This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Labour builds bridges with Trump’
Lucy Fisher
Before we begin, we’d love to hear a bit more about you and what you like about the Political Fix show. We’re running a short survey, and anyone who takes part before August the 29th will be entered into a prize draw for a pair of Bose QuietComfort 35 wireless headphones. I’ll put a link to the survey in the show notes along with the terms and conditions for the prize draw.
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It’s funny seeing all the newbies in Portcullis House and having to work from café-style tables, not yet in their offices, their IT set up.
Anna Gross
I feel like they all look quite nervous and they’re walking around, they don’t really know who to speak to or where they’re going. It’s quite sweet.
Jim Pickard
And what was that famous advice someone gave decades ago to new MPs? And the advice was . . .
Miranda Green
Specialise and stay out of the bars.
Jim Pickard
Exactly. I think it applies to journalists as well. (Lucy laughs)
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Lucy Fisher
Hello, and welcome to Political Fix from the Financial Times with me, Lucy Fisher. It’s been a busy start to Labour’s second full week in government with the launch of a new strategic defence review and the promise of a devolution revolution. Meanwhile, the assassination attempt against Donald Trump has thrown up questions about toxicity and politics on both sides of the Atlantic. And former front bench Labour MPs passed over for government roles have been licking their wounds and some have been plotting revenge. Here to discuss all this and more, I’m joined in the studio by my colleagues Jim Pickard. Hi, Jim.
Jim Pickard
Hi, Lucy.
Lucy Fisher
And Anna Gross. Hi, Anna.
Anna Gross
Hi, Lucy.
Lucy Fisher
And down the line is Miranda Green. Hi, Miranda.
Miranda Green
Hi, Lucy.
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Lucy Fisher
So let’s kick off talking about the big strategic defence review that Labour has launched this week. Jim, I’m really interested in the cast of reviewers they’ve lined up to do this big external review. They’ve got the former Nato boss, Lord George Robertson, who of course is a former Labour defence secretary, who previously led a big defence review. They’ve got Fiona Hill, a British-born kind of Russia expert who’s been huge in the kind of US administration, has been an adviser in the White House. And they’ve got General Sir Richard Barrons, a retired four-star general who was deputy chief of the defence staff. Tell us your take on this defence review and why they’ve kind of outsourced it to external reviewers rather than keeping it in-house, as they normally do.
Jim Pickard
So you’re right, these are really a heavyweight bunch of people that they’ve gathered to do this defence review. And I think the first point here is political, which is of course, during the Jeremy Corbyn leadership of the Labour party, this was a party which was sceptical about Nato, hostile to Trident, certainly in terms of Jeremy Corbyn’s personal preferences, and therefore lost a lot of support among the military, among the families of the military and among the communities of the family of the military.
And they have spent an awful lot of time in recent years trying to convince the electorate that under Keir Starmer Labour is serious about defence, understands defence and it is very grown-up about the threats to Britain, potential and current, from around the world.
And in terms of what the defence review is looking at, there are themes that we have heard before which they’re gonna want to probe, which are, you know, are the threats to Britain conventional warfare threats or are they things like cyber threats? You know, who are the enemies that we should fear the most and prepare against the most? And also, who are fall short of enemies but are somewhere in between friends and enemy? And very interestingly, we had Lord George Robertson mentioning China yesterday as among the countries that pose a deadly threat to Britain. And that does feel like a different language, doesn’t it, Lucy?
Lucy Fisher
It does. I mean, Anna, really big pivot. The previous Tory government was very careful in its language, describing China as a competitor or a challenge, only using the term threat in an economic context. So for Lord Robertson to kind of wade in and announce China being this deadly threat and part of a “deadly quartet”, as he called it — China, Russia, North Korea and Iran — posing this very serious threat to Britain. It feels like this is gonna be bigger than just looking at defence, but it’s gonna be a sort of huge impact on Britain’s foreign policy and wider security policy.
Anna Gross
Absolutely. I totally agree that the former administration really stuck blindly to this line that China was a challenge and it was asked again and again — is China a threat? And it refused to say that.
And one of the things that’s quite interesting — I mean, I know we’re gonna talk a bit about relations between the UK and the US and US policy more generally — but this is one area where it looks like the UK may align more closely with the US, which has been very categorical, very clear that China is a threat, both Biden and Trump.
John Healey, who’s the new defence secretary, when he was announcing the review, he was saying that the Ministry of Defence is gonna be a new economic department. And I thought that was really interesting.
And it’s kind of in line with what all of the cabinet ministers are saying at the moment, that their department — Wes Streeting, who’s the health secretary, was saying this last week as well, that the NHS is actually gonna be a kind of area of economic growth. And it just . . . You can sort of see already their arguments to the Treasury saying, we’ll be contributing to economic growth, give us a bit of money.
Lucy Fisher
I think that is fascinating that they are trying to put, as you say, this growth mission at the heart of every department. But to my mind, it really does make sense in defence. And I was there in the briefing yesterday with John Healey, who pointed out that, you know, if you’re trying to spread wealth creation or 70 per cent of jobs in defence are outside London and the South East, the economic multiplier of investment in defence is significantly higher than most other sectors. It has higher-skilled jobs and as a result, the average wage in defence manufacturing is 40 per cent higher than other sectors. I mean, Miranda, that’s a sort of canny move by Labour, isn’t it, to try and put defence industrial strategy front and centre of this review?
Miranda Green
Yes, it is clever and it’s a clever blend of recognising the reality of the world that we now face and also catering to domestic political concerns about jobs and industries and growth. I mean, there’s no doubt that that theme that the Tories tried to use as an attack line in the general election, ie, we live in a dangerous world. Do you really feel safe with Keir Starmer and co? Actually, that is in a sense just a description of some of the international challenges that the new government faces. And, you know, announcing this defence review with such heavy hitters, as you said early on, I think does sort of demonstrate that the Starmer administration is taking this aspect of what they face really, really seriously.
I think also, you know, the politics of it are interesting because that emphasis on Starmer as a patriotic leader reclaiming the red wall seats and all the rest of it, that’s worked very well for them, even though some sort of felt that by the end of it, the Union Jack was kind of burned onto everyone’s retinas because it was the backdrop so often. You know, it was clever politically. And I thought it was so interesting.
Some research that I went to the launch of this week by More in Common: after the gaffe by Rishi Sunak leaving D-Day early and the gamblegate story. The third-biggest gaffe that the public noticed and didn’t like was Nigel Farage making those comments about how Russia was provoked over Ukraine. And it just goes to show where, you know, the British public’s heart beats on some of these international issues, on particularly, you know, the questions around the future of Nato and standing firm against Russian aggression, etc. So I think it’s sort of clever politically and also where the public is probably to pay attention to these threats.
Jim Pickard
I think one of the things I would say about John Healey saying that the M8 is an economic department, however, is that, you know, what does that mean in practice? It raises a lot of questions about is this new government gonna buy British? Is it gonna start procuring more domestically than from abroad? And in doing so, will it challenge various kind of global state aid rules and all the rest of it?
And there just so happens to be a very current, live situation with a company called Harland and Wolff, which has shipyards in Northern Ireland and a couple of sites on the mainland of the UK as well. And Harland and Wolff is in financial difficulties. It has been begging the government for a £200mn loan guarantee. The Conservative government agreed it in principle back in December, but refused to sign it off in recent months over concerns about state aid and also concerns about whether the money would somehow end up in the pockets of an American vulture fund. And that dilemma is one that is being wrestled with by the New Labour government, literally as we speak now. And what they choose to do in that would be an interesting pointer as to how interventionist they might be on these things.
Lucy Fisher
Well, that’s right, Anna, isn’t it? I mean, this sort of diktat’s gone out to all the departments, you know — find the skeletons in the closet, bring out your dead, because the work needs to start now, in a messaging political sense, to pin all these bin fires onto the previous administration.
Anna Gross
Exactly. And I think it’s not necessarily about saying, oh, it’s actually way worse than we thought so give us more money as a department — although, you know, all of the departments would like more money. It’s more about paving the groundwork so that the public isn’t expecting huge changes in the next six months or even the next year. Sort of giving them a bit more time so that they can instigate reforms, they can launch their consultations, and the public is just a little bit more patient. I don’t know whether that will work, but that’s the kind of ambition.
Miranda Green
I do think Anna’s absolutely right about that buying time point. Speaking to some of the incoming newly elected Labour MPs this week about the first meeting they had of the parliamentary Labour party, and they were really struck by Rachel Reeves telling them all in a sense, welcome to parliament, and here’s a list of the things that we can’t do and that we can’t spend any money on. And I think this theme of kind of buying time is gonna be a strong one in the next few weeks, actually.
Lucy Fisher
She’s certainly living up to her much-touted reputation as the Iron Chancellor-in-waiting now that she’s in the role. Jim, that’s another big thing that this review’s gonna do, isn’t it? It’s gonna pave the road, it’s gonna be a road map to Britain increasing defence expenditure from its current level of around 2.3 per cent of GDP to 2.5 per cent of GDP. But clearly, that’s gonna have to come at the expense of something else. I mean, so far we haven’t had that debate play out in public, have we, about what the need to spend more on defence, which they’ve committed to in principle but haven’t put a timeline on, will mean regarding cuts elsewhere or tax rises to fund this all.
Jim Pickard
Yeah, exactly. And this is something that Rishi Sunak tried to make a political dividing line in before the election. I was on the trip he made to Poland and Germany. I think it was around May where Rishi Sunak set out his plan to get to 2.5 per cent, and it was mapped out for about a decade. A lot of people will have forgotten that the Conservatives didn’t actually have the funding for the final few years of that, but they did find the funding, at least for the five or six years up to the end of the 2020s, for that trajectory.
So yes, Labour will have to find some way to pay for that by the end of the decade. But I think the advantage they have is that that’s not necessarily one for the current parliament. They can sort of shift it a little bit and suggest that we can find some efficiencies or we can find some tax rises or cuts or whatever it may be, some way off. But I think there will be pressure on them, given, you know, the fragile geopolitical situation we find ourselves in, there will be pressure on Labour to spell it out relatively quickly.
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Lucy Fisher
Well, let’s move on to talk about the defining story of the past few days, which, of course, was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Anna, interestingly, this has led to the first phone call between Keir Starmer and Donald Trump. Kind of unusual circumstances in which this has been thrown up.
Anna Gross
Yeah, I mean, it is a bit of an awkward moment for Starmer because, you know, there’s a short spell at the moment where the US has a democratic leader but the UK has a centre-left government and France is kind of forming this centre-and-left coalition. And so that could have been a quite nice trinity there. But it’s looking increasingly likely that Trump will be the next leader.
And we had a great story that Jim led last week that several members of Starmer’s cabinet have been highly, highly critical of Trump in the past. I mean, they’ve said things and they’ve called him inflammatory and ignorant, a sociopath, an absolute moron, a racist and the worst president in history. So these are things that Starmer, he’s gonna have to be kind of trying to rebuild this relationship now.
Lucy Fisher
Well, and Miranda, I mean, interestingly, we’ve had a signal overnight, haven’t we, from Donald Trump that he is willing to forgive because he’s chosen Senator JD Vance as his running mate, who described him as the American Hitler. So there is a path back, perhaps, for British politicians and David Lammy in particular, the foreign secretary, who famously called Trump, I think it was, a Nazi sympathiser.
Miranda Green
Well, yeah. The fact that David Lammy and his team have worked so hard to build those links and to shout about them to all of us does sort of speak volumes about the fact they realise this is not gonna be the easiest relationship in the western alliance, to put it mildly.
So far, we’ve had a lot of people in the kind of policy world around the Labour party looking at the Biden example as how not to do it right. So we’ve had lots and lots of people saying, this is how you turn around economic policy — have a plan to create jobs and transition the economy to net zero — and lose. So I think it’s gonna be an interesting moment if, as we think, Trump manages to become president for a second time, that the Labour party has to pivot away from an ally, because Anna’s right — obviously, the Democrats in the Biden administration are much more their natural political allies.
But if they are gonna lose catastrophically, you know, everything about that relationship and also the lessons, potentially, that people in the UK learn from how to do politics successfully in the age of mass disinformation via social media. I think it’s gonna be quite a big sort of part of how they think about it. I’ve been struck, I don’t know if you colleagues have been as well by the number of incoming MPs who’ve talked to me about how awful the general election campaign was for them this time because of the degree of misinformation and local WhatsApp groups, opponents running as independents, you know, running really awful smear campaigns against them. You know, this is the sort of Trumpian world in which Democratic politics is now practised.
Lucy Fisher
Jim, I mean, just sticking on JD Vance for a minute, you know, interesting, Miranda mentioned earlier this research showing that the British public really rejected Nigel Farage’s remarks about Russia and Ukraine. And, you know, there seems to be a lot of British public sentiment behind Ukraine, you know, winning the war that Russia has started.
Vance has famously said, you know, he doesn’t care what happens in Ukraine. And also, we’ve seen in the past 24 hours, these remarks emerged from him in the past fortnight or so, in which he joked that the UK was, as he described it, the first Islamist country to get nuclear weapons. It does feel like there could be a real splintering on kind of foreign policy and the kind of, you know, transatlantic consensus that has held heretofore, even during the first Trump presidency, if Trump makes it back to the White House.
Jim Pickard
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the thing that is sending shudders through European capitals in the last 24 hours is that comment of Vance saying that he really doesn’t care either way what happens to Ukraine. You know, for those world leaders who believe that Ukraine is the holdout of western democracy against authoritarianism and must be propped up at all costs, it is very alarming.
We, of course, don’t precisely know what Trump will do if he becomes president vis-à-vis Ukraine. It’s possible that he might just try and see himself as, you know, the great dealmaker and step in and try and consolidate the situation as it currently is and create peace on terms that Ukraine really doesn’t like. But the Vance comments suggest that he would just be quite happy to turn off the tap of financial military support for Kyiv, you know, overnight. So it is certainly alarming for those of us who are worried about the situation in Ukraine.
Lucy Fisher
And interesting, Anna, to see some of the kind of UK figures trying to kind of get in there. Liz Truss on the first flight out to join Trump on the campaign trail, likening him to kind of Thatcher’s defiance after that rightwing bomb attack by the IRA in 1984. Do you think we can expect to see Nigel Farage crossing the pond in the coming week or two?
Anna Gross
Absolutely. He will never miss an opportunity to head over to the US and get a photo op with Trump. And I think a lot of these figures are perhaps quite cleverly positioning themselves for a time in the future where perhaps we do have a Trump administration again. The Conservative party is rebuilding and they might be able to kind of present themselves as a force that has a good connection with the US and could work closely with them.
Jim Pickard
And I think, you know, what we’re seeing here is we’ve heard Keir Starmer say again and again, again, we’re no longer a party of protest. We’re a serious party of government. And, you know, Labour was very much a party of protest.if you go back to that period when Trump was president first time around. And of course, David Lammy, he described Trump as a woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath, a profound threat to the international order and all the rest of it.
And I think the pivot we’ve seen is Starmer taking Labour to a place where it’s much more pragmatic. It’s all about, you know, having to deal with the world as we find it rather than as we’d love it to be. And I presume that Starmer is thinking that if he can show this, not support for Trump, at least sympathy for Trump when he’s almost been assassinated, you know, Trump’s more likely to listen to him if and when he gets into the Oval Office.
The problem is we’ve seen, because Trump has been president before, that he’s not very good at listening to anyone. And, you know, even the generals and business leaders and Republican politicians he surrounded himself with during his first term, literally all fell out with him very, very quickly because he is not someone who really loves listening to, inverted commas, reason.
Lucy Fisher
And Miranda, just thinking about David Lammy, you know, he made this big bridge-building trip to the US in May. He met Vance and a number of other key Trump allies. On the one hand, that looks pretty canny now, doesn’t it? But on the other, you know, I just wonder if there might end up being some kind of backlash to the way that he’s tried to sort of build links with the Republicans, talking about how some people view him as a small-C conservative, describing himself as a good Christian boy and talking about trying to find common cause with Trump.
Miranda Green
Yeah. Well, I think that the interesting thing about David Lammy is that he is in the cabinet as foreign secretary, because even in quite recent months, there have been a lot of whisperings about whether he might be replaced, for example, with Douglas Alexander, who’s back in parliament and is now in a junior ministerial role in the business department but of course, who has a lot of international experience. Or even, there were sort of wild rumours about Peter Mandelson or David Miliband coming back. So there was a sort of sense of doubt of is Lammy really the best person for this job? And he’s had to sort of fight back against that, which is probably why he’s hired quite sophisticated advisers and spent all this time briefing about how well he’d been preparing these, you know, links with Washington, setting off immediately on tours to our other major allies to cement relations there.
But I do think it’s worth flagging up the potential political reaction to the Labour party in power and its foreign policy stances because, you know, obviously, in the election we saw those seats peel off to the Green party. We saw four independents plus Jeremy Corbyn win those seats. There’s a presence in parliament to kick off from the left about foreign policy now and they are very, very aware of this. They are very worried about these electoral threats. So I think that foreign policy plays into those domestic political worries in quite a strong way.
Lucy Fisher
I think that’s really interesting. And just to draw together two strands of what you said, Miranda, one of which was talking earlier about the intimidation and just how kind of terrible some of the abuse was on the campaign trail, which, like you, I’ve heard from new MPs just talking about how shocking that was to them to sort of to go through that and also how a lot of the worst of that was coming from some of these pro-Palestinian campaigns, movements, independent candidates.
Anna, you’ve been writing about this and what the Home Office is gonna do about this kind of toxicity in politics this side of the Atlantic.
Anna Gross
Yeah. So Yvette Cooper, who’s the new home secretary, she came out yesterday and said she’s going to chair a meeting of the government’s defending democracy task force to try to gather evidence from those involved in various campaigns about what took place and the kinds of threats that they faced.
Lord Walney, who’s the government’s top adviser on government disruption and violence, he’s been calling for something a bit more thorough than that. He was asking for that to be a proper formal investigation into whether there were links between some of these different organisations involved in intimidation and harassment, etc. The government stopped short of that but it’s launched this inquiry.
And my sense on this is that there have been some quite serious cases of harassment, abuse, and you can totally understand why many of these MPs feel really upset and threatened and feel like they need better protection, especially after what happened to the MP David Amess in 2021. But I also do think that some of the reporting around this has been kind of a little bit breathless and fallen into some tropes that all pro-Palestinian organisations are kind of extremist. And I think, you know, it’s really important to divide the two. There has been threatening actions. There has been intimidation by some groups.
And there is a strength of feeling amongst the Muslim population, who polls suggest that in previous elections, 60 or 70 per cent of Muslims voted for Labour. And people within the Labour party at the moment think that, I mean, it’s an estimate that maybe 80 per cent of Muslims voted against Labour for independents or for other parties. So there has been a real shift away from the party, and there is a real strength of feeling that Labour’s let them down over the Gaza conflict. So yeah, I think there are real feelings there, but that needs to be passed from the also very real and very serious intimidation.
Jim Pickard
Yeah. I mean, I think the other thing to mention is that some of the victims of this harassment, intimidation are, of course, Muslim MPs and particularly female Muslim MPs. There seems to be a misogynistic edge to some of this harassment. You know, you take Shabana Mahmood, who’s now the justice secretary, and, you know, she gave a very impassioned speech at her council on election night where she talked about masked men, intimidation, harassment, you know, really just almost felt as if a lot of these political candidates from the Labour party, there was an attempt to silence them.
And there was definitely a lot of misinformation and disinformation as well, suggesting that some of these individuals had opposed the ceasefire, that Labour opposed a ceasefire. Now, of course, listeners will remember that initially, Keir Starmer did have to be kind of pushed and dragged into that position, but it’s been basically half a year or more or less that Labour has said there should be a ceasefire in the Middle East.
I think, you know, as Anna said, there was, of course, the murder of David Amess. And let’s not forget, of course, the murder of Jo Cox in recent years. I personally don’t know what the answer is to this. I think a lot of it comes from internet causing these high feelings to run out of control. People get themselves into social media or WhatsApp bubbles where they’re only listening to people that agree with them.
The one caveat I would say to this hurdle is that I did a bit of research before coming here about, you know, the murders of MPs in the UK. And I didn’t know, I had forgotten that in fact, four British members of parliament were murdered by the IRA or similar groups between 1979 and 1990. So although this is horrible and feels kind of new, political violence in Britain is not 100 per cent new.
Miranda Green
So I think the problem with comparing it to the IRA era is that, you know, that was a situation where an armed terrorist group that wanted to break away from the British state had declared war on the British state. You know, London was in a sort of, you know, terror alert lockdown for much of my childhood and teenage years because of the IRA. You know, we’re now supposedly in peace time and yet MPs are being murdered. And also, it’s not just the MPs. Don’t forget that a member of MP’s staff trying to run a constituency surgery was also murdered not that long ago.
So the whole kind of way in which our MPs quite uniquely in the democratic world interact with their constituents and are there to serve their community, that is under threat if people can’t do it safely. So I do actually think it’s extremely serious, this situation. And I think the speaker should make some really quick moves, for example, to actually document the incidents that are going on so that we know the scale of what’s happening so that he and the security services can actually sort of take better precautions to protect MPs.
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Lucy Fisher
We’ve covered on the podcast who has got a big job in the new Labour administration. We thought this week was worth pausing a moment for those who worked hard in opposition on the front bench but didn’t make it into the Labour administration. Anna, you’ve been rounding up all the people, just reminding us how brutal a business politics is.
Anna Gross
Yeah. So there were 31 MPs and peers who were relegated to the backbenches in this process. Twenty-two of them were front bench MPs. So one of them was the shadow attorney-general, Emily Thornberry. There was the shadow science minister, Chi Onwurah, and the shadow children’s minister, Helen Hayes.
Lucy Fisher
And, Jim, you’ve been picking up some sort of ill feeling, perhaps unsurprisingly, among these people who worked hard to get Labour into government — you know, part of the big push to win this majority and work on policy in opposition, who now feel pretty sore about being relegated to the backbenches.
Jim Pickard
Yeah. ’Cause if you can imagine having spent the last parliament, or possibly earlier in some cases, doing all the hard yards of schmoozing with stakeholders, going line by line through all this legislation, working long hours. And then at the end of it there’s meant to be this wonderful rainbow, pot of gold, where you actually get into government and you can make decisions that affect people’s lives, and you find yourself back on the backbench. And so I’ve heard a few kind of grumbly threatening moans from some of those individuals.
Lucy Fisher
(Laughter) What are they threatening?
Jim Pickard
They’re threatening to criticise the government from the backbenches in, you know, quite open ways. The problem for them, of course, is, you know, politics is all about counting and being able to add up. And so long as the government has a majority of nearly 200, then they can put up with the small number of people complaining.
Interestingly, we might have a bit of rebellion this week after the King’s Speech if there’s a successful amendment put forward possibly by a Labour backbencher, possibly by the Lib Dems, on the two-child benefit cap, criticising that. I think that’s gonna be our first test where we find out which Labour MPs really do have the kind of stomach and the appetite to actually rebel against Keir Starmer.
Lucy Fisher
Really crunch moment. Miranda, how big a party management issue is Keir Starmer going to have? I mean, we’ve got 231 fresh new Labour MPs among their tally of 411. Right now they’re all on their best behaviour. But how long can that last for, as well as all these demoted folks who probably realise they’re not in line for preferment?
Miranda Green
This is such a fun question, isn’t it? How long will the honeymoon last, and how long will the iron discipline exerted over the ranks of the 400 or so Labour MPs continue to work? I mean, you know, the way the system works, the prime minister has total power of patronage and that gives him an awful lot of power. And, you know, the demotions, I suppose you could say, were to encourage the others to toe the line and do their absolute best.
I think there’s a limit to how much fuss those demoted, disgruntled people can make in the short term. But as Jim says, you know, this two-child limit, the controversy over whether Labour should remove the limit on welfare payments to families for a third child or more, this is a real bone of contention. And when Tony Blair first won in 1997, they made a real mis-step by trying to crack down, as it were, on welfare payments to single parents. And it was a real disaster because it really confused people about what a Labour government is there for.
And so I think that’s the problem they’ve got with this two-child benefit cap, and it could cause a lot of embarrassment. I mean, I’ve already, we probably all have, already had encounters with very, very well-behaved Labour MPs who say one thing in private and another in public. So how long will that last?
Lucy Fisher
And Jim, this doesn’t quite count as a demotion, but there’s a lot of question marks about Angela Rayner’s new role. Of course, she’s now deputy prime minister. In some sense, this couldn’t be more senior. Very striking that the first big announcement on planning, which should fall under her department, was made by Rachel Reeves, the chancellor. And we’ve learned that the New Deal for working people will technically fall under Johnny Reynolds, the business secretary, even though she’ll remain the strategic lead. I mean, there’s long been questions about her loyalty to Keir Starmer. Is he sort of trying to rip the carpet out from under her, or at least take away some of the tricky briefs from her that she might disagree with him about?
Jim Pickard
I think it’s a completely legitimate question. I think what this whole debate reflects is the fact that she had accumulated, Angela Rayner, a whole massive portfolio of responsibilities. And when you look at these, you know, there’s devolution, which on Tuesday she was front and centre talking about; there is planning which yes, Rachel Reeves nicked from her for big announcement last week, but planning will still be in terms of the details of responsibility Angela Rayner’s department, which was called levelling up department, is now called Communities and Housing, like it used to be. So she’s still responsible for that.
I guess the question people might be asking legitimately is she oversaw this new deal of employment rights package, which has since been renamed. Should she have been responsible for it? I think, would most people expect employment reforms to be the responsibility of the housing department or the business department? Personally, I think it’s the latter. And someone in that department told me months ago that they were gonna be taking responsibility for it and it didn’t seem that surprising to me then. I think, you know, Angela Rayner is a big figure. People are interested in her political progress one way or another. I think it’s interesting to watch. But for now, I think that she’s still a member of the all-powerful “quad” of four senior cabinet ministers, and she still has an awful lot on her plate.
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Lucy Fisher
We’ve just got time left for Political Fix stock picks. Miranda, who are you buying or selling this week?
Miranda Green
Well, I’ve been spending quite a lot of the last few weeks making an FT film about what happens to the Tory party now, you know, what’s the great shape shifter of the democratic world? How can it survive? Who will it pick to lead it? And so I’ve been looking with quite some interest in some of the sort of polls on the runners and riders that have come out this week.
And I can’t help noticing that Kemi Badenoch has got, you know, a really healthy lead over the other people whose names are in the frame at the moment. But history shows us that it’s not always the frontrunner, right? So I would sort of probably buy whoever turns out to be the main challenger to Kemi Badenoch, because that’s what the form for the Tory party tends to be.
Lucy Fisher
I can’t wait to watch your documentary and I’ll put a link to it in the show notes. I am gonna have to press you though. Is this you selling Kemi Badenoch and who are you buying? Who is this challenger going to be who might beat her?
Miranda Green
Well, the thing is. So the ConHome poll, you know, ConservativeHome the website, there are only three other people on my list at the moment. And Robert Jenrick and Tom Tugendhat are both hovering at about 12 per cent, with Kemi out in front with about 26 per cent. And then there’s poor old Suella Braverman back down at 9 per cent, who seems to have sort of shot her bolt slightly. So should we sort of compromise on saying that I’m selling Suella Braverman, who I’ve probably sold several times already on the podcast.
Lucy Fisher
Jim, who are you buying or selling?
Jim Pickard
So I totally agree with Miranda about how the frontrunner for the Conservative leadership contest usually stumbles and falls. And that was, you know, Margaret Thatcher was an outsider. David Cameron was not the favourite. Boris Johnson was 6/1 at the start of the race in 2019, believe it or not. So I totally agree with that. The star politician that I’m buying is someone called Lord True, who . . .
Lucy Fisher
Remind us.
Miranda Green
Wow!
Jim Pickard
. . . at the last count was the leader of the House of Lords. I don’t know an awful lot about Lord True, but the . . .
Lucy Fisher
Do you know his first name?
Jim Pickard
(Laughter) I think it’s Nicholas. The reason I’m buying him is I’m making a point about how in the House of Lords there is no Labour majority. The House of Lords could become more interesting to us political journalists and to the Westminster bubble because that’s where some Labour legislation could end up getting amended and knocked back for amendments. And watch that space.
Lucy Fisher
I think you’re right. And I’m looking out for the King’s Speech, where there’s gonna be this legislation to remove the hereditaries. Will we see Starmer try and stuff the Lords with Labour peers later this year? We will be back on Friday to discuss everything that’s in the King’s Speech and the European Political Community Meeting taking place on Thursday.
Anna, who are you buying or selling for stock picks?
Anna Gross
So, in Starmer’s reorganisation of his cabinet, he sort of quite clearly prioritised expertise and skills over loyalty, which can’t be said of Sunak and others in the Conservative government in recent years. And he took the very unconventional decision to promote several new MPs to junior front bench roles, and that hasn’t actually been done since Harold Wilson formed his first government in 1964.
And so I’m gonna pick one of those people that he promoted, a new MP. Her name’s Miata Fahnbulleh. She’s a kind of very well-respected economist. And she’s headed up a prominent think-tank. And yeah, she’s been mentioned to me by several Labour figures as a kind of rising star.
Lucy, how about you?
Lucy Fisher
Well, if it’s not to sort of cheat to go for the blindingly obvious, I’m buying Rachel Reeves. (Laughter) Her stock’s already pretty high. This is the kind of . . .
Jim Pickard
Expensive.
Lucy Fisher
. . . daft investment advice that Robert would be shaking his head. He likes to buy when the price is low. But I’ve just sort of seen the sort of the stardust that’s attached to her since Labour’s won this huge majority and being the first big Westminster party for Labour, the Labour Together think-tank/factional warfare machine fighter. On Monday night, just the huge whoops and applause as she took to the stage. It just made me really kind of see her in the light as potentially the next Labour leader, who knows, the next Labour prime minister after Keir Starmer. So I’m going out on a limb with this costly buy.
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Well, that’s all we’ve got time for this week, Jim, Anna, Miranda, thanks for joining.
Anna Gross
Thanks, Lucy.
Jim Pickard
Thanks very much.
Miranda Green
Thank you.
Lucy Fisher
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 or leave a review or star rating. It really helps us spread the word.
Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Leah Quinn and Edwin Lane. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. Original music and mixing by Breen Turner. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. We’ll be back with you on Friday.
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