The Boris Johnson WhatsApp psychodrama

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘The Boris Johnson WhatsApp psychodrama’

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Miranda Green
Some of the stuff about how to fix the NHS is a question of extra expenditure and that is why you hear neither party talking about it. To catch up with other OECD countries where we’re right down the bottom is gonna cost a lot of money.

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Lucy Fisher
Hi, and welcome to Political Fix, your essential insider guide to Westminster from the Financial Times, with me, Lucy Fisher, the FT’s Whitehall editor. You heard there my colleague Miranda Green talking about the NHS, because this week we’ll be discussing public services and what the health service needs to thrive or even just survive. We’ll also look at the latest battleground in the Boris Johnson-Rishi Sunak psychodrama, the Covid inquiry. Plus, we’ll talk about where Sunak’s jumping on his jet to next. In the studio with me today are FT columnist and Political Fix regular Miranda Green. Hi, Miranda.

Miranda Green
Hello Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And of course, Robert Shrimsley, the FT’s UK chief political commentator. Hi Robert.

Robert Shrimsley
Hi Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
So it’s been a pretty quiet week, parliamentary recess half term, yet another bank holiday, of which I must say I’m a little bit bored now. Robert, what’s caught your attention this week?

Robert Shrimsley
I think there was a really interesting story which I think broke in the middle of the week, which is the PCS civil service union, one of the more militant unions. And I know we’re gonna talk about public sector disputes a bit later, but this particular one where they essentially said civil servants may go on strike so they don’t have to implement the Rwanda immigration policy. And I thought this was extremely interesting and potentially quite dangerous because it’s one thing to go on strike over pay or conditions or all kinds of other things, but it really isn’t for civil servants to try to block a policy they don’t like. Now their particular argument for this was they thought the policy might be unlawful, but the truth is that’s a court’s decision. And if it is ruled unlawful, then they have arguments about not implementing it. But until such time, if you get into the place where civil servants can say, we’re not going to implement this policy that we don’t like, that’s a dangerous place to be, and I’ll be very interested to see how that plays out.

Lucy Fisher
Miranda, how about you?

Miranda Green
Well, ’cause it’s been a quiet week, Lucy, I thought I’d turn to my favourite topic of the Lib Dems.

Lucy Fisher
Hurrah!

Miranda Green
Nobody else will, and their strategy and whether it’s advisable, as they have been doing, to stay completely schtum on both Brexit and on potential deals with Labour if Starmer can’t manage to get a majority government after the next election. And I managed to speak to no less a personage than Professor Sir John Curtice, who’s been picking over the local government results from last month, comparing them to the Brexit vote and also how people now feel about Brexit, which is a key, you know, ingredient. And he thinks that there are limited upsides really for the Lib Dems to continue to be nervous about shouting about their pro-European stance, and it might actually hurt them and limit the number of seats they can get next time.

Lucy Fisher
Well, really interesting. And I’ve had a sneak peek at your Big Read on this. That’s in the FT over the weekend. So a plug for that and we’ll have to do a proper segment doing a deep dive on the Lib Dems soon. And Robert, while we’re on the subject of excellent material in the paper, I have to say I loved your column on the Tory liberals who’ve lost their Brexit dream and possibly the party too, you think?

Robert Shrimsley
Thank you. I like working with you.

Lucy Fisher
I promised not to try and butter you up. (Laughter) But maybe I’ll also steer clear of slating anything, right? (Laughter) Let’s talk about the Covid inquiry. Luckily, that’s kept the longueur at bay for Westminster watchers like us this week amid this explosive row over the Covid inquiry and what evidence exactly the government must disclose to it. It’s a quarrel that’s engulfed Boris Johnson, and it’s a saga that’s thrown up questions about government by WhatsApp, whether messages sent by ministers over the app are part of the public record or whether some should be considered private and therefore beyond scrutiny. Here’s what Rishi Sunak had to say to Sky News in defence of the government’s approach to the inquiry.

Rishi Sunak
Well, I think it’s really important that we learn the lessons of Covid and that’s why the inquiry was established and we want to make sure that whatever lessons there are to be learned are learned, that we do that in a spirit of transparency and candour. The government has co-operated with the inquiry. Tens of thousands of documents have been handed over.

Lucy Fisher
But Labour’s Chris Bryant, also speaking to Sky, warned the Cabinet Office’s reluctance to hand over everything demanded by the inquiry could undermine public trust in it.

Chris Bryant
I think there’s a danger here that if the Covid inquiry doesn’t get everything it needs in a timely fashion, that it will feel to the British people as if ministers are trying to obstruct a proper inquiry. And that will be both a breach of the ministerial code and morally offensive.

Lucy Fisher
So, Robert, the big marmalade dropper on this story on Thursday night was that the government is challenging Baroness Hallett’s demand for this material with judicial review. What’s your reaction to that?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, I think it was clearly coming. The government clearly feels that there is enough in here to embarrass. At least I hope they do. It’s a terrible decision otherwise to say we’re not giving material to the Covid inquiry. That’s a terrible look. So I have to hope that this is based at least upon some reasonable fears about what it is they would be revealing.

Lucy Fisher
Can I just challenge you there just to really pin you down. So what the government is saying is that the only thing that will be redacted is material that is unambiguously irrelevant and they spell out what they mean by that. It’s personal messages, nothing to do with Covid. So you are challenging that assertion.

Robert Shrimsley
Well, there are two things they’re saying. That’s one of them. And the point there is that Baroness Hallett would herself (inaudible) and out with the inquiry would say, well, this is not relevant so we’re not going to use it. So it’s not really for the government to decide what’s relevant to an independent inquiry. It’s for the inquiry. And the second point of the argument they’re using is that it would interfere with ministers’ right to have private policy discussions. But actually, looking at private policy discussions is a particular reason why they are requesting this information, because that’s what this inquiry is there to find out is how they formed policy and what they were thinking when they were doing it. So I’m afraid I’m sceptical of the review going their way and I’m sceptical of their arguments.

Lucy Fisher
And if they do win this battle, Miranda, I mean, is this inquiry gonna be worth the . . . I say, piece of paper it’s written on, the hundreds and hundreds of pages it will run to?

Miranda Green
Well, first of all, it’s quite an irony the government deciding to use judicial review and arguing the right to privacy because they’re very against other people using these avenues when it’s inconvenient to them. So that’s a nice irony for everyone to note. What, you know, whether it will really hamper the inquiry, I think this battle over disclosure is gonna go on. That’s one thing. And the second is that, you know, as Robert says, it’s kind of dubious if the justification is, you know, that future governments can’t make policy properly. You know, that’s really very similar to all the justifications around the Blair government — why they didn’t wanna introduce freedom of information all those years ago. As we found it’s extremely important, a proper process and a proper scrutiny of government to have maximum disclosure.

Robert Shrimsley
One of the things worth remembering about public inquiries, particularly public inquiries into government, is that the odds are stacked heavily in favour of the government in public inquiries ’cause they’ve got huge teams of lawyers and civil servants to argue the reasons for why they are doing things. We get excited in the media about particular events, someone senior giving evidence at the inquiry or some supposedly killer memo, but actually these things are very serious and slow-moving and nuanced. And governments are most of the time very good at arguing their point of view and they will be good, in my opinion, in this public inquiry at arguing that this was a fast-breaking thing, things were moving all the time, information was shifting. So the truth is they’re playing on a playing field where they have a lot of advantages already.

Lucy Fisher
Is there a broader question here about the use of WhatsApp? Because another element I’ve sort of been thinking about lately and haven’t seen raised as much in the discourse is . . . certainly my ministerial sources, special advisers I speak to on WhatsApp. A lot of them have turned on disappearing messages with me. So the question for future inquiries might be . . . no one is going to want my messages to them . . . 

Robert Shrimsley
I think it is just you as well Lucy

[Laughter]

Lucy Fisher
Am I known as being untrustworthy, Robert? But there may not be this record that these messages are being stored for future inquiries. Miranda, isn’t that worrying?

Miranda Green
Well, it’s very interesting development. I mean, in a sense, this is all new technology. You know, when I worked in politics back in the ’90s, it was always a question of what you would or wouldn’t put down on paper and also what you would or wouldn’t put in an email. And I think there’s actually a slightly wider question here than which is also that government tends to want to establish a precedent that they’ll release as little as possible, right? And that it’s at their discretion. Whereas of course, others, including us as journalists, would like to establish a precedent that it should be maximum transparency unless there’s a very good reason for it. So I think in a sense, you always get government trying to kind of hold a line that looks unreasonable from the outside, and I would expect them to do that until they really can’t anymore. On WhatsApp, it’s really interesting, isn’t it? I mean, you know, in a sense there are quite a lot of people in kind of formal organisation that well, for example, the Institute for Government is quite disapproving of the use of WhatsApp by ministers already. So there is a question mark about that kind of very casual way of potentially making policy on very serious issues. You know, is it really appropriate? We’ve had former permanent secretaries questioning whether this is actually the right way that we should be formulating responses to serious challenges like a pandemic.

Robert Shrimsley
And this is a key point. You talk about new technology. That’s right, it speaks to an immaturity around how we approach things like WhatsApp. To be fair, I think the civil service is always against anything that doesn’t pass through their own hands. And it’s a way of people talking to each other about going through their civil servants. But there are two important immaturities around WhatsApp, one of which is the immaturity of the users, the ministers, these spads, the officials who treat it rather like they would treat a conversation in the pub . . . 

Lucy Fisher
Mmm.

Robert Shrimsley
 . . . And have not, had not yet at least, got their head into the place that says everything I say here is potentially public record. I need to treat it like a document that can be got under freedom of information. I need to be careful how I speak on this. The other thing, I think there’s been also a bit of immaturity in the public and the media on how it looks at some of these things when they’re released. I remember the row over . . . I can’t actually remember if it was a WhatsApp message, but it speaks to that moment when Boris Johnson was criticised for saying he’d let the bodies pile up in the streets rather than have another lockdown. And, you know, the mature way of looking at this was to say, well, first of all, since he had just had another lockdown, he wasn’t actually proposing bodies piling up in the streets. He was having a bit of a temper tantrum about a policy he’d had to enact. And I think we all need to be a little more grown-up when we look at some of these things. Say, look, this is people venting and letting their feelings go. It isn’t necessarily telling you what the government really wanted to do.

Lucy Fisher
And can I ask you Robert, what do you think should be at the heart of this inquiry? Should it be the bereaved families and the loved ones of victims of the pandemic who want to understand how policy was made or should it be a lesson learning exercise to help future pandemic responses?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, I think, you know, one’s got to be mindful of the bereaved and of their feelings. But I do think to be slightly brutal about this for a minute, I think the job of the public inquiry is to find out what happened, analyse what went wrong so that it doesn’t happen again. That’s the real purpose of this. It isn’t there to ease feelings or even to exact revenge. And therefore — and one of the reasons why public inquiries often last so long is they are trying to, you know, assuage the unhappiness of the victims or the people who are, we’re at the wrong end of the policy. But the fundamental purpose of a public inquiry is to get to the bottom of what happened when we think that what happened wasn’t good enough and make recommendations so that when it happens again, we don’t make the same mistakes. And I think that’s got to be the relentless focus of this inquiry, as indeed all others.

Lucy Fisher
And Miranda, just finally on this topic. I mean, there are a lot of concerns that the public hearings, as they stand, are gonna go on till 2026. The report might not drop until seven years’ time. I mean, that’s an awful long time to wait for these lessons, isn’t it?

Miranda Green
It is, and I think it’s too long. Because really, if what you’re trying to prepare for is potentially another global catastrophe along the same lines, you want to learn the lessons as quickly as possible. And actually, you know, what is the point of international science bodies, international policy bodies getting together to make recommendations about how we might all respond to another pandemic, God forbid, if our governments can’t actually focus on lessons learned at the sort of micronational level because, you know, there really are lessons to learn and it wasn’t a great response in places. And actually, I think the public would be relatively forgiving. In fact, if you look at the kind of wave of goodwill, I know it seems difficult to remember now, but the wave of goodwill towards Boris Johnson himself when he was ill with Covid in St Thomas’ Hospital. You know, it was an unprecedented challenge. And maybe, that actually a kind of quite frank attitude to lessons learned would serve the government well.

Lucy Fisher
And indeed, when I’ve been reporting on this week, you know, I’ve spoken to pandemic era ministers who say, look, it was an unprecedented crisis, but we, by and large, tried our best and on balance, in general, got most calls right. So most of the people I’ve spoken to would be happy to hand over all their communications unredacted because they feel they have nothing to hide, and that’s the best way forward is transparency.

Miranda Green
There is a problem, though, isn’t there? Which is kind of tone of voice, inappropriate jokes, something that might come out through very informal channels of communication like WhatsApp, that can then sort of leave fairly or otherwise a sort of lingering bad taste. And that’s something we just don’t know whether there might be something in there that might do that.

Robert Shrimsley
But I do think your point is — both of you said, in fact — that the public was much more mature about what the government could do when it got things wrong often than the media. And I remember sitting at home in the early days of the pandemic, watching the media, questioning, watching — my colleagues even — questioning the prime minister or the health secretary with these sort of gotcha questions. And you were sitting there thinking, I don’t care about this. I want to know how many ventilators you’re going to have in three weeks’ time or whatever it is. And I think the public understood just what a major shock this was and that people were doing their best. So they will be forgiving of errors made particularly at the start, and that kind of thing. What they won’t be forgiving of, and I think, what will come out in part is where the government wasn’t telling them the truth about testing, about the policies around care homes potentially, and about whether they were too slow to react. So I think, that’s the danger zone for politicians. It’s not the people will be unsympathetic, but they will be unsympathetic to the period when they felt they were not being told the truth.

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Lucy Fisher
Well, let’s move on from talking about the Covid inquiry to another subject that’s still suffering the fallout from Covid: the NHS. And with us in the studio, we have Sarah Neville, global health editor at the FT. Hi, Sarah.

Sarah Neville
Hi. Good to be with you.

Lucy Fisher
So you’ve written a really in-depth piece this week about the NHS’s uphill struggle to improve its productivity. Tell us about your findings.

Sarah Neville
Well, what me and my colleague, Federica Cocco, looked at was the narrative, I guess, is that the NHS is drastically short of staff, with about one in 10 posts not filled. But what our work showed was that there has actually been a significant rise in several key categories of staff. But there doesn’t seem to have been a commensurate rise in the number of patients being treated. That I think is quite interesting because it throws a spotlight on the other things that are holding back NHS productivity, particularly a lack of investment in capital and IT, which has signally failed to keep pace even as the core NHS budget was continuing to be increased at least marginally above inflation during all the years of Osborne austerity. The capital budget languished. It didn’t increase. And now the NHS is very much paying the price for that.

Lucy Fisher
It’s really interesting, not least I think, you know, fair to say the government, the NHS has been criticised for the long-delayed workforce strategy that we’re expecting in a couple of weeks. But from what you’re saying, even if that spells out the recruitment and training of more doctors and nurses, the NHS’s problems aren’t going to end there.

Sarah Neville
I think that’s absolutely right. Clearly more staff will help, but unless something can be done to allow the NHS to catch up really with many other comparable countries, because if you look at the number of hospital beds we have per head of population, the number of MRI and other critical scanners, we do lag rather shamefully behind similar nations. And of course that links into all sorts of things like our very poor rate of early cancer diagnosis, for example.

Lucy Fisher
And so what is the solution here? Is it more money for capital investment in IT system upgrades?

Sarah Neville
I think it is. I think it’s also perhaps about the workforce mix. And a lot of that is about educating all of us as patients to perhaps not automatically expect to see a doctor, a GP if we go to our local practice. But to accept that we might be guided to a different member of the primary care team. There’s a lot of buzz these days not just here but also in the US and some other countries about the idea of health coaches. And these are people who are not medically trained, but they’re empathetic people who are able to work with patients, you know, to help them, for example, to stick to a diet. As we all know, obesity is a massive problem for the NHS, as in many other countries, but it’s particularly bad here in England. So I think that we do all perhaps have to accept as patients that we’re going to have a slightly different relationship, possibly, with our NHS and that there is gonna be more stratification of patients so only the very sickest, you know, may see the sort of the most expensive and highest qualified staff. That’s, I think, something that we all have to kind of grapple with a bit.

Lucy Fisher
That’s really interesting. And can we talk a bit about the political dimension to all this? Of course, it’s one of Rishi Sunak’s five priority pledges to cut waiting lists by the time of the next election. I know you marked the fact he missed a key milestone in recent weeks of cutting, getting rid entirely of people who’ve been waiting 18 months for treatment. What are the odds now on him fulfilling that promise?

Sarah Neville
Well, I think one of the great unknowns that affects that is how many people are going to seek healthcare, going to actually be joining those waiting lists. Because one of the slightly unexplained stories since the pandemic is that people haven’t come back to seek health care in as great numbers as the NHS had anticipated. So are they now going to start doing that, in which case those lists are just going to get topped up and up? But on the other hand, there are actually the odd bit of more promising straws in the wind. It’s true the NHS did miss that key very politically sort of sensitive milestone to ensure nobody was waiting more than 18 weeks by the start of April. But the NHS actually has succeeded in cutting 18-week waits by more than 90 per cent. And if you talk to people in the NHS, in government, they’re encouraged by those sort of signs, you know, March, that there were more diagnostic tests carried out, I believe, than any other month since the pandemic. So it’s not an entirely bleak outlook for the government but at the same time, it is clearly going to be an immensely challenging target to meet.

Lucy Fisher
And I’ve got to ask you about Labour as well, where Streeting has brought forward some pretty radical policies in the health space, including, for example, suggesting tearing up the GP contract. What’s your overall appraisal of what Labour is sort of pledging so far?

Sarah Neville
Well, I think the interesting thing is that they are very committed to reform in a way that almost reminds one a bit of New Labour when they came in with a similarly reformist agenda. You know, it did so much to increase competition in the NHS, but I’m less clear as to the detail of the Labour plans. I mean, Keir Starmer’s speech was interesting, I thought, in one particular respect that he talked about lots of policies that he would class as health policies. So, you know, decent work, decent housing. I thought that was very promising because I think if we are going to make the NHS sustainable, the health of the population is going to have to drastically improve and of course that’s about far more than biomedical treatment. That was very interesting, but I would like to see far more detail of how he’s going to achieve that kind of pivot. So I think in short, there are definitely some interesting themes starting to come through, but we do need to see far more detail.

Lucy Fisher
Well, Sarah, we’ll have to get you back when we know what Labour is planning in more detail to give us your take. Sarah Neville, thanks for joining us today.

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Lucy Fisher
Robert, your take on what we just heard?

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, I think it’s really fascinating. I have to say, just to be flippant for a moment, that I’m not sure that I would be deeply encouraged about going to the doctor/surgeon and being told to go and see an empathist. I think I might want someone a little bit more specialised, but I thought the key point in all the things Sarah was saying, particularly around GPs, was trust that the point is what the public has to believe. What people have to believe is that they are still seeing the right person for their condition and seeing someone who is sufficiently qualified and serious to help them. So if you’re sent to a clinical nurse who knows about the thing you’re going to see them about, that’s absolutely fine. If they want to triage you and have a conversation before you go in to see the doctor so they make sure they send you to the right person. That’s good. I think what will be problematic is if people feel that they’re getting an inferior service with less qualified people, not because this actually is the right way to do things, but because they’re trying to save money.

Lucy Fisher
Miranda?

Miranda Green
Yeah, I also think, I must say. So on the staffing, you know, having observed at close hand departments having to completely abandon the normal recruitment route in from the rest of the EU when we were still a member, for example, and then recruit actively for oncology from America for oncology nurses. That’s been a huge challenge on the staffing side and, you know, Sarah’s piece is very interesting on that churn in NHS personnel.

It seems to me listening to her, actually, that a couple of the things that are holding back NHS productivity — which I write pieces about — both the lack of tech and proper communications technology inside the NHS and also lack of capital expenditure are the things that would both improve sort of management productivity, but also the patient experience, you know — decent buildings, more CT scanners, the tech which makes sure that your data and your records have not gone missing between the referral and the results and then the next referral, etc.

I agree with Robert up to a point. Some of the stuff about how to fix the NHS is a question of extra expenditure and that is why you hear neither party talking about it. I mean, you know, on CT standards, for example, Sarah raised this. You know, Australia has 70 per 1mn residents; the UK has only nine per 1mn residents. You know, to catch up with other OECD countries where we’re right down the bottom on the bar charts is gonna cost a lot of money until we actually are equipped, for example, to speed up diagnosis. You know, as Robert says, being referred to an empathist is not quite going to cut it with the public.

Lucy Fisher
And of course the NHS is far from the only quarter of the public sector that’s beset by problems at the moment. We’ve had rail passengers trying to get away for half-term breaks and some major sporting events being hit by another wave of train strikes and it looks like they’ll continue, at least according to one union leader Mick Whelan, who heads up Aslef.

Mick Whelan

Our members are in this for the long haul, you know. We’ve been around 140 years. We’ve been into this for the best part of two years. They’ve been solid. We currently got at least 10 of our ballots out for re-balloting under the Tory legislation, and we expect those to come back with high turnouts and high percentages again to go forward. And the feedback we got last week was incredibly positive for our members because for us it’s existential.

Lucy Fisher
So as we heard there strikes are going on the railways. We’ve got university lecturers in a marking boycott. The junior doctors are going to walk out this month as the new threat of civil servants also taking industrial action. Robert, is strike action now priced in with the public? Is it the new normal frustrating but not that big a problem for Sunak?

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, I’m afraid that’s exactly what I think is going on wherever. I think there’s a resignation among the public and also on the government about strike action that people are looking at this and they’re sort of shrugging off, which is a very depressing thing, particularly if you’re old enough to remember the ’70s, as I am when this happened all the time. And you just sort of, this is how life is, this is how it works. The NHS, I got my appointments cancelled, the trains don’t work. I think it’s a problem for the unions as well, because the more people are resigned about this, the harder it is for them to break through and increase the pressure on the government. I think it is fundamentally still a massive problem for the government because it feeds into this sense that people have that things don’t work. There is that sense of resignation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t going to be a payback for this when the time comes.

Lucy Fisher
And Miranda, how does this play out in your mind? Do you think there’s any chance of the government solving some of these disputes or should we just brace for strike action right up until the next election?

Miranda Green
Well, I think as we’ve discussed around this table throughout the kind of wave of public sector strikes, it’s slightly odd that the government has not tried to pick off some of the disputes where they could come to an agreement, but to have a kind of blanket strategy of giving nothing to anyone on the justification of the same line about not wanting to stoke inflation. Actually, I think some of the strikes in, particularly, the health service and in schools really do affect those members of the public who notice them and who are on the receiving end. And actually, you know, the polling shows that people who have kids in a state school support the strikes, whereas even if, you know, the public as a whole might not be over 50 per cent support for the teaching strikes themselves. I think they should actually take them slightly more on a case-by-case basis rather than having this kind of blanket government defiance. And I also think that Robert is right. You’re both right that it’s kind of become part of the atmospherics, that we’re all held up by strikes, but it’s kind of okay until it isn’t, and probably for the government, the point at which it isn’t is going to be polling day when people are asked who you want to be in charge, because you have to demonstrate that you have grip.

Lucy Fisher
Let’s look at just one final subject, which is Sunak on his travels this week, taking advantage of the parliamentary recess. He’s been in Moldova for a meeting of the European Political Community. Miranda, is this part of Sunak’s great re-engagement with Europe? I mean, interesting isn’t it with the EPC very much a Macron-driven vehicle, but Sunak’s trying to really place the UK sort of at the forefront of it.

Miranda Green
Well, it’s been a lot more low-key, I think it’s fair to say, in terms of the coverage it’s had in the UK than when Liz Truss as prime minister went to the first one, which I think was in Prague. And perhaps that’s because it was so surprising to see Liz Truss engaging in a positive way. And also that was the first one. You know, Sunak’s obviously trying to use it to stoke support for his crackdown on irregular migration across Europe and presumably it’s useful in that way.

Lucy Fisher
Do you think that’s really forming the basis of much of the discussion? I mean, that’s what he’s briefed to sort of UK reporters and headline writers. But really, I mean, they’re only a matter of kilometres away from the Ukrainian border in Chișinău, aren’t they? So I think it seems to me it’s probably Ukraine that’s been top of the agenda.

Miranda Green
Yeah, absolutely. And actually there’s been a kind of ramping up of the rhetoric from Moscow in the last few days is that they’re not and partly in response perhaps to this summit happening right next to Ukraine.

Lucy Fisher
And Robert, next week Sunak’s off to Washington. The FT’s George Parker will be with him. Lots on the agenda there, but are you relieved that the UK has finally dropped the fantasy that they are pursuing a comprehensive free trade agreement with the US, which has clearly had absolutely no interest in that idea since Biden took office?

Robert Shrimsley
I can’t say I’m relieved because I never really took it very seriously for all the reasons you just set out, Lucy. And I mean, it’s interesting of course that the UK now seems to pursue a lot of trade deals at state level. It goes after deals with individual states of the US. This particular British government has a problem with this particular American president that the UK is not viewed as a great partner by Biden. They don’t like the Conservative party — this particular Conservative party. They didn’t like Brexit and I think that’s been a problem ever since Biden won. I mean, I’m not saying they would have been happy with Donald Trump because he brought all his own problems. But nevertheless, I think they’ve had a lot of difficulty getting engagement at a serious level with the US since they left the European Union. So I think what I’m mainly relieved about, if relief is the word, is just to see British leaders making the effort to engage, engage on terms that might generate something useful with Biden.

Lucy Fisher
Well, that’s about all we’ve got time for on the politics front this week. As we head into the weekend and leisure time abounds, what have you been enjoying on the cultural front this week, Miranda?

Miranda Green
Well, it’s been my birthday week and —

Lucy Fisher
Happy birthday!

Miranda Green
Thank you so much, Lucy. And tradition dictates it’s the one time the year that I’m allowed to bore my family with a bit of this.

[‘SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES’ PLAYING]

Bob Dylan
John is in a basement mixing up the medicine. I’m on the pavement thinking about the government.

Miranda Green
Yeah, I’m the only person in the house who loves Bob Dylan, but I really do. And I suppose I could say that it’s political, that song, I’m on the pavement thinking about the government. Don’t follow leaders. (Lucy laughs) Don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. We don’t need that here, do we? No?

Robert Shrimsley
They work as the vandals stole the handles.

Miranda Green
Exactly, you see! It’s broken Britain right there. And the Lib Dem favourite, of course: don’t wear sandals; you can’t afford the scandals.

(Laughter)

Lucy Fisher
Nicely tied in. Robert, what are you enjoying this week?

Robert Shrimsley
I think my main cultural event, apart from Succession — which I won’t talk about because we could spend the whole podcast doing it, certainly if I’d let me — is I went to see the band Scouting for Girls at a festival, bizarrely a food festival, because in south-west London they were playing and I hadn’t seen them live before. I know they’ve been around for a decade, but they were just absolutely great. They have tremendous charisma on stage. They’re playing festivals, medium-sized venues, open-air festivals all through the summer. So my recommendation is find the chance to go and see them.

Lucy Fisher
And if I could just mention Succession for a minute. We were talking about this when we started recording and I think we’re both in agreement, Robert — superfans, both of us. It was a pretty epic finale. There’s been a lot said about how TV’s upped its game, but I’ve also really enjoyed how much telly criticism has improved and I’ve just spent days reading every sort of article essay I can find on the Shakespearean allusions in Succession. So you have to get ready to try and find something else to replace the Succession-spaced hole in my life now.

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That’s it from Political Fix for this week. Miranda, Robert, thanks for joining me. If you like the podcast, do subscribe. You can find us through all the usual channels to receive episodes as soon as they’re released. We also appreciate positive reviews and ratings. It really helps spread the word. Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Anna Dedhar and Audrey Tinline. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer and the sound engineer is Breen Turner. We’ll meet again here, same time, same place next week.