Transcript: Tory morale plunges

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Tory morale plunges’

Jim Pickard
Hello, Political Fix listeners. Just dropping in here to say, before you enjoy the rest of the show, we recorded this chat before the apology from Rishi Sunak after he left the D-Day commemorations in France early. The prime minister returned to the UK to do an interview attacking Labour’s alleged tax plans. More on those plans coming up.

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Lucy Fisher
“Chicken runs” and parachutes — the two buzzwords around the Tory campaign this week. Confused? We’ll explain all. Welcome to Political Fix from the FT with me, Lucy Fisher. Well, we’re now well into the election groove, and this week has seen uproar in Tory activist circles about a row over Tory chairman Richard Holden’s selection as he bags himself a safe or safer seat. Now, to analyse it all, I’m joined by the FT’s Robert Shrimsley. Hi, Robert.

Robert Shrimsley
Hello, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And Jim Pickard is here, too, fresh off the Labour campaign bus. Hi, Jim.

Jim Pickard
Hello.

Lucy Fisher
So we spent last week talking a bit about Labour’s woes. But Robert, for me, the latter half of this week has really been dominated by Richard Holden — not necessarily a household name, but the chairman of the party — leaving behind his North West Durham seat, which admittedly has been carved up in the boundary review but had a majority of less than 1,200, and fleeing 300 miles south for a safer seat in Essex with a 20,000-vote majority. Tell us why this has sparked so much rancour in the party.

Robert Shrimsley
Well, I mean, I think this is, it should be said, a general election regular. This is something that happens every time that once you get into the actual campaign, there are a number of seats that have been held back by the party where the leadership knows the sitting MP is going to stand down, or at the last minute someone just decides they’re going to stand down, them. And those seats don’t go through the normal full selection process that normally happens the rest of the year.

And in the Labour party it’s even more dictatorial; they simply impose a candidate. The Tories, you know, being much more democratic, impose a shortlist, and they give the constituencies three names and a couple of days to figure it out. That’s what happens. And that’s normally used to ensure seats for favoured figures in the leadership. So, for example, Will Tanner, who was Rishi Sunak’s deputy chief of staff, got dropped into a very safe seat, I think it was Bury St Edmunds. He still had to beat a couple of people, but he did.

But Richard Holden, the chairman of the Conservative party, had to find himself a seat. And as you might think, that’s a reasonable perk. You’re chairman of the party, you get to pick a seat. But it proved very tricky. And every time he tried to set up a selection for himself, the local party made such a fuss that he was forced to back off.

So in the end, they did the one thing that they could do, which is hold back a seat until the very, very last moment, at which point central office could say, no, you’re not even getting three names, you’re just getting the one. And guess what? It’s the party chairman. And so Richard Holden got the seat. He has nabbed this seat, this probably safe seat, for himself and naturally caused a bit of a furore among activists.

I mean, in the end, I don’t think it amounts to a hill of beans except for the people who lost out. And as I said, it does happen every time, but it’s created some bad feeling. And the other problem, obviously, is that there are far fewer seats which will be deemed safe this time than there might once have been in previous elections.

Lucy Fisher
Well, Jim, Robert thinks it’s not necessarily that out of the usual, although, of course, this is the Tory chairman and I spoke to a lot of people who say he looks pretty weak if he’s not willing to fight the seat or the area he was previously representing. And this is a bit of a trend, isn’t it? He’s the fifth Tory MP to flee from a northern seat to a southern seat. This has led to claims that the party is abandoning the north. It’s retreating back into the shires, its heartlands. What do you make of it?

Jim Pickard
Exactly. They’re like kind of migrating birds heading south for the winter, aren’t they, and getting away from the frozen waste. I think this is yet another sign that the red wall is lost as far as the Conservative party is concerned. They’re racing for the high ground, but I don’t think it’s unique for the Conservative party to be handing out safe-ish seats to favoured candidates.

If you look at what the Labour party has done, you know, you’ve got Torsten Bell, Luke Akehurst, Josh Simons, who were all Starmer acolytes, I suppose — “Starmtroopers”, as they’re dubbed in the Westminster village — and they’ve all been given pretty safe seats. It’s kind of what you do when you have power. You can distribute it among people who will support you rather than undermine you.

Robert Shrimsley
I should add, I mean, the people who really follow this will be aware that the former BBC journalist Michael Crick has this Twitter feed we called “Tomorrow’s MPs”, which . . .

Lucy Fisher
We’ve had him on the podcast, Robert.

Robert Shrimsley
Of course we have. So he’s used this essentially to champion the local candidates against people being parachuted in. So basically, Michael Crick is almost single-handedly and personally responsible for the fact that government will be run by local councillors rather than people with any expertise of running anything, anywhere. It’s terribly bad for government, even if it may be good for local democracy.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah. One senior insider put it to me that local associations want councillors on steroids rather than future statesmen, and I think that is potentially an issue.

Jim Pickard
But to be fair, if they’ve run the local council, they have run something rather than, you know, there are several people . . . 

Robert Shrimsley
But they haven’t run anything - they’ve been a councillor normally on the local council.

Jim Pickard
There are certain high-profile people in the Westminster village who haven’t run a bath. And if you’re a council leader, which a lot of these candidates are, you have run something.

Lucy Fisher
Well, I’ve spoken to some Tory insiders who say that even this seat of Basildon and Billericay in Essex may not be safe for Holden. And that is because, of course, elsewhere in the county, Farage is standing. Just before sitting down to do the pod, Robert, I was speaking to Tim Montgomerie, the founder of the Conservative Home website that’s beloved of the Tory grassroots, who was saying he is now really worried that we could soon be seeing what he calls the crossover moment — that moment when Reform overtakes the Tories in the polls.

Now, he doesn’t think it’s gonna be a permanent thing. He thinks it will just be a quick bounce off the momentum that Farage has this week after his announcement that he’s taking the reins of Reform and that he’s gonna stand as a candidate. But that would be a huge moment, wouldn’t it? That could lead to panic in the Conservative party.

Robert Shrimsley
Yes, although if they’re not panicking yet, I’m not sure what else does (Lucy laughs) generate this. I think if it happens — and it could and there’s an awful lot of pollsters out there, and there’s quite substantial differentiation between them, even if they’re all predicting a Labour win — that would certainly be a big headline — would set the cat amongst the pigeons — it’s worth . . .

It’s worth saying that the nature of our electoral system means that even if Reform is ahead for a couple of polls, it doesn’t in any way translate to them getting all those seats and the Tories losing. I mean, if we think back to the ’80s, when the SDP was neck and neck with the Labour party, even then, the incumbent benefits of being the Conservative party rather than Reform still mean that they’ll win way, way, way more seats than Reform possibly could. But obviously there comes a point where they become a total spoiler to the Conservatives and they cost them many more seats than they previously thought.

The counterargument to this, I think it’s still possible, is that there comes a moment where people who are minded to vote Conservative, who are instinctively Conservatives but were fed up with them, start to look at this and go, hang on a minute, you know, I don’t mind the government changing, but I don’t want Labour with a majority of 150 or I don’t want 450 Labour MPs. Some of them migrate back.

Lucy Fisher
What do you think, Jim?

Jim Pickard
Yeah, and I think something I’ve picked up from shadow ministers, Labour shadow ministers, is this idea that all these MRP polls which give Labour 400, 450 seats and put the Tories down to 100 or whatever it is, senior Labour figures are very worried that this is gonna deter their supporters from coming out. It’s gonna feel like a licence for leftwing people to vote for the Greens or Lib Dems if they’re leftwing or Plaid Cymru or SNP, whoever it may be instead is they’re a little bit worried about the sense of sort of false complacency that could give them.

I think in terms of where Reform ends up, I do think that past performance here is a bit of a guide. And I think if you look at 2019, in the European elections then, you know, the Brexit party was way ahead of the Tories at the time of the local elections, the European elections, and of course subsided during the general election. I think if you look at 2010, there was a point where the Lib Dems were flying high and then came back a little bit; 2015, Ukip flying high, came back a little bit. I think they’re gonna do much better than they would have done without Nigel Farage at the forefront, but I still find it hard to believe that they will end up ahead of the Tories.

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, they do have one advantage, which is that, you know, the Daily Telegraph and others, you know, is really terribly excited about Nigel Farage. When you look at the Telegraph, you can see a paper that’s really quite keen on him and certainly quite keen on a new Conservative party, which is much more Faragist. So they’ve got a bit of support coming from what we used to call the Tory press, and that will help them.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah, and I’m very interested to see what happens after the election. If, as many people are now predicting, Farage does win Clacton, does he then somehow, you know, mount a kind of merger, reverse takeover of the party from parliament? I mean, I speak to many Tory MPs on the right who would love to welcome him back into the fold and he would right . . . 

Robert Shrimsley
Except they wouldn’t be there.

Lucy Fisher
Well, they may not be there. That’s the key.

Jim Pickard
The only thing I would say on that . . . if you look at Farage’s recent history, there’s a bit of a history of, you know, he’s a brilliant politician, but he’s not very good at holding political parties together. Ukip disintegrated. If you look at the original clack of Ukip MEPs, they all fell out with each other and disintegrated. The Brexit party obviously didn’t last that long. You know, he’s a great politician; he’s not a brilliant manager. Can he stay the course?

Robert Shrimsley
And remember, I mean, look at the way he dished Richard Tice, the leader of Reform, this week. I mean, you know, once he decided to come here, he wasn’t telling Richard Tice that he intended to take over as leader again until the very last minute. So whatever else Nigel Farage is, he’s not a brilliant collaborator.

Lucy Fisher
No, not a team player, but great for us, and fireworks ahead. Robert, the TV debate, the first of the election campaign, happened ITV 9pm on Tuesday. You were there, Jim. You were there, too, watching it so can you tell us what it was like in the spin room.

But let’s first just talk about the impact of it. I was interested how that sort of narrative has unfolded. There’s been later polls that suggested that Starmer might have just edged it, but the snap poll that came out straight afterwards suggested that Sunak had won, and that sort of entrenched the narrative that he was the victor. I think that certainly helped morale in the campaign, which is pretty bleak from people I’ve spoken to. Robert, will it have any lasting impact, this debate, kind of beyond that?

Robert Shrimsley
No, my instinct says not. Although I thought that Rishi Sunak, probably in debating terms, had a better evening than Keir Starmer. He was punchy, his sound bites landed. It was quite an annoying format, which, you know, reduced everything to 45-second answers. So you’ve got lots and lots of soundbites. I think he did quite well in that.

And as you say, the snap poll gave him a two-point lead in how it broke down. But that’s not enough to change the course of the election. So, by and large, the person who went into that debate ahead came out of it ahead in the meta picture. But it would have put some heart into the Tories themselves that Rishi’s come out fighting until they started seeing the polls from Reform.

The counterargument to that is that some of the things that Keir Starmer did appealed to voters in different ways. They thought he was a little bit warmer, a little bit more human. He related some of the questions from the audience better. One of the ways he in my mind lost was by letting Rishi Sunak bully him on the tax question and raised this “you’ll pay £2,000 more in tax” again and again and not rebut it very well. On the other hand, he chose not to interrupt all the time, and some people like that. So on balance I don’t think it changed very much at all.

Lucy Fisher
But Jim, there was this big kind of wheeling out of this figure, £2,000 tax rises that Labour would land every household with in the small print over four years rather than over one, which is the way we normally talk about these figures. There’s been huge controversy over this figure. Tell us about it. How was it calculated in the first place? What have the Tories said? What has Labour rebutted?

Jim Pickard
So this came out three weeks ago. So Keir Starmer has no excuse for not being pre-prepared to rebut this. It was a Jeremy Hunt press conference where he basically came up with 50 Labour policies and said, you know, some of these have been costed by the Treasury, some been costed by us, some have been costed by other people, and they basically add a couple of thousand pounds to your taxes rolled over four years. The problem with it was that although civil servants did some of these calculations they did it on Tory political special adviser assumptions, which are rather different to Labour assumptions, which is why Labour says this figure is nonsense.

But the thing that really struck me was that you could see Keir Starmer’s face when he got hit with this number. He looked surprised. And then Rishi Sunak kept hitting him with it maybe a dozen times. And he took so long to rebut it. You know, it’s the basic rule of a debate is that if you’re in a debate and someone says, “Jim Pickard kills kittens”, you don’t just sort of let them say it, you immediately say, “Not only do I not kill kittens but this man here murders puppies. He will stop at nothing. He would incarnadine the seven seas with slaughtered pets”. You know, you have to hit back. There was nothing of that from Keir Starmer. He looked kind of woolly. He just sort of took it. And then 30 minutes in, he said, well, that’s nonsense. And then 50 minutes in, he says it’s absolute nonsense, all garbage.

I think things are a little bit different 20 years ago where TV and newspapers had the upper hand in everything. I think with the world of social media, you know, the backlash against the £2,000 figure has been quite strong, and a lot of people will have seen that it’s very much a disputed figure. But I just don’t know why he didn’t. You know, Labour has its own flaky numbers to hit the Tories with. They have a flaky figure of £71bn of unfunded promises which, you know, is not actually a real number, but if you’ve bothered to draw up this number, why didn’t Keir Starmer hit Rishi Sunak with it?

Lucy Fisher
Yeah. And to deploy another number, I was struck that, you know, I think it was 4.8mn people watched this debate — in the scheme of things, you know, significantly fewer. I think more than a million fewer voters than watched the Corbyn v Johnson debate in 2019 and far fewer than the 26mn viewers that tuned in for the Queen’s funeral. And I know we get even more viewers than that for kind of football tournaments. Robert, just give us a sense of what it was like being there in the spin room. And for anyone who’s not familiar with the term, this is a room set up backstage where you watch the debate, still on TV, but you have access to spin-doctors, hence the name, and other senior politicians who try and tell you a bit about what’s going on.

Robert Shrimsley
It’s a very strange thing. You travel all the way up to Manchester to watch this thing on television but you’re in this room and you’re . . . The room is full of members of the shadow cabinet, cabinet ministers, advisers. And they’re all there watching it, and they’re there before it starts. And they get up at the end. They immediately jump up saying, you know, here’s some spin, this is this. They did that. This is what we think. This was the win. They both obviously have looked at this and decided they’re man one. It’s a slightly strange format.

You know, the spin room in American elections normally involves real policy experts being brought along to rebut a specific point, whereas this is, you know, fellow politicians say, no, no, no, I really thought Keir won. It’s a slightly strange one. But the other thing that was very apparent, and as Jim was talking about, is watching this debate. Everybody was sitting there watching Rishi Sunak hit Keir Starmer with this £2,000 in extra taxes thing. And like, you sat there and we couldn’t believe that he wasn’t pushing back harder. And it was, you know, you could sense the frustration among Labour people that he was letting this go by default. It’s a very strange atmosphere, though.

Jim Pickard
I think the . . . I don’t wanna let sunshine into magic, but what was quite amusing was not even the same building that they were debating in. They were on the other side of a bridge crossing Salford docks. And yeah, the spinning was entirely predictable from all these people. I think the thing that was quite strange is that, you know, I’ve been on the road in the Labour battle bus for three days and not really encountered that many politicians or spin-doctors. They’d kept the press away from them a bit. And then suddenly you’re in this room where there are all these people you really wanna talk to, and a lot of them you wanna be talking to them about other stuff, like what’s gonna be in your manifesto and how does this policy work and the rest of it. We’re all basically asking the same basic question, which is, how did your guy do?

Robert Shrimsley
I do think that it’s one of the interesting things about Keir Starmer. But over a series of different things now, he’s shown himself to be really quite flat-footed in live events. The moment it goes off-script or it doesn’t quite, he doesn’t quite formulate his answer correctly, he can go very badly wrong. A lot of his problems over Israel-Gaza spring from one particularly disastrous radio interview he did where he, you know, was a little bit too firm on Israel’s right to blockade, probably firmer than he intended to be. And it’s because you can see he’s got an almost a genuinely lawyerly manner wherein lawyers and court cases, they never ask questions they haven’t worked out the answer to and they proceed in a very structured way. And the moment the structure breaks, you can see he’s simply not as fleet-footed as some other political professionals.

Lucy Fisher
I think that’s right. Jim, just to ask you to lift the veil, just tell us a bit more what it was like on the Labour battle bus.

Jim Pickard
So I joined the Labour battle bus at 2.00 on a Sunday afternoon. It was a beautiful sunny day and there I was on a coach heading up the motorway towards Manchester. We spent Monday morning at a sort of military museum in Bury and it was very atmospheric.

Lucy Fisher
With any politicians or . . .?

Jim Pickard
Yes. So Keir Starmer turned up and he did his little speech about how you can trust the Labour party with defence as much as or more than the Conservative party. And he brought along with him 14 ex-military Labour candidates. And so . . . And we had a chance to chat to them all. So it was, I mean, given that a lot of them are gonna win and we’re gonna run into them in the House of Commons in a month’s time, that was pretty good meeting these people with really interesting backstories. So that was Monday morning. Tuesday, we ended up going around Keele University with Peter Kyle. He was pointing at some solar panels and showing an interest in their renewable technology. And we had dinner with the shadow cabinet minister just before the debate. So . . . 

Lucy Fisher
Was it boozy? Karaoke? Night clubs?

Jim Pickard
On this occasion, I have to say no.

Lucy Fisher
Ah. What did you eat?

Jim Pickard
At Wagamama’s.

Lucy Fisher
Wagamama. OK. That’s suitably, you know, delicious but restrained.

Robert Shrimsley
The striking thing about this is, you know, in the old battle bus days, once upon a time, you know, you actually met voters. You went with the politicians, they had their key staff up, you were on the same bus, you travelled somewhere, you all got out together, they met voters. Now everything is so incredibly structured and (overlapping audio).

Jim Pickard
But how much of that is security, Robert?

Robert Shrimsley
But some of it was security. But most of it, I think, almost certainly is about making sure that they’re not caught on camera being awkwardly confronted by members of the public.

Jim Pickard
As control freaks, yeah.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah, and I was interested reading an article in The Times by Cleo Watson, who used to be Dominic Cummings’ deputy, about how these trips work, where, you know, she would be deployed to run ahead down a high street into businesses, poke a head in the door and say, “Do you want a visit from Michael Gove? Do you want a visit from Michael Gove?” and only people who looked positive would, you know, he would be allowed to go in and speak to people already primed to be, you know, favourable to the Conservatives.

Robert Shrimsley
Hold on a second, I mean, you’ve both been at these events. You sit, there’s an event staged and Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer walk in and, you know, there’s a load of Labour people behind them and they’ve all got appropriate placards and banners, and if you ever zoom out from it, you’ll find it’s in the corner of an empty aircraft hangar. There’s absolutely nobody else. It looks great on TV but it’s not real in any normal sense.

Jim Pickard
I thought the hilarious one was the one with Rishi Sunak where there were two people in high-vis jackets asking questions who turned out to be Conservative councillors.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah, that was pretty nutty, wasn’t it? I would say I remember being on the battle bus ahead of the EU referendum with Boris Johnson and that’s when I really realised what kind of rock-star magic he had back then. Hundreds of people would crowd out a town square on a, you know, rainy Tuesday afternoon and he’d come and I was with him in the south-west, hold a pasty aloft, you know, or even a broccoli or anything. And people just found him hilarious. And he kind of, he leaned into the gaffes, but that I think that piratical gonzo magic was part of the appeal of that campaign. We’ve had a sort of slower sort of couple of days in some sense in the second half of this week because of D-Day commemorations. There’s been a sort of truce, hasn’t there, Robert?

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah. They’ve clearly not been pushing out major announcements. Well the Conservative’s have pushed out one announcement, but they’ve got to focus on the D-Day commemorations itself. It’s quite a long campaign. So they can afford to give themselves a day or two, and it might look tasteless if they’re too incautious. But we’re also now gearing up towards another couple of debates. Both the manifesto launches are expected next week. So, you know, they’re sort of the big points of this election will now begin to hove into view into the next stage.

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Lucy Fisher
Well, Rishi Sunak has been in France this week for those 80th commemorations of the D-Day landings in what could be one of his last international appearances as the UK prime minister, if the election doesn’t go his way. And we’re joined now by the FT’s Michael Peel, who’s here to give us his take on how the UK’s current political scene is viewed by those watching Britain from outside the country. Michael is the author of the recently published book What Everyone Knows About Britain* (*Except the British). Michael, hello.

Michael Peel
Hello, Lucy. Thanks for having me on.

Lucy Fisher
So Michael, tell us a bit about your book and what the main takeaways are for whoever becomes the next prime minister of the UK.

Michael Peel
Well, what’s been very striking I think in this campaign is the lack of acknowledgment that there are things going on in the wider world that are gonna have quite a big effect on what the next government does and indeed can do. And, you know, foreign policy has been kind of a bit of a mess since Brexit. And in thinking about this disappearance, I organised my thoughts alliteratively for you into three things which very much run through the book and are things to watch out for, which are tilt, Trump and troubles.

And the tilt is that one of the big things after Brexit that the Conservatives did was this. And their national security strategy was this tilt to Asia, which has led to some really kind of strange decisions politically. So, you know, even as trade barriers are being put up to Europe, they were wooing countries in south-east Asia. And in the book, I look at the example of Cambodia, where, for example, Dominic Raab became the first foreign secretary to visit for more than half a century. The first British warship has visited for more than half a century.

But there are problems with this and two big problems. One is a political problem that Cambodia has been ruled by a father and son dynasty for almost 40 years. But it’s an authoritarian state. And in the book I interview an opposition politician who’s now in exile the second time in her life having had to be out of the country during the Khmer Rouge genocide, and now she’s been driven out again. She says, well, this wooing by Britain is a kind of betrayal of the values that Britain claims to promote of political pluralism around the world.

But there’s also a practical problem with it. You know, Cambodia is a long way away. It’s not a big country and it’s not rich. It’s never gonna be a big trade partner. And it’s part of that sort of fantastical thing that, you know, trade in places around the world is gonna, you know, replace or even supersede what the relationship was with the single market in Europe. And so the next government’s gonna have to think very carefully about these priorities, I think.

And then Trump, an obvious one. But part of the thing has been, a part of the pattern over the past few years has been trying to cosy up closer to the US. If Trump wins, it’s gonna be a difficult partner. Biden will pursue US policy of being less interested in Europe more widely, which has been there for a while.

And the troubles is overstretch: resources, military resources, in particular; sending warships to Asia. One of the aircraft carriers is gonna go off to the South China Sea probably next year whereas Britain, you know, it doesn’t have the carrier groups, the firepower the Americans can bring to this, you know. There’s a vulnerability there potentially which hasn’t really been discussed at all. And, you know, the next government’s gonna have to think much more carefully about how Britain projects itself in the world.

Lucy Fisher
Well, I think that’s right. And whoever wins the election, and the polls point to Keir Starmer, will within a week I think it is of gaining office have to jet off to Washington for the Nato 75 anniversary summit, where Henry Foy, our excellent Brussels bureau chief, pointed out to me he will be sat in between Zelenskyy and Biden in which what will be a fantastic kind of photo shot for the next prime minister, because the countries are obviously sat in alphabetical order. What’s the number one message that Keir Starmer — or Rishi Sunak, if he somehow manages a miraculous turnaround — what’s the number one message they need to land at that summit in the margins when they’re speaking to other leaders, Michael?

Michael Peel
I think to just be realistic about Britain’s place in the world. And, you know, Britain has lot of advantages still, you know — sitting as a permanent member of the UN Security Council and, you know, other fora where it still looms large. The English language, incredibly important in diplomacy. So Britain still has a lot of those advantages but it also needs to be realistic about, you know, the kind of power it is these days and that it’s not a kind of a superpower that can project anywhere in the world that it wants.

Lucy Fisher
Robert, can I bring you in here? I mean, what do you make of the plausibility of leaders trying to speak more realistically about Britain’s place in the world? They’re likely to be accused of talking Britain down, aren’t they?

Robert Shrimsley
It is a really difficult balance because obviously, overwhelmingly, leaders need to speak to a domestic audience. They’re focused on their domestic audience, and domestic audience doesn’t want to be told unpalatable things. Our colleague George Parker was on one of the prime ministerial trips and when he asked Rishi Sunak a question, referred to Britain as, you know, mid-sized power or something like that. And he flipped. He’s really, really furious at him for this.

But, I mean, I think you’re on something very strongly here, Michael, because there is an air of unreality about the way our politicians look at Britain’s, the image of Britain in the world, particularly, I have to say, Conservatives, but not exclusively. I really noticed this when they’re talking about countries which were once part of the British empire and that they have this sense that, you know, these countries feel immense emotional ties to Britain. They feel a loyalty and a feeling towards, you know, the mother country. And actually, when you go to some of these countries or you talk to people, say from India or wherever, you know, they’re not at all grateful for colonialism. They actually are quite angry at the British record, and they don’t feel this enormous sense of duty towards the UK that we sometimes think they have.

Michael Peel
Yeah, I think that’s right. And I go into the book in a, you know, a chapter called “The Empire Strikes Back” about exactly this, that you have, you know, court cases coming to London about everything from British colonial abuses such as in Kenya — the Mau Mau uprising and the torture that had happened there which the government apologised for the abuses and paid out quite a lot of money in a settlement in the end — to the case that I focus on, because I used to live there, in Nigeria where a group of people who live in the oil-rich Delta region are suing Shell for pollution that they say Shell is responsible for. It’s a live case. Shell denies responsibility for the pollution. But, you know, Shell’s role in Nigeria was established during colonial rule. So, you know, there’s a thread which runs all the way through there. And now, you know, this reckoning is coming back to the legal institutions of the metropole, the Royal Courts of Justice on The Strand. And it’s a really sort of interesting overlay, which, as Robert says, is not really acknowledged in the way it should be.

Robert Shrimsley
Just to pick up on your point, Lucy, David Lammy, who would supposedly be foreign secretary if Keir Starmer wins, made a speech a week or so ago where he talked about being descended from slaves and that actually this gave him a different approach, different reality about Britain’s place and wanting to have a more serious discussion about it. I have to say, I also sensed I could be wrong about this, that that speech was pared back a bit. Some things he wanted to say he was advised not to, but he wants to try to balance and says, you know, we need to be grown up about our history. We don’t need to be ashamed of our history but we do need to recognise things that we did. And I think that’s a very fine line to tread and I’d be interested to see how he treads it if he does indeed do so.

Lucy Fisher
Yes. Discipline hasn’t always been David Lammy’s strong suit. Michael, just to finish off then on a positive, upbeat note, we’ve talked about some of the ways maybe Britain’s overpuffed the nation’s image. Are there things we’re better at that we don’t give ourselves enough credit for that, you know, overseas we’re recognised for doing well?

Michael Peel
I think, coming back, I’m now the science editor of the FT and it’s very striking, even in these early days, that, you know, Britain still has an enviable science and technology base. And part of the reason it’s enviable is precisely because it’s not inward-looking. You know, it’s a massive exercise in collaboration. So in the university rankings released a few days ago, Imperial College London was ranked number two in the world after the the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And they’re doing stuff everywhere. So it’s not just with MIT, indeed, but and other American institutions or European institutions. But they’re also working in Singapore. They’ve got links in India, in Ghana. You know, it’s very imaginative and it’s a really good example of taking something Britain has, being savvy about projecting it internationally, collaborating and ratcheting up to become something even bigger.

And of course, you know, high tech industries are great because it’s not just, you know, the people who are having the Nobel Prize-winning theories that drive these companies, but it’s everything that contributes to it — you know, the suppliers who are helping build the facilities, who are supplying the chemicals, whatever that they need to function. So there’s a whole ecosystem around it which with a joined-up strategy and also, it has to be said, a focus on the looming higher education funding crisis, could really be beneficial to Britain in the long run.

Lucy Fisher
Michael Peel, thanks for joining.

Michael Peel
Thank you very much, Lucy.

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Lucy Fisher
Well, finally, we’ve just got time for campaign watch. Jim, what are you looking forward to in the next week?

Jim Pickard
Looking forward to another political debate, this time in Grimsby midweek. And I think seeing the Labour manifesto after having seen various incarnations of it for the last couple of years, seeing it in black and white is an interesting moment to me.

Lucy Fisher
Robert?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, I think, and obviously, as you touched upon, we’re looking at the possibility that Reform could overtake the Tories in a poll. But actually what I’m looking at at the moment, it happens in most elections, is that moment when the pollsters begin to panic, because they’re actually terrified about this election. They’ve all called such a huge win for Labour that if there isn’t a Tory wipeout there’s a pollsters’ wipeout coming. And so what I’m looking forward to is that moment when they all start tweaking their methodology so they can all bunch together in quite a tight pack rather than have these huge variations. What about you, Lucy?

Lucy Fisher
Well, I am off to Bari in Italy for the G7, so I’ve got a little two-day stint on the Puglian Riviera. But I think that will be interesting just to try and gauge Rishi Sunak’s mood. If his kind of handlers let him anywhere near the press pack during that trip. I think he’s gonna be trying to duck in and out as quickly as possible.

Robert Shrimsley
Basically what you’re looking forward to is two days on the beach.

Lucy Fisher
(Clears throat) Operation Aperol a go-go. Well, that’s all we’ve got time for this week. Robert and Jim, thanks for joining.

Jim Pickard
Thanks very much.

Robert Shrimsley
Cheers, Lucy.

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Lucy Fisher
And that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. A reminder that during the election period, we’re also getting together for a campaign catch-up on Tuesdays. So we’ll be back in your feed on Tuesday lunchtime. Do check out the free links I’ve put in the show notes. They’re articles we’re making available on subjects discussed in this episode. There’s also a link there to Stephen Bush’s award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You’ll get 30 days free. And don’t forget to subscribe to the show. Plus, please do leave a review or star rating if you’ve enjoyed it. It really helps us spread the word.

Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Audrey Tinline. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Original music and sound engineering by Breen Turner. The studio engineer was Andrew Georgiades. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. We’ll meet again here next Tuesday.

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