times with me, George Parker, standing in for Lucy Fisher, who’s off on her hols at the moment. Coming up in today’s pod, free speech versus law and order: the dilemma for the government over how to deal with social media companies in the wake of the riots. Plus, we’ll take a look at the huge challenges facing Rachel Reeves as the chancellor struggles to boost growth while balancing the books. And here with me in the studio today are Political Fix regular Miranda Green.
Miranda Green
Hello, George.
George Parker
FT columnist Stephen Bush.
Stephen Bush
Hi, George.
George Parker
And political correspondent Anna Gross.
Anna Gross
Hi, George.
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George Parker
So guys, Elon Musk has been all over his own X social media site, claiming Britain is on the brink of civil war and making all kinds of other incendiary remarks. Has any of it affected your use of X or Twitter, Anna?
Anna Gross
It has not. Actually, there was one moment where I was like, I don’t wanna be on this platform any more and I downloaded so-called Bluesky. It’s terrible that I don’t even know what it’s called.
Miranda Green
I think it is. I mean, honestly, your guess is as good as mine.
Stephen Bush
Bluesky is one of them.
Anna Gross
I mean, it’s called . . . Yeah. I downloaded Bluesky, I spent maybe 15, 20 minutes making my profile, following some people, and then I did not go on it again and I forgot its name. (Laughter)
George Parker
Not a good start. Miranda?
Miranda Green
Yeah. So I thought about joining this other thing, which I think is called Threads, which those of us who were around in the 1980s think is just a terrible apocalyptic documentary about the city of Sheffield after the atomic bomb goes off. Well, no, Threads doesn’t sound attractive, but that’s also another kind of refuge for people alienated by Twitter/X, but you have to join Instagram to get onto Threads. I’m a bit anti-Instagram because I’ve got teenage daughters and I don’t really want them having their . . . becoming obsessed with how they look. And I feel like I’d be a hypocrite if I was on Instagram. So that put me off that. So I think, you know, the problem is, you know, the network effect of Twitter/X is that everyone’s on there still sharing ideas, news, instant reactions. It’s very hard to do your job without it, genuinely.
George Parker
Yeah, there seems to be a lot more junk on there at the moment, doesn’t it, leaving aside Elon Musk’s comments.
Miranda Green
Abs.
Stephen Bush
Yeah. I think one of the . . . So I am on Bluesky quite a lot now, partly because I . . . a part of my creative process is to say something stupid and have someone go, here’s why this is stupid. Or like, oh yes, but this has triggered a useful idea. I feel a bit bad about this because this is not that a high-minded reason to have been leaving the website. But actually, just the sheer proportion of junk that I see whenever I’m on there. Just the kind of, you know, sort of like weird Americans saying things like, you know, I kill my own meat and that’s why I’m gonna ride out the civilisational collapse.
George Parker
That’s not Donald Trump.
Stephen Bush
Yeah. You know, but just that kind of thing. There’s just a lot of just weird stuff that I don’t care about and I’ve just been finding it increasingly unfun. So I realise I’ve started to treat it a bit like I do LinkedIn — no offence to anyone who follows me on LinkedIn — where I’m kind of aware that there’s traffic on there. So I sort of like go, OK, time to, you know, put my pieces on there with a LinkedIn-friendly spiel. But I don’t understand it. I don’t really engage with what the, you know, I see the notifications, you know, I just kind of sort of shuffle things out onto it. And I think, you know, that if you look at the usage statistics, I think that will ultimately be the problem for Twitter will just be a kind of slow death because there’s so much junk on there.
George Parker
And the problem is now the football season’s started as well, so another reason to hang around on there as well. So I think we all need a detox, don’t we? Is that probably the lesson of all this?
Miranda Green
Well, maybe, but I mean, I have to say in its defence, when it was good, Twitter was sensational. And I found certainly during the Covid lockdowns, it was a kind of alternative social forum. I’ve made friends through Twitter exchanges. You know, it’s really good for, you know, being in touch with journalistic contacts and politicians and other writers. I think I will really miss it if the whole thing collapses.
Anna Gross
It is also kind of still fundamental for doing our jobs. I mean, so much of what I’ve been writing about over the past week or even two weeks is what people have said on X or what Musk has said on X.
George Parker
Official government communications on X.
Anna Gross
Precisely. And so it is actually really hard to conceive of leaving it all together.
George Parker
Downing Street has studiously avoided getting into a public row with Elon Musk. But that wasn’t the position taken by Thierry Breton, the EU internal market commissioner, who sent a letter to the US tycoon threatening punishment if content posted on X was found to place EU citizens at risk of serious harm in inverted commas. Breton was then slapped down by the European Commission, who effectively accused him of going rogue. Stephen, I just wondered what you think politicians should do about Musk, if anything at all.
Stephen Bush
Well, I think there are two closely related but ultimately separate Musk questions: you know, the two-tier claim and the civil war thing. You know, we shouldn’t shy away . . .
George Parker
Two-tier policing.
Stephen Bush
Two-tier policing, right. These are explicitly racially loaded terms, right, like the, you know, idea, which is, by the way, very obviously not borne out by the statistics that non-white groups are policed less heavily than white groups is just a straightforward talking point from the racist far right. The idea that the United Kingdom is heading towards civil war because of its ethnic diversity — again, these are straightforwardly racist tropes.
Now there’s the issue of do you want to, if you’re thinking about European security, have a situation where you are dependent on Starlink and other services that are provided by someone who is clearly going mad and getting madder? And then there’s the separate question of should you be policing who he hosts and doesn’t host on Twitter.com?
Where I would say the answer on the Starlink one is yes, there clearly is a Musk problem. If I were advising anyone involved in either the Department of Defence in the United States or Europe or here, I’d be like, you know, you’ve got to reduce your dependency on Musk versus should Breton be writing a note saying, don’t host Donald Trump on X? No.
George Parker
OK. Now Anna, the UK has an Online Safety Act only recently from the statute book, not yet fully operational. Can you just explain what that does in practice?
Anna Gross
Yeah. Just to start, there have been a lot of questions this week about, you know, what is Keir Starmer going to do to react to Musk and can he use the Online Safety Act or will he at some point be able to use the Online Safety Act to deal with disinformation that’s spreading on the platform?
One of the things that I think is a kind of slightly confused about this question is that there’s nothing in the Online Safety Act and there’s nothing in UK law against telling a lie. You’re allowed to say something that’s untrue in basically any forum. We’re allowed to write things that aren’t true and in newspapers, you’re allowed to write things that aren’t true and spread things that aren’t true online. There’s nothing to prevent you from doing that.
There’s one stipulation in the Online Safety Act that you can’t send a message that contains information that is known to be false and is intended to cause non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience. So you have to have proof that the person who sent it knew it was false and also that they intended to seriously harm someone. So, I mean, that’s an incredibly high bar.
The other thing just to say on the Online Safety Act is that not all of it is enforced yet, but what is yet to be enforced? People think, you know, there’s some stuff that’s not yet been enforced which is gonna basically force all these platforms — X, Facebook, YouTube — to comply with quite stringent laws around misinformation, etc.
The reality is that all it’s going to do is require those platforms, require those companies to set out their own terms of use and then make sure that they comply with those terms of use. So is Elon Musk gonna be creating incredibly stringent terms of use for himself around misinformation? That’s the question. And therefore, is there really gonna be that much that the Online Safety Act can do?
George Parker
And there’s the separate hints that Keir Starmer seems to be alluding to, that he might look again at the whole question of legal but harmful. Would that make any difference to someone like Elon Musk saying that Britain is on the verge of civil war?
Anna Gross
Yeah. So the legal but harmful thing though is there was a lot of wrangling over that last year, you may remember. That is slightly separate. So that would actually create an obligation on companies that’s separate to their own terms of service that they’ve created for themselves, saying that it’s actually illegal to allow content that we as a government through law deem to be a legal but harmful. And then they’d have to set out all of the parameters very closely of what exactly is legal but harmful.
But, you know, I’ve spoken to people in government who are incredibly sceptical, actually, that clause is going to be brought back in and that it could be made workable after all of this time. Again, even if it were to happen, it would take a really long period of time and there’s still issues around can the UK enforce these things outside of its own territory. So it’s not very simple.
Miranda Green
It’s really difficult, isn’t it, because the whole thing is fraught with horrific calculations that imply miscalculations in terms of who would deem what is harmful. You know that’s why there was so much wrangling and why the clause was left out of the bill.
And even the chat about the potential for it being brought back has brought all those voices who kept it out of the legislation, you know, back to the fore. And I do have to say, I think they have a really good point. Even with this question of imposing on the online platforms an obligation to set out their terms, as Anna was explaining, and then police them.
There’s a whole bunch of problems with that already in terms of introducing private censorship of essentially the public debating sphere even in the sort of early days of the social media sites becoming more and more, you know, networked, millions of people flooding onto them, etc.
You know, do you remember all the controversies over what Facebook used to deem acceptable photography and banning pictures of women breastfeeding, for example? You know, even on a sort of relatively minor example like that, you know, if you have a site which says, OK, it’s fine to show pictures of domestic abuse, but not a breastfeeding mother, you know, that should alert you to the fact that you are delegating decision-making on what’s harmful content to a bunch of people who may not be equipped to decide. And I think that’s also part of a really serious set of problems there.
George Parker
I think Elon Musk has a point, to a certain extent, when he says people in the EU like Thierry Breton, or indeed some people in the UK, actually want to trample on free speech.
Miranda Green
Well, no, because I just think the whole American culture around free speech is completely different to both the UK and then separately, the EU’s view of the balance of, you know, what’s harmful against free speech. I think the UK, as usual, probably sits somewhere in between the US point of view and the European point of view and we should have our own environment of how we think we want to conduct debate online. But it is not that of the United States. You know, free speech is a different sort of, you know, totemic concept there and much more is allowed in that public sphere than is allowed here.
Stephen Bush
One really interesting manifestation of those two approaches to free speech embodied in the Breton letter is, broadly speaking, in the United States, the right for a broadcaster to go, well, I’m gonna have the happy Republican drivetime hour and you’re not gonna hear from a member of the Democratic party is, you know, that is considered free speech in action. Whereas here in the United Kingdom and across the rest of Europe, if you have the happy member of the Christian Democratic Union, you know, on for an hour, you’ve got to have an hour of someone from the Party of European Socialists to balance it out. And that, of course, was central to Breton’s letter; was, well, look, why are you having this politician on if you’re not gonna have Harris?
But I think in some ways X is a little bit of a red herring in that obviously it’s more dramatic because the owner visibly disagrees with the British government’s policies. And we will get a broader idea of where the various incitements and, you know, the claims people are actually going to go to prison for have been made. But it does seem at first glance, and a lot of the disinformation that triggered the riots was just spreading on Facebook groups and on Telegram, right? And it’s not like Mark Zuckerberg or the fascists of Telegram agree with those messages either, right? So in some ways, the issue remains the speed that various actors can organise online and the ways that leaves law enforcement struggling to catch on.
Miranda Green
And also, let’s not forget their desperate desire to continue to be seen as some sort of neutral platform, not a publisher, because they don’t want to acknowledge — and this has been a lot of the battles in Washington — that they are actually a publisher of content. So they have to sort of defend that position or they become liable for everything that’s on the sites.
George Parker
Keir Starmer was talking about deploying the full force of the law in the aftermath of the riots. And that was the way to respond to this. And we have the case this week of a 53-year-old woman, Julie Sweeney, who suggested online that people should blow up a mosque with all the adults in it. She’s been sentenced to 15 months in prison for these comments on Facebook. Do you think that was the right response, or is there a danger that we’re going too far down that route?
Miranda Green
I’m honestly not sure. And I think it’s kind of slightly too early to tell what will have been the right response and what won’t. I mean, that seems to me to be a clear-cut case of an incitement to violence, actually and, you know, violence on, you know, ethnic, racial, cultural, divisive, you know, lines.
But, you know, I do think, for example, that there have been some cases of quite young people who were involved in the riots, 12-year-olds, etc given custodial sentences. I wonder about that slightly. But I think imposing order, again, is no small part of the important things the government has to do and to reassure people that, you know, inflammatory remarks that lead to real violence and real damage and real lives put at risk won’t be tolerated.
Anna Gross
I’m concerned as well about overreach in some of these cases. I mean, there was someone who was sentenced to, I think it was a 15-year-old who was sentenced to 10 months in prison for engaging in a riot, doing some sort of violent behaviour.
Miranda Green
Is that desirable? What kind of influences will come to bear on that 15-year-old in prison, right? That’s not gonna bring him back into the fold.
Anna Gross
Exactly. And I’m not certain that there’s evidence that the strength of the punishment itself is what prevents further kind of violence or rioting or anger. It’s I think that the speed at which, you know, people were arrested and the visibility of that reaction does seem to have dissipated a lot of it. But I’m not sure that the charging and the long sentences is really part of that. I’d be interested to see any evidence on that.
Stephen Bush
So I’m not concerned. Look, I, you know, as listeners are probably tired of hearing I grew up in Tower Hamlets. And, like, you know, one of my school friends didn’t go out for two days during the riot because they were scared that they, you know, if they went out wearing the hijab they would be beaten up. So I’m afraid my sympathy for an open and shut case of incitement and, you know, I’m sorry 15-year-olds do know right from wrong. Look, and actually, it’s pretty clear that the fear of punishment — we see this with everything from drunk driving, this is where I’m gonna tune my Michael Howard “prison works” — great home secretary. I’m not joking. He was a great home secretary. Like . . .
George Parker
Have to come back to that in another episode.
Stephen Bush
. . . That we know that whether it’s, you know, drunk driving or riotous behaviour, the certainty of a strong legal response does deter criminal behaviour. And I think it’s right for the government to be on the side of law-abiding people who are being subject to collective punishment. I mean, actually, even if the alleged attacker had been Muslim, collective punishment against British Muslims would not be acceptable. But I think it’s important for the state to be on the side . . .
Miranda Green
That’s an important point, actually. That is a really important point.
Stephen Bush
Yeah. To be on the side of people who are the victims of these criminals rather than some, you know, wet-liberal boohoo, what about this poor 15-year-old when they’re in juvie?
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George Parker
So I’ve recently got back from New York and Toronto, where I was covering a visit by Rachel Reeves, who’s looking to drum up some investments in the UK, going to talk to some Canadian pension funds and all the rest of it.
Miranda Green
Ooh, George, that sounds exciting. What was it like being on tour with the great Rachel?
George Parker
Well, exciting. I mean, she has this reputation of being boring-snoring, didn’t she, as a former Newsnight editor once called her. And she did all the things that you would expect a new chancellor to do very professionally. She sort of, she met women in finance in New York and she was hailed for the fact she’s the first female chancellor in 800 or 900 or 1,000 years, whatever it is.
And she went off to Toronto and met some pension fund people. She had dinner with Steve Schwarzman from Blackstone. I think the dinner got off to a slightly awkward start ‘cause we’d reported that day the fact that Steve Schwarzman, the Blackstone boss, had run into some problems developing his luxury mansion down in Wiltshire, I think it is, because of some problems he’s got with the local colony of great crested newts. I think some bats might be down there as well.
Miranda Green
Attacking planning regulations is the new government thing, isn’t it?
George Parker
Exactly. But not newts. Newts are off-limits, I’m afraid, Miranda. But the fascinating thing was, at the end of this, on both the days in New York where the chancellor’s team were quite keen to get her off to her bed because she had a big programme the next day. On both occasions, she insisted on coming out for a drink. So in the early hours UK time, and we sat down . . . no, I’m not gonna disclose everything that was said because it was all off the record. But I can tell you she did some quite mean impressions of some of her political rivals. And she is! When I’ve mentioned this to people, they can’t quite believe it. But you’ve met her privately. She can be a be of a hoot, can’t she? Just . . . people will be raising their eyebrows at that. But she can, can’t she?
Stephen Bush
Yeah, I know she can, she can. Yeah, she’s . . . Yeah, she’s very funny.
Miranda Green
She’s good company but I have to admit something here which I know, you know, won’t go beyond this room, colleagues, but I’m actually becoming physically frightened of her because it’s all . . . you know, the way that politicians take on a kind of . . . They kind of almost grow with the power and authority that accrues to them from the role. And I sort of think as she’s been taken more and more seriously and now become chancellor, as she’d hoped, she’s sort of got an aura around her, which I personally find intimidating. I do find her intimidating. I think it’s partly to do with me being very physically small. Anyway . . .
George Parker
Yeah. What do you think?
Anna Gross
Yeah, I was surprised as well. I think when I first saw her in public, I found her to be quite awkward. And the way that she speaks and especially in the early days, I found it quite stilted. But then, around the dinner table, I found her to be quite wry, quite funny, quite witty, I was surprised by that.
George Parker
She’s got quite a raucous laugh, hasn’t she? But certainly, that is not her public image.
Miranda Green
But you need that to survive in politics at the top, don’t you think? You need to have a slightly different private face where you can laugh things off and see the ridiculous because a lot of the situations that arise in politics at the top level are faintly ridiculous.
Stephen Bush
I do also think one of the reasons why, you know, when we think back to that 2010 intake, which in both sides of the House was kind of hailed as this great intake with loads of talent and most of it I’m terrifyingly aware that quite a lot of the 2010 intake on both sides of this podcast, sorry. Most of it has not had the career that it was expected and hoped that it would have.
And I think one of the reasons why she has, I mean, I think back to an in-conversation I had with her in 2013 where it was quite awkward and partly because I was quite near to the start my career, partly because she was a relatively recently elected MP. But she is someone who has consistently improved as an operator. You know, like her Christmas card machine is one reason why she was elected select committee chair, which is a big reason why she became shadow chancellor, which is a big reason why she is chancellor and a big reason why, for good or for ill, she is the most important minister in Keir Starmer’s government. And I think lots of politicians tend to be one-club golfers. You know, they’re charismatic, so they continue to be charismatic.
George Parker
Stephen, I think we just need to explain what her Christmas card machine is. She is . . . because I’ve actually interviewed her for a BBC programme about this specific question. She is absolutely obsessive about Christmas card writing and her poor kids are roped into a massive industrial-scale operation, aren’t they?
Stephen Bush
Yeah. Like basically, you know, she starts writing the Christmas cards, I think you’ll notice it sometime in, I think, early summer and there’s a . . . (Miranda laughs)
George Parker
That is true.
Stephen Bush
It’s a fascinating bit of retail politics, right, because the card is always, as with many MPs’ cards, it’s a competition done by the local primary schools in her constituency. So obviously, the voters like that. And MPs get, you know, like, they are specific little notes. They’re not just like the yearbook like, have a great summer, but for Christmas. She does put that kind of effort and attention into things. I mean, look, for example, if Robert Jenrick becomes leader of the opposition, it will be in part because he’s done little things like that. And that is, I think, part of the story of successful politicians, is that self-improvement.
George Parker
OK. Now we want to talk very quickly about one of the big questions facing Rachel Reeves this autumn, which is how you balance the need for fiscal discipline, balancing the books which she say are in a state of disarray. Tories would, of course, dispute that very strongly. But the need for fiscal discipline versus the need to get growth going.
And there are a couple of stories we’ve reported in the FT this week which throw that choice into stark relief. One is a story I was involved in writing about how the Treasury now is trying to scale back the amount of state aid available to AstraZeneca to build a new vaccines factory at Speke on Merseyside. You know, this is a shining example of the kind of thing that the British economy should be doing. So, you know, is it a good idea to save £20mn and risk losing a factory, possibly to France?
The second one, Anna, that you’ve been writing about is the decision by the government to cancel the Conservative government’s plans to build a supercomputer in Edinburgh. Can you explain what this supercomputer was going to be and why it might be important if we don’t get it?
Anna Gross
Yeah. So this was part of £1.3bn that was quite quietly cut by the new government, spending that the previous government had committed to various AI projects, the biggest of which, as you rightly say, was this supercomputer that’s based out of Edinburgh University, was an exascale computer. There’s only two that are known to be in the world. It’s a type of computer that can do an incredibly large amount of processing of . . .
George Parker
Is ithat close to like a megaflop or something? What’s it called?
Anna Gross
Yeah, yeah. It’s an exaflop.
George Parker
Exaflop. That’s such a strange word. Anyway . . .
Anna Gross
Yeah. So they can do an incredible amount of processing and they’re seen as integral to widescale rollout of AI. So there’s been a huge amount set of the past few years about how much the UK needs to invest in supercomputing and particularly in exascale.
And so when they quietly announced they were cutting this, there was a huge backlash from the tech community saying, including, you know, the shadow science minister Andrew Griffith, he told us, you know, this is a clear sign of a lowering of the UK’s ambition when it comes to tech and science, which, as you say, is gonna be really important for growing the economy, which apparently Rachel Reeves is so keen on.
To be fair to the UK government, they say A, this was actually never funded properly. It was not actually put into any budget by the former government. And they say, just hold it, watch this space. We’re doing a review at the moment. Supercomputing is still really important to us, as is AI, and you’re gonna see more investment here. So we’ll have to see what actually happens, but that’s what they’re claiming.
George Parker
Miranda, you’re worried that Rachel Reeves, who everyone says is fiscally extremely orthodox, going back to her days at the Bank of England, will be so hidebound by her self-proclaimed fiscal rules that opportunities for growth, investment in capital projects could be lost.
Miranda Green
I think there is a worry. I mean, I heard George Osborne himself say about 10 days ago that listening to Rachel Reeves’s statement at the end of July that it was like a sort of mini-me experience for him, you know.
So I think it does start to slightly concern people if you get the impression that this is a pure Treasury spreadsheet way of thinking, ie, you know, we’re looking at all the outgoings, what can we remove to to bring down the total tally. Because, you know, there are a lot of other people who’ve been saying for several months now, you know, awaiting an incoming Labour government, that the whole way that the Treasury thinks about things — Treasury brain, so-called — needs rewiring.
You know, so if you’re going to prioritise growth, which, after all, is Keir Starmer’s central mission of his mission-led government, you have to look at things differently. And also, there’s a lot of people in the background sort of saying, well, you also need to start thinking about a kind of cost-benefit analysis even on social projects, because the costs down the line of cutting things to the bone — that’s gonna be really difficult if we’re still in a sort of, you know, spreadsheet mentality.
George Parker
I think George Osborne actually admitted that if he had his time again, he wouldn’t have cut the capital budget to the extent he did in the austerity era. I mean, Steve, I just wondered what you thought about this AstraZeneca thing. They thought they’d been offered around £65mn by Jeremy Hunt. When they got to talk to the Treasury under the Labour government, it looked like it’s come down to £40mn. Understandably, they’re annoyed. There’s talk about the possibility this could go to France rather than to Merseyside. That’s not a great start for a government that’s committed to industrial policy, is it?
Stephen Bush
And yeah, of course, they would say, well, look, these commitments were made by the last government without a plan to pay for them. But the problem, exactly as Miranda says, is that what tends to happen when chancellors of the exchequer are in a tight spot is they take away money from industrial strategy. They take away money from capital projects. They spend it on the stuff that they know is going to be core to getting them re-elected, right?
Would, like, what is the most important set of priorities in terms of if you are a Labour MP and you wanna come back? It’s, in no particular order, potholes, getting down the number of waiting list and policing. Now, obviously, all of that stuff is really important, but I think there are two ways budgets can fail, right? They can fail immediately and they blow up and they’re unpopular, or they can fail because you look back and go, oh, that was the Budget which killed the defined benefit pension scheme. And I think all of this, you worry that it might lead to that type of Budget.
George Parker
Yeah. Now, the good news is that Rachel Reeves is on holiday this week. She’s taking a, I don’t want to give too much away, but she’s on a, taking a seaside break somewhere in England. But Keir Starmer cancelled his holiday. Martin Kettle in The Guardian said that was the first serious mistake that Keir Starmer has made. Miranda, should politicians take holidays?
Miranda Green
Yeah. Everyone needs a holiday and it’s actually really important. And also let’s be honest, a really senior politician and member of the government, they’re not . . . I mean, they are on holiday in that they’re out of their office. But the idea that Keir Starmer will not be attending to the business of government in an important way is not right anyway. But, you know, spending time with your family and having a think is really important for, you know, having an ability to sort of set strategy and to see the wood for the trees. And everyone knows if you can’t see the wood for the trees at work, you do your job in a worse way. So I’m actually in favour of it.
George Parker
Yeah. And of course, Gordon Brown — do you remember when he became prime minister back in 2007, they literally couldn’t get him away for a holiday for more than a few hours. Remember he was down on holiday in Dorset and some obscure animal disease outbreak happened and he had to come back straightaway. Do you remember the bluetongue episode? He was always back.
Anna, you cover the Liberal Democrats, who have made a sort of art form of always calling for parliament to be recalled at any given time. Do you think we should cut politicians some slack?
Anna Gross
Yeah. I mean, I totally agree with Miranda that if you look at yourself, or you look at your friends, you look at your family, you know that people get burnout. People stop operating as well if they aren’t able to take a break.
And earlier today, I was sort of looking back over stories that had been written, the kind of pearl-clutching stories about I can’t believe this person’s on holiday when X is happening, over the years, and they tend to be, you know, the right-wing-supporting papers complaining about leftwing politicians doing that or the other way around. It is a partisan thing.
And I think if you feel favourable towards a politician, you tend to understand that it’s actually, you know, reasonable and actually beneficial to them and to the country if they’re able to take a bit of a break.
George Parker
Stephen, what are the politics of taking holidays if you’re a frontline British politician?
Stephen Bush
Well, a part of the politics in this instance are if you have riots and severe disturbances, it is obviously a bad look if you are on holiday while bits of the country are, you know, on fire.
Miranda Green
Particularly if your personal branding is I roll up my sleeves and get dug in.
Stephen Bush
Yeah, if you’re branding is I’m Mr Security, I get stuff done, right? So he obviously had to cancel this holiday, right? You see, it’s so core to like the Keir Starmer brand that this is the kind of policy that he, you know, that he does. However, he obviously doesn’t need, though not least for the good of the people who work in his office, to find some time to make it back partly because, you know, when you look back, not just on those, you know, stories where coincidentally it turns out leftwing papers discover the joy of holidays when there’s a leftwing government and rightwing papers decide they’re terrible when there’s . . . when we have a leftwing one.
But when you look back at some of the avoidable mistakes governments have made, they’ve often been because the people involved are tired and cranky. You remember when David Cameron decided he needed to whip Conservative MPs to vote against Jesse Norman’s amendment for a referendum on the European Union as a show of strength, which obviously did not need to happen because the Lib Dems and the Labour party were gonna vote against it. So there was . . . yeah, there was no possibility of the amendment passing. All that the show of strength did was it made the rebellion larger, more divisive, more bitter. I was talking to someone in that Downing Street set-up a couple of months later saying, why did you do it? And they said, well, look, on reflection, we were all tired and we thought that Jesse was taking the piss. And that’s why holidays are good for politicians. (Laughter)
George Parker
Exactly. And I’m about to go off on holiday to the island of Lundy off the north Devon coast. And I hope and I recall that it’s so far off the north Devon coast that mobile phone signals do not work in that area.
Miranda Green
It’s very on-brand, George, though. You need to go to Devon.
George Parker
Oh, I tell you, if you haven’t been to Lundy, I heartily recommend Landmark Trust. Stay in a castle, a lighthouse, a coast guard lookout. There’s no permanent population, there are no cars, but there’s one pub. Magnificent. And puffins, of course.
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George Parker
That’s almost it, but there’s just time for our political stock picks. Miranda, you first.
Miranda Green
Well, I’m going to buy Mel Stride, the former work and pensions secretary who is standing to be the next leader of the Conservative party.
George Parker
Rank outsider?
Miranda Green
Rank outsider, but I think saying very sensible and responsible things about the riots and about, you know, the conduct of Nigel Farage and trying to get the Conservative party to not heed the siren voices that wish to take them off to the right.
George Parker
Too sensible, I would’ve thought for the Conservative party in its current . . .
Miranda Green
Yeah, but credit where credit’s due.
George Parker
OK. Fair enough. Anna?
Anna Gross
I am going to sell Tom Tugendhat and buy James Cleverly. Can I do both?
George Parker
Yeah, you can do both, yeah.
Anna Gross
OK. On the grounds that I was at Tom Tugendhat’s speech on Tuesday where he was talking about law and order in the wake of the riots. And I don’t know, I found him . . . I just I didn’t find him particularly compelling. He’s obviously a smart guy, but he’s very establishment, very posh. And I think that it’s likely to come down to this is — I could be totally wrong about this — but I think it’s likely to come down to two people for the Tory leadership. One of them will be Kemi Badenoch, and the other will be a kind of person who speaks to the centre ground, to the One Nation Tories, and that’s between James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat. And my money is on James Cleverly.
Miranda Green
You know, and Mel Stride, of course, Anna. And it’s also . . . (Overlapping speech)
Anna Gross
Of course.
George Parker
Don’t forget Mel. (Laughter) OK. Stephen?
Stephen Bush
Right. I’m going to sell Tom Tugendhat as well. And I’m gonna buy Robert Jenrick. I think . . . What I found surprising about Tom Tugendhat’s speech is that there is a constituency, quite a large one in the country, for Keir Starmer should have been even more draconian towards the protesters. As listeners will know, I am one of those people, but I don’t think there’s a constituency for that in the Tory membership. And it adds to this problem that a lot of Tory MPs are like, this guy is a foreign policy guy with no expertise on domestic policy; maybe I’m gonna back James instead.
And then I think the interesting thing is Robert Jenrick has done a great job of hoovering up institutional support on the right. I think if something happens to Kemi Badenoch — which seeing as she is . . . what was that wonderful phrase that you used in that article that time? You know, a redoubted fighter for what she perceives to be the truth? (Laughter) I think, look, she does occasionally, like Denis Healey and David Miliband, did fall out with MPs because they feel that she’s given them a piece of her mind too many. And if that does happen, Robert Jenrick will be the beneficiary.
Miranda Green
What about you, George?
George Parker
Well, I think going back to our earlier discussion about holidays, given the fact that Keir Starmer so far refused to take one, I’m gonna sell Keir Starmer. I think it is a mistake, but I will be buying the stocks back again if he decides to take holidays later on in August. Am I allowed to do that? I’m just dumping and running for the beach.
Miranda Green
Honestly, I think people are really playing fast and loose with the rules this week. I’m gonna consult the inside of the top lid of our game.
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George Parker
We need Lucy back. And that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. I’ve put links to subjects discussed in this episode in the show notes. Do check them out. They’re articles we’ve made free for Political Fix listeners. There’s also a link there to Stephen’s award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You’ll get 30 days free. And don’t forget to subscribe to the show. Please do leave a review or a star rating. It really does help to spread the word.
Political Fix was presented by me, George Parker and produced by Audrey Tinline. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Original music by Breen Turner and mix by Sean McGarrity. Petros Gioumpasis was the studio engineer. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. We’ll meet again here next week.
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