Transcript: Could the election results still surprise us?

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Could the election results still surprise us?’

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Lucy Fisher
In the final stretch to election day, what could yet surprise us? Welcome to Political Fix from the Financial Times with me, Lucy Fisher. It’s less than a week now till polling day and the narrative seems set. Labour is headed for an historic victory, but what could yet shift the dial? To discuss this, I’m joined by FT Political Fix regulars Stephen Bush. Hi, Stephen.

Stephen Bush
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And Miranda Green. Hi, Miranda.

Miranda Green
Hello, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And joining us in the studio today is our Paris-based colleague, Simon Kuper, who’s just written a very timely book about corruption in the UK. Hi, Simon.

Simon Kuper
Hi, everyone. Honoured to be here.

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Lucy Fisher
Look, we’re in the final furlong now. We’ve had a few developments in the past 24, 48 hours, haven’t we? Miranda, let’s talk first about what’s happened with Reform, this undercover investigation from Channel 4. It’s revealed racist, sexist, Islamophobic comments. It comes after Farage made very controversial remarks about Putin. Have we reached peak Reform, peak Farage in this electoral cycle, do you think?

Miranda Green
It’s a really hard one to call because I think that I stand by earlier, you know, comments that there’d probably be a ceiling that the Reform vote would reach. And that ceiling is partly to do with Farage himself repelling some people whilst he attracts others. So, you know, I think in a sense, the stories that have come out feel very shocking, but they also feel inevitable. Wouldn’t you agree? You know, these are things that we would probably suspect are going on inside a Reform campaign. So I think it just draws attention to the fact that Reform has structural problems in building a significant power base.

But on the other hand, you know, going around the country, I’m interested in if the three of you agree with this, it’s quite surprising the sort of voters who are saying they’re thinking of voting Reform. So I think it’s still quite hard to call on that basis. I mean, for example, I’ve been surprised the number of younger people out and about who are saying they don’t like politics generally, and it’s become a kind of useful kick the established party’s vote. And even in those areas that Labour so successfully seems to be taking back from the Tories in 2019, the famous red wall, I think it’s gonna be really interesting to see what the Reform vote level is in those seats, and whether that creates problems for Labour in power.

Lucy Fisher
I think is really interesting what you say about younger voters. And that’s certainly a very striking, quite worrying trend across the rest of Europe, where young people seem to be, you know, attracted to the far right.

Stephen, Nigel Farage came out immediately after this Channel 4 clips dropped saying these comments are unacceptable, these people will no longer have anything to do with Reform. Is he able to just draw a line under it? Does he have the kind of respectability that having polling in the kind of the teens confers on the party? Or do you think that this investigation will shine a light on the kind of rhetoric and messaging, dog-whistle politics that he and the party have been, you know, accused of by figures on the left for kind of fostering an environment where people feel free to kind of make these sort of racist and unacceptable comments?

Stephen Bush
Well, the political balancing act that Nigel Farage is always having to make is that his available voter pool is basically a quarter of the country which agrees with one or more of the statements that we would associate with the 1 to 2 per cent of the country which would be willing to vote for a BNP-type party. And so the risk for him always is that some of his candidates start saying five or six or, indeed, in the case of some of these candidates are turned out to have been former members of the BNP, and then suddenly that voter pool within the 25% he’s fishing around starts going, oh, oh wait, no, I don’t like that. And so the whole kind of house of cards collapses. And it does become a BNP-type party in terms of its electoral appeal, right? And there is always a risk from this kind of story for Nigel Farage. And it is, I think, kind of baked into the cake of being that kind of party.

We see that again throughout Europe, right, which in some cases passes with a much more explicit link to collaboration during the occupation in the second world war, that they are continually having this problem where they’re kind of going nudge, nudge wink to that group of voters. And sometimes in an election campaign, the skeleton will pop out of the closet and go, hey, remember we’re Vichyites! (Laughter) And that is always a risk for those parties.

The important variable though here to consider is postal votes, which one in five votes in the United Kingdom will be cast by post or thereabouts. And they will largely be voters who are older or have some form of mobility-related disability. Broadly speaking, if you are an older voter, you are in the bracket that the Conservatives are obsessed with, ie, people who are not voting or voting Reform. I think one reason why these stories may not have as big an effect now as they would have had if they’d happened four weeks ago is quite a lot of the people who are saying to pollsters that they will vote Reform have voted Reform.

Lucy Fisher
Interesting. Let’s just look at what’s changed the dial, if anything, in the BBC debate we saw on Wednesday. Miranda, Sunak came out swinging. He was using this line again and again: “Do not surrender”. And since then, we’ve seen this attack ad with what seems to be from the back, a grandfather, a mother and a child with their hands in the air as though they’re sort of facing a shooter. It’s been derided as sort of sick and unacceptable by critics. What do you make of this? Are we just to expect that things are gonna get a lot more high-octane in the final few days of this campaign?

Miranda Green
Well, it’s a very sort of aggressive version of Operation Fear, which they probably should have been running a better version of the whole way along, if you ask me. The only thing that the Conservative party had to, you know, their advantage really was a kind of, you know, the submerged, enduring worry that Labour are coming for you in the form of higher taxes and that they still can’t be trusted on the economy, even after the Liz Truss debacle and all the rest of it. So going for some version of “Labour are still scary however acceptable Keir Starmer looks right now” was probably the best sort of campaign they should have been running.

This is not that campaign. This is a really desperate-looking, sort of last-minute aggressive attack. And I thought Sunak’s kind of visible, you know, irritation and anger in that debate, you know, came across as over-the-top aggression. The surrender line — similarly, you know, it made me slightly think I was listening to an absolutely fantastic rival podcast, I have to admit, but by historians talking about the 1945 election and the famous occasion when Winston Churchill decided to try and warn the country that Clement Attlee was going to have to introduce some version of the Gestapo to impose his socialist policies on the population, which of course, completely backfired. And, you know, the attempt to to paint Starmer as a frightening figure is, of course, the opposite to the problem that Starmer actually has, which is he’s seen as a bit insipid.

Lucy Fisher
And Stephen, I feel like we have to bring in the other big debate that’s happened this week between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And I don’t know if this struck you, but in the UK debate between Sunak and Starmer, one of the key moments was that voter, Robert, asking, you know, are you two really the best options we’ve got to lead our great country? And after seeing the choices on offer in the US, I thought actually, perhaps these two aren’t so bad. What’s your take on the way the UK debate has impacted the narrative here, if at all?

Stephen Bush
So I don’t think it really has impacted the narrative very much, really. People tend not to watch the second debate. It did again have a significant fall-off in views from the first debate. And although Rishi Sunak was again quite punchy, when the post-debate polls come out, as we would expect, he trails on essentially every issue.

And in many ways the story of this election campaign is although Rishi Sunak has made many mistakes in the conduct of the election campaign, the big problem are the decisions he’s made since becoming leader, some of them as recently as a couple of weeks ago. So first opening thing he had to say in the debate was, I now have a new line about why I took so long to suspend candidates accused of betting, which now includes this thing which really does defy any credib--, you know, just really is completely implausible, which, you know, well, we had to have our own independent inquiry first.

Seeing as he is the person who knew when he had decided to call the election, and when he told the people who were accused of betting when the election would be, he does not need to have an independent inquiry into his own memory. (Lucy laughs) So no wonder voters look at that and go, you’re being dishonest.

Then when you look at the decision to focus on small boats, which he was never going to be able to deliver on, you know, the fact that we are, broadly speaking, it is a year since the Scottish government was able to resolve the junior doctor strike. It is about six months since the BMA first started to think, realise there was a landing zone with the Welsh government. So, unsurprisingly, Rishi Sunak’s failure to make that an executive priority means that he is in an election sounding unconvincing on health policy. And I think it was always unlikely that anything he was going to do or say politically over these six weeks was going to claw back the damage done by his decisions and indecisions over the last 18 months.

The problem for the Conservative party is that he’s also made a lot of mistakes in these six weeks, and we wait to discover what the impact of those mistakes will be not just in a week time, but, you know, now as people are voting by post.

Miranda Green
I completely agree with Stephen that the real problems have been there for a long time and you can’t reverse them in six weeks. But do you not agree that deciding to become completely obsessed with the Reform or Reform-curious voters rather than all those people who were sliding off to Labour and the Lib Dems across other parts of the UK was, you know, that’s just the wrong strategy for an election campaign where you’re trying to conserve as much territory as possible.

Stephen Bush
Oh, yeah. I mean, if you’re running a marathon and you don’t do any exercise for the six months beforehand and then you decide to do it in heels, you are going to have an even worse marathon than if you just ran without any exercise. And the decision to focus on Reform candidates is deciding to run the marathon in heels not least because, broadly speaking, it means the Tory party is focusing very narrowly on 5 per cent of the vote, right? People who voted Reform but are willing to come back to the Conservative party. So that means even if your campaign is super effective, you’re only going to peel back 5 per cent. Correct?

Lucy Fisher
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Stephen Bush
You know, Rishi Sunak has moved to the right of where Boris Johnson is, but it hasn’t proved rightwing enough for the rightwing voters he’s seeking. It’s scared a bunch of voters off to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. And it’s going to end in the way this strategy always ends.

Lucy Fisher
Simon.

Simon Kuper
I think that presumes that the Tories are trying to win the general election, which I don’t think they are. I think the Tories are campaigning against other factions in the Tory party for the post general election, and Sunak realises that the energy within the party is on the far right. And so he feels that if I move that way the party will be a bit happier with me. I just don’t think that they’re thinking about winning an election. I’ve just been around the West Midlands writing a piece for the FT. Impossible even to speak to a Tory candidate. Anyone working for the Tory party there, they don’t want to talk; I think so demoralised, embarrassed and also fed up with the leadership.

Lucy Fisher
I also wonder if any of you have noticed any Tory posters or stakes in windows, outside people’s houses. And I’m not just talking in London, which is a sea of, you know, red support. But I spent last weekend in Hampshire, I’ve been in Dorset since the election was called — what you’d think of as kind of core Tory heartlands. And I’ve kept my eyes peeled and just seen no visible signs of support.

Miranda Green
No. Which makes you wonder whether, I mean, there are still some Tories trying to push the line that there might be shy Tory voters, as was a huge factor in saving the election for John Major in 1992. That’s when the phrase “shy Tories” was coined. Clearly they’re not gonna save the election. But I do think, I mean, I disagree slightly with Simon. You’re right about why they’re in this panic and this lurch to the right. But I do still think that when this election was called, they were trying to conserve as much Tory territory as possible, and therefore the strategy has been a disaster.

Lucy Fisher
And what about the sort of phenomenon of begrudging Tories who have recognised the argument being made by the party about Labour getting a supermajority, that a vote for Reform, you know, will help hand Starmer this blank cheque? You know, there doesn’t seem a huge amount of love for Starmer and what Labour’s offering, even from people who are very disgruntled about the current administration. I just wonder if some of those people who are undecided or thinking about voting for another party might be persuaded by the argument that there needs to be a strong opposition, and realistically, it has to be the Conservatives.

Stephen Bush
Well, the problem is, we shouldn’t forget that while Keir Starmer’s sort of -1, kind of -4 approval rating is, you know, basically only about as good as David Cameron in 2015; about the same place Boris Johnson landed in 2019. Rishi Sunak is record-breakingly unpopular. He is more unpopular than John Major in 1997. Depending on the pollster, he is as or more unpopular as Jeremy Corbyn in 2019.

However, the difficulty lots of voters have is that they want the Conservative party to be very strongly repudiated because they think it deserves it. And they also — I think wrongly, but them’s the breaks — they also did not like the coalition and don’t like the idea of having another. So they want there to be a clear Labour victory, but they want the option of getting rid of Labour in five years.

And I think, yeah, the one variable is different disgruntled Conservatives who think it’s time for a change but don’t want the Tory party out of business, are going to land in a different place depending on how they think they can get that desired result. And that is one reason why I suspect they’re actually in their safest 100 seats. They will outperform the polls slightly because people do understand how our electoral system works and they do get that if they are in some of these very, very safe seats that they are not voting to change the government. They are voting on whether or not to have a Conservative party afterwards.

Simon Kuper
I mean, very briefly, I think voters believe Labour are gonna win the election, the Tories are gonna be caned and that frees me to vote sort of according to my heart the way the French do in the first round of presidential elections. So the Labour-Tory combined vote is, according to an FT poll, about the lowest it’s been in many decades. So people are gonna vote Reform, they’re gonna vote Lib Dem, they’re gonna vote Green. There’s also a bunch of tactical voting, but people don’t at all feel that they have to vote either Labour or Tory because they think it’s over.

Miranda Green
Well, that’s really visible actually in some of the numbers. We haven’t yet discussed whether the polling industry may have a headache on results day.

Lucy Fisher
And we’re in for potentially an almighty shock, right, if these MRPs — this term that stands for multilevel regression and post-stratification model, which are extrapolated from the polls and involve a huge array of assumptions — are wrong. Miranda, just remind us exactly what these are.

Miranda Green
Well, these are new sort of whizz-bang, very sophisticated, opinion polls which actually break everything down at the seat-by-seat level as well. So they give these really detailed sort of projections, which is quite different from the traditional opinion polls of the past, which were an intention-to-vote snapshot.

Lucy Fisher
Well, you said they’re sophisticated. We will see whether that bears out next week.

Miranda Green
Totally. I saw a sort of satirical tweet last week which said, “New MRP poll lands. Labour majority 30,000”, you know, “Tories on -50 MPs”. And that has felt like some of the slight hysteria that’s built up around these detailed constituency-based polls. But actually, what has been interesting is looking behind that. I mean, as my colleagues on the panel have been saying, you know, the electorate does really understand in quite a sophisticated way what’s going on here, I think. As Simon says, it’s freed up not to, you know, vote on who ends up in Number 10, because that seems like a done deal.

But when you ask those crucial squeeze questions, ie, this might be your preference, but if getting the outcome you wanted to get rid of the Conservative government, you needed to vote for one of these other parties who are better-placed in your constituency. The swings to that more efficient vote are unbelievable. You know, 19 per cent to the Lib Dem candidate in some areas of the so-called blue wall, nearly 10 per cent to the Labour candidate by Lib Dems and Greens. You know, the voters are actually empowered in this election in quite an interesting way and becoming ever more sophisticated about how they use first past the post.

Lucy Fisher
And it also feels to me that particularly with Green voters and at least some Reform voters, there is a sense of ideological purity and resentment towards the two main parties that mean the Green voters don’t feel that they want to vote tactically for Labour, or Reform voters don’t want to vote sort of fall back in behind the Conservatives.

Stephen, in the scenario that the MRPs have wildly overestimated Labour support and Labour to get a majority of only 50, even 100. I mean, has the expectation management run out of control? Could that somehow seem like Keir Starmer falling short?

Stephen Bush
I suspect this will be a similar dynamic to what happened with Rishi Sunak’s first defeat against Liz Truss, where because it was emphatic but slightly less emphatic than the polls suggested, he and some people around him were able to convince themselves that this was actually some kind of victory. And that’s one of the reasons why they fought such a maladroit campaign this time around.

And I think that the Conservative party, you know, anything above 100 will be treated as a form of victory. Just as in 2010, the Labour party saw getting a hung parliament as a form of victory, spent five years saying no one won the election, you know, with a 35 per cent chance to get back. And they did worse the second time around. And I think parts of the press and the Conservative party will convince itself that anything short of apocalypse is actually a blow to Keir Starmer. And they will do what parties tend to do in that situation, which is waste the first term and probably get worse results in time.

But I think the flip side, though, is I think actually in some ways in Westminster, we’ve all priced in the idea that the MRPs are probably wrong. But I think, weirdly, I think the thing Westminster would be more surprised by is the polls being right despite the fact there is quite a lot of good collateral to suggest that they are.

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Lucy Fisher
Well, let’s move on to talk about our second topic this week, which is ethics in politics. We’ve just seen sleaze beset the latter part of this campaign with the betting scandal. There’s been kind of question marks about the Conservatives’ integrity among multiple administrations. Keir Starmer has talked up plans to put ethics and integrity at the heart of his administration.

And Simon, you’ve just written a new book called Good Chaps, named after this theory that those who rise to power in the UK can be trusted to act as they ought, because they are, after all, good chaps. But your contention is that actually, Britain has been taken over by bad chaps. Tell us more.

Simon Kuper
I think the good chap was a genuinely existing historical figure of the postwar decades. So senior politicians, senior civil servants were men, chaps. It means public school and Oxbridge and then had fought in one or other of the world wars. Think of Harold Macmillan, Anthony Eden, Ted Heath. And they limped home, in Macmillan’s case, literally with the belief that serving the British state your whole life was the highest thing you could do. So they became MPs, they were BBC bosses, they worked in the NHS, in the military. And you didn’t need to constrain them with rules because they had these shared norms. You know, they all came from this very small class, almost all of them. And they genuinely believed in service. That’s what they lived for. And so the British state has very few rules.

If Rishi Sunak the day after the election wants to go and work for Vladimir Putin, he can. There’s no rule stopping him. He’ll get a slap on the wrist from Acoba, the watchdog. But it’s fine. You’re allowed to do anything, more or less. And the problem is that the good chap died. I mean, it started with Thatcher, who is very sceptical of the idea of public service. And then from the ‘80s and ‘90s, a lot of money washes into London and the city grows with the Big Bang. And then you get a lot of foreign money coming in — first from the former Soviet Union and later from the Gulf, from everywhere. And those people arrive in London and they think, well, in my home country, I bought politicians, just to be sure. In Britain I’d like to get close to politicians. How much does a British politician cost? And they can’t believe the prices. I mean, you can donate £250,000 to a party. I mean, prices are rising, but for a long time, £250,000 would buy you access. You’d get to know the prime minister.

Lucy Fisher
And just explain how that works. Like, how if someone were wanting to do that, how would they use that money to gain access?

Simon Kuper
OK. So what you wanna do is you ring up the Tory party and they’d say, you know, I’d like to join your most elite membership club. And for a long time that was about £250,000 a year. And for that, you get invited to dinners with all the other extremely wealthy donors, with often the prime minister and all the chancellor there. And so you’re in a small room. It’s all off record. This is repeated. You get to know each other.

And so I think the big story of British politics we talk about too little is the money has washed in that it’s become like US politics. So in the US we’re very familiar with the story of dark money and of donors owning political parties. And I would argue that it’s happened here to that kind of degree. And the average voter isn’t at all aware. So those kinds of people exert tremendous influence. And Labour also, now the money is washing in because if, you know, if you’re smart, you’re not gonna give it to the Tories now. You’re going to give to the future party of power. So that’s what’s happening. The money is now rushing to Labour.

Lucy Fisher
Miranda, what’s the alternative to this? I mean, is it taxpayer money funding political parties? Most people would not want to see that. So it’s gonna have to rely on people with private means to channel their funds into parties, right?

Miranda Green
Well, it’s a really, really tough nut to crack, isn’t it? But, you know, I do think Simon is right on the whiff that’s come off the whole business in the last few years, particularly with the influx of kind of kleptocratic money into London — you know, the problems that we’ve reported on extensively in the FT of London as a kind of absolute paradise for money laundering and then buying influence or attempts to buy influence, I should say. I think it’s really important to point out that what people think they’re buying, they might not be getting.

Simon Kuper
The party often tries to trick the donor. The donor thinks, ah, well, now I get to influence policy. And the party sort of pretends that. But often the donor is disappointed.

Miranda Green
Yeah. I mean, you know, having worked on both sides of politics, I can tell you that handling donors, I mean, honestly, some of the amounts that were flying around in my ear in the ‘90s wouldn’t get you lunch at Pret A Manger today. But, you know, nevertheless, it’s actually, it’s a really tricky balancing act for party leaderships because you don’t actually want to give these people influence at all. But you do want their money to pay for your stake boards and your posters and your leaflets, you know? So it does need to be tightened up. I think it’s really interesting that the Tory party thought they were doing something really clever raising the ceiling on the amount that could actually be spent at the current election that we’re living through. You know, it’s gone up from, I think £19mn . . . 

Simon Kuper
To about £35mn.

Miranda Green
To about £35mn, which is huge. And, you know, the excuse for that was that it hadn’t actually been uprated for a long time. And it needed to be . . . 

Stephen Bush
Wasn’t at all to do with the death of someone who’d left a large amount of money.

Miranda Green
Exactly, exactly. So, but actually, also, as Simon has said, what we’ve seen is a huge influx of money into the Labour party, because that’s where the power is gonna be.

Lucy Fisher
Stephen, just to play devil’s advocate here, you know, Simon talks about these donors coming in wanting to kind of influence policy. It’s not a very attractive environment for wealthy people in many ways, the UK under the current Conservative administration, which has cracked down on non-doms. We’re on track for the highest tax burden in 70 years. Some people might say, well, that’s evidence that, you know, these wealthy individuals might give millions to Rishi Sunak and his mates, but, you know, they’re not successfully buying policy.

Stephen Bush
Well, I mean, that is the mystery in many ways of the present Conservative government. I was talking actually with a reader of my newsletter who’s given money in the past. And they were joking that the thing they find a bit odd is that there’s a kind of like, don’t have a flabby Labour government. And they were kind of going, well, how would I be able to tell the difference?

And exactly as Miranda and Simon have said that there’s this odd dance between donors and political parties where the party pretends that it’s offering more influence than it is. But sometimes, of course, actually the party is giving quite a lot of influence even when it thinks it’s not giving things away. So I think, you know, basically your solutions to this problem are you either have public funding for political parties, which is difficult given that there are lots of demands on the public purse even though it’s, you know, the terms of public spending it’s a derisory amount. Or, and I think this to me would be the solution I would reach for, you have a different electoral system.

Simon Kuper
The tragedy is, public funding would be completely the right solution and really quite cheap. £2 per British person — about £130mn a year — would fund the whole system and it would save us a huge amount of money. I mean, just to pay £130mn a year would remove the influence of these party donors. We would be so much better off.

But the other thing, I mean, the beauty of the British political system for a donor is you only need to buy the prime minister and the people around the prime minister, because if the party in power controls parliament, which is the norm, the PM is God. The PM can do anything, can push almost any kind of legislation through. That will probably be the case under Starmer. So you don’t care about MPs, they’re just voting fodder. You only have to buy the people around the PM.

Lucy Fisher
And we sort of focus quite a lot of this conversation on the Tories. I think, Miranda, you mentioned Labour is attracting big donors. But of course, the unions have traditionally been the way that Labour has been funded. And, you know, it’s been a traditional attack line by the Tories that New Labour is in hock to those union barons. Has that link kind of broken down under Starmer?

Miranda Green
Well, it’s become a very different relationship clearly over the last — well much, much longer than Starmer being Labour leader. I mean, you know, the Labour party was explicitly set up to pursue the aims of organisations like trade unions through parliamentary means. I mean, that is literally the mission statement of the Labour party. So no one should really be surprised by that relationship or by those shared goals.

But of course, we live in a completely different sort of economy and society now. Those sort of, you know, capital versus labour — set twos of, you know, the blue versus red bloc are, you know, very much of the past. So I think it sort of opens up as a line of attack. I mean, you’ve actually got at the moment the most high-profile giant trade union funder of the Labour party. You know, this gives the leader of that union, Sharon Graham, an extraordinary platform to debate with the Labour leadership the pros and cons of various policies. And obviously, in the Jeremy Corbyn era, we saw the Unite union really as a kind of puppet master behind the Corbyn leadership.

So, you know, it remains relevant, but it is also very transparent. And I think what Simon’s talking about is something slightly different. I mean, I do remember, though, at the end of the last Labour government, there was a similar scandal — you know, cash for peerages, which kind of petered out. But it’s always going to be an issue when you’ve got this set up, right?

Simon Kuper
Under Tony Blair, cash for peerages was a scandal and Blair was interviewed various times by the police. Now cash for peerages is the norm. But, I mean, just on Labour and the unions, under Corbyn, there were virtually no corporate or individual donations. So the unions were funding the party. And that has really now changed.

If you take three people — Dale Vince, green entrepreneur; Gary Lubner, who ran essentially Autoglass; and David Sainsbury, yeah — they give many millions each. And their contributions, of these three guys, just dwarfed all, anything the trade unions are giving. So the kind of cliché that Labour is in the pocket of the unions, which you still hear in the Daily Express, is just massively out of date.

Stephen Bush
Although the thing I think is important to remember is, one, if/when the Labour party wins this election, there will be a quite substantial set of labour market reforms. And indeed the Labour party, particularly the GMB, will be very influential on how Labour pursues net zero. And indeed, if you look at the detail of what Wes Streeting is talking about in terms of healthcare reform, you can see the imprimatur of Unison’s influence over the Labour party’s structures. You know, the Labour party is going to have a much better relationship in healthcare with workers who are represented by Unison, I would suspect, than they are with ones who are represented by the BMA.

But I think Miranda’s exactly right. Everyone knows that about the Labour party. Broadly speaking, everyone understands that the Labour party is funded by the trade unions and socially concerned rich people. The Liberal Democrats are funded by socially concerned rich people, and the Conservative party has traditionally been funded by the moneyed rich and the successful.

One of the problems the Tory party has, you know, to plug an excellent piece that the FT’s parliamentary team wrote about how the Conservative party lost touch with prosperous England, is that in recent years they’ve become a party detached from their donor base. And in some ways, if the Conservative party were more led by their traditional donors, more engaged with the needs of the City of London, more engaged with the needs of agricultural voters, that government would probably be rather better and rather more successful than the Conservative government we’ve got now.

Simon Kuper
Yeah, the donors now tend to be these libertarian buccaneers running these kind of solo shops in the city — small hedge funds, private equity firms type of things. And these people generally detest regulations, detested the EU, which they always found was getting in their way. So it’s a very unrepresentative group of business that now funds the Tory party. The British corporate world stopped donating 20 years ago when they had to get that through shareholders. And so they’re not really in the political game at all.

Lucy Fisher
And just finally, Simon, you’ve talked about how you think the funding of political parties could be cleared up. But what more could be done, generally speaking, now that you think the “good chaps” concept is outdated and that people aren’t kind of motivated by public service to go into politics or public office?

Simon Kuper
We used to have this system of norms, these unwritten norms that there were things you just didn’t do. So you wouldn’t, after being prime minister, go and lobby for Chinese interests like David Cameron did or you wouldn’t fly to Venezuela on behalf of a hedge fund manager to meet Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, who’s not recognised by the UK. And you didn’t have to tell people to do that; they just wouldn’t do that.

So what you need to do is move from a system of unwritten norms to written rules, saying, after you’ve been PM, you can never lobby for a company or work for any company again. It’s just too risky. You’ve just had too much access. You cannot jump from working for the Ministry of Defence to working for BAE a few months later. You just have to write all this stuff down. So we’re gonna have a much more bureaucratic system than we did before, which is unfortunate, but I think necessary.

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Lucy Fisher
Well, just finally, our last campaign watch of this final full week of campaigning before polling day next Thursday. I actually want to turn to the results and ask you what you’re looking out for as they start to roll in on the early hours of Friday morning. Stephen.

Stephen Bush
So the first interesting result of the night will be Basildon and Billericay. The early results are either very safe Labour seats where we don’t expect, if the polls are right, the Labour vote to move very much at all, or seats that are so far down the outer reaches of the Conservative majority that they are the kind of seats which, even in a situation where Keir Starmer had to resign at 1am, we would expect him to still be winning those seats, right? That would be the bare minimum we’d have expected of any Labour leader in any circumstances in this election.

But Basildon and Billericay — very, very safe seat, a seat where the selection happened in a way which put a lot of Conservative noses out of joint — is the first one which will give us a sense of whether or not the predictions of a Labour landslide and a Conservative collapse are about right. And it will be in the same way as Blythe Valley last time when it went to a recount and we all knew, OK, the exit poll’s right. Basildon and Billericay will be the result this time around that we look at and we go, oh, it’s either on or it’s off.

Lucy Fisher
And as you mentioned, Stephen, a lot of contention around how that seat was selected. Richard Holden, the party’s chairman, no less, was accused by colleagues of doing the chicken run. They said he’d abandoned the North West, which he represented in the last parliament, to seek this much-safer seat. So there are some very angry Conservatives who might be secretly quite pleased if he doesn’t get over the line. Miranda, how about you?

Miranda Green
Yeah, well, I will also be looking very interestedly to see whether he remains as Billericay Dickie, the Ian Dury song of that name. I think the moment that I’m gonna be most interested in is whether Jeremy Hunt can hang on in Surrey, in the new seat of Godalming and Ash, where it’s neck and neck with the Lib Dems, because if the chancellor himself gets toppled, that’s probably our kind of Portillo moment of this election and will be really memorable and a sort of awful human symbol of the, you know, the failed project. Lucy, what about you?

Lucy Fisher
Well, I’ve been out and about as far afield as Islington North, which is actually where I live. And I’m really interested to see whether Jeremy Corbyn can clinch it. Really interestingly on the ground, a lot of people don’t realise he is not the Labour candidate. You know, they said, oh yes, I support Corbyn and Labour. So I think insiders in both camps think it might come down for some voters to whether they spot his name or Labour and its rose logo on the ballot first.

Simon, of course, before we get to the UK election, on Sunday we have the first high-stakes round of voting in the French parliamentary elections. Tell us what we should be watching out for there.

Simon Kuper
I mean, the complication is you have three blocs. You have the united left, you have Macron-centre and then you have the far right. And I think one interesting question is will people do tactical voting within their constituency? So if you’re a centrist but you really hate the far right, are you gonna vote for the united left? So all these kinds of positionings ahead of the second round, which is where the UK and French systems totally diverge, the big one on July 7th. Who do people hate and fear most? Do they hate the far right or do they hate Macron? He’s, I would argue now, a more hated figure within France as a whole than Marine Le Pen, which is scary. Or is there terror of the far left, which would be a sort of Corbyn-like government?

Lucy Fisher
Fascinating. Well, I’ll be watching that and for analysis from you and our other FT colleagues. Well, for this week, that’s all we have time for. Stephen, Miranda, Simon, thanks for joining.

Miranda Green
Thank you.

Simon Kuper
Thank you.

Stephen Bush
Thank you.

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Lucy Fisher
And that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. We’ll be back on Tuesday for our last campaign catch-up before polling day. Do check out the free links I’ve put into the show notes. They’re articles we’re making available on subjects discussed in this episode. 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. Plus, do leave a review or a star rating if you have time. It really helps us spread the word.

Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Philippa Goodrich and Leah Quinn. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Original music and sound engineering by Breen Turner. Broadcasting engineers were Andrew Georgiades and Rod Fitzgerald. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. We’ll meet again here on Tuesday.

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