Transcript: Campaign catch-up — Why this UK election result could be the most distorted ever

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Campaign catch-up — Why this UK election result could be the most distorted ever’

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Lucy Fisher
Are we on track for the most distorted UK election results ever? Welcome to Political Fix from the Financial Times with me, Lucy Fisher. We’ve entered the final full week of campaigning and Labour’s 20-point lead looks pretty rock solid. So today we’re going to discuss just when and how the seeds of the Tory’s expected collapse were sown. And we’ll examine predictions that this election will produce the worst mismatch ever between the number of votes clinched and the number of seats won by the UK’s political parties. To do all that, I’m joined by FT Political Fix regulars, Robert Shrimsley. Hi, Robert.

Robert Shrimsley
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And the FT’s George Parker. Hi, George.

George Parker
Hello, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And finally, we are joined today in the studio by the FT’s chief data reporter and columnist, John Burn-Murdoch. Hi, John.

John Burn-Murdoch
Hi, Lucy. 

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Lucy Fisher
So, the Conservatives, we’ve had a spate of polls and MRPs suggesting they are headed for a defeat of historical proportions on July 4th. But before we look at the bigger picture, let’s just deal with the latest crisis. George, “betting-gate” rolls on and on. Tell us the latest.

George Parker
Well, as we record this, Rishi Sunak has belatedly decided to withdraw Conservative support from two candidates embroiled in this allegations of betting on the date of the election on July the 4th — it’s Craig Williams, who’s standing in Montgomeryshire, and Laura Saunders, who’s standing in North West Bristol. And you’ll recall, Lucy, that for about a week now, Rishi Sunak has been under immense pressure to suspend these people as candidates. It’s too late to take their name off the ballot paper. It has to be stressed they’re already on, the nominations have closed, but to withdraw the Conservative party’s support for these people. And that’s exactly what has happened today. And the big question being asked is: why has he waited so long? It’s almost as if it’s a textbook example of how not to deal with a crisis like this during a campaign. You know, he should have acted much earlier. He let it drag on for a whole week.

Lucy Fisher
Or two weeks in the case of Craig Williams.

George Parker
Exactly. The explanation is that they’ve been making further inquiries at their own end. But the truth is they were facing huge pressure, not just from the Labour party but from senior people within the Conservative party saying just draw a line under it. And of course, the question is: is he doing this because he fears that there’s more to come out and he needs to be seen to be at least, belatedly, trying to get ahead of the next round of bad news? But for this to dominate the campaign in the way it has is the worst possible thing that could happen to a campaign which is already in deep trouble.

Lucy Fisher
Robert, it’s clearly a setback, but will it make any difference to the Tories in the polls, or do you think the public have just priced in now what they’re planning to do with their own personal vote?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, given how badly the Tories were doing before this story broke, it’s quite hard to see how it’s really going to affect the result of things. There are two things I would say. Number one is, I saw a scatterplot from one of the polling companies showing that it was one of the two stories that had really resonated with voters. That and D-Day, which when Rishi Sunak left early, were the two stories that most people had heard about and most people disapproved of. So in that sense, it’s really bad.

And the other point, I mean, even now, you know, a week and a half to go, that Conservatives would be hoping that they could just pull back some voters that, you know, the threat of a Labour supermajority, as they like to call it, would just make some Conservative-minded people think, well, look, I’m happy with the Conservatives losing, but I don’t want them wiped out.

But what’s happening is it’s just obscuring any message. And I think that Rishi Sunak wants to sort of lead on and say to the public he’s being obscured by this ridiculous little scandal which placed all of the worst feelings people have about the Conservative party and about him, because he hasn’t managed to knock it on the head.

George Parker
And as Michael Gove said at the weekend, it keeps dragging them back to the past. It’s reminiscent, isn’t it, of “Partygate” that, you know, one set of rules for the Conservatives and another set of rules for everyone else. So it’s terrible in every . . . 

Robert Shrimsley
(Inaudible) is baffling. I mean, Craig Williams, you’re not some minor figure. He’s Rishi Sunak’s parliamentary aide. He’s in and out of Downing Street, close to the prime minister. And Rishi Sunak knows when he knew, presumably, and he’s admitted placing the bet. You just knock it on the head, you just show a bit of ruthlessness of the kind one expects from a party leader, you know. But what do you think Keir Starmer would have done in these circumstances? I mean, that person would have been out within hours.

Lucy Fisher
And that’s what Starmer said, right? You know, their feet wouldn’t have touched the floor. And it does remind me of the kind of the good old days, as the Tories would see it, of Lynton Crosby being in charge of the campaign, because what he was famous for was knocking the barnacles off the boat, as he called it, making sure, as Robert said, nothing derailed the campaign message of the day. He was certainly ruthless.

Robert Shrimsley
But that means there is no boat. It’s all barnacles.

Lucy Fisher
(Laughter) They are made of barnacles.

Robert Shrimsley
Barnacles. That’s all it is.

Lucy Fisher
John, let’s bring you in. So, when did the Tory collapse began? To my mind, I’ve often thought, looking at the polls, it seemed that since October 2022, in Liz Truss’s disastrous “mini” Budget was the moment we can chart back to. But you’ve interrogated the data and you think it goes back a lot longer than that, that the seeds of collapse were sown?

John Burn-Murdoch
Yeah, and I think it’s particularly interesting how we’ve just been talking about, you know, incompetence, Partygate and the parallels between that and the betting scandal. And I think that’s a really important point because something we look at all the time is just the standard voting intention polls. But our data scientists have been putting together another chart for me, which is turning that into estimates of numbers of seats since the last election. So if there had been election calls at any point in the last five years, what the result would have been.

And by the time Partygate started bubbling up — so we’re talking late 2021 here, like almost a year before Johnson left, Truss came in and so on — the Tories, if an election that had been called at that point, would have been down to 211 seats. So that’s majority completely wiped out. That would have been the worst result since 2005. So I think, you know, between Dominic Cummings, Barnard Castle, Partygate, that sense of as we’d been talking about rule-breaking, there were already suggestions of incompetence there, promises they have been failed to deliver on. You know, this is ancient history now. So many crazy, crazy things have happened since then, but the declining numbers of seats or votes under Johnson was bigger than what we’ve seen under Truss and Sunak combined. And, you know, the Truss point is interesting because of course, that was an absolutely absurd period of a few weeks. You know, everything went completely bonkers. Of course, people will talk about the mortgage rates going up, but it was really what that signalled more than any specific impact it had.

However, there was almost a full recovery from that plummeting in the polls when Sunak came back. So I think we can fixate on that because it was such a ridiculous time of British politics. But so in terms of vote share, 45 per cent, the Tories got in the last election. But that point when Truss came in, that was down to about 32 per cent and then plummeted, but bounced back up pretty much to the high 20s, low 30s at the point that Sunak came in. So there was a very, very long, sustained decline under Johnson in those first two years. You can essentially draw a straight diagonal line from the election result in 2019 down to where we are in the polls today.

Lucy Fisher
And, Robert, I mean, part of Johnson’s big claim was that he would deliver levelling up. Do you think it’s the policy and the kind of failure to deliver since 2019 that people are also kind of thinking about now heading into this election? Or is that ancient history?

Robert Shrimsley
I think it’s just a combination of a lot of things. It’s the combination of the hollowing-out of public services in the years of austerity which, you remember, Johnson campaigned against, essentially. He was gonna fix austerity. It’s the impact of the pandemic, the loss of support over Brexit. You know, we look back at 2019 and forget that he was running against a terrible Labour candidate for prime minister. So his vote was probably bumped up (inaudible). And then just the fundamental personality failures which, to voters, just sort of manifested the delivery failures. You’ve got these people, they don’t believe the rules apply to them. And they’re also not delivering for you. I mean, if he was playing fast and loose with the rules, everyone thought they were getting richer, it probably wouldn’t matter very much. But it’s the combination of nothing’s getting better and these people clearly are taking the mick. So I think it’s the two very much together.

Lucy Fisher
And George, you’ve written a fascinating piece that I’ll put in the show notes for this episode looking at how the Tories lost successful Britain — those kind of more prosperous, wealthy shire heartlands, parts of London, Westminster and two cities that the Tories have always held — looks like they could lose it for the first time. Tell us a bit about what you found.

George Parker
Well, I went back to 2019 and the election and it was a stunning success for Boris Johnson, plainly got a majority of 80 and somehow seem to have found the elixir of Conservative success, winning 40 so-called red wall seats off Labour. And at the same time, look at the electoral map of Britain in 2019 — a sea of blue right up the south of England.

As Robert was just describing there, it was a toxic legacy as well. It was a huge majority, but it was built on, in their case, the red wall, Brexit, Corbyn, Johnson’s own charisma and the promise of loads of money. Once Brexit was done, once Corbyn was gone, once Johnson was gone, once the money was gone, there was nothing left to hold that red wall together in the Tory camp.

Now, at that point, the Conservatives could have said that those seats, it was a one-off. We’re not gonna hold those seats next time around. Let’s just double down on Tory heartlands, the Midlands, the areas where we in the past we managed to get narrow or even sometimes largish majorities.

Instead of which, they went down the route of a culture war-type approach echoing some of the the tunes we’ve heard from Donald Trump, also from Farage as well; talking about the Rwanda migration scheme, “F** business”, denigrating the successful parts of the establishment, making it sound like they hated London, you know, the Conservative party hating their own national capital. And they thought they could do this. It was obviously cheaper than throwing loads of money at the red wall, but they thought they could do this while still holding on to those seats in London and the London belt.

But if you look at the polls now, you can see it’s been a total strategic disaster. And in the end, the conclusion of this article was basically they’ve ended up pleasing no one and electoral disaster is around the corner.

Robert Shrimsley
And I think the great counterfactual, one thing we can’t know is how it would have been if it hadn’t been for the pandemic, because the pandemic not only obviously took all of their attention for two years, led to Partygate, but also it took all their money away. The point is, in that first Budget they had, just as the pandemic was starting and people hadn’t quite grasped what it was gonna be, they were throwing a lot of money into the North and the Midlands of England, throwing a lot of money into science and research. The plan was to spend their way through Brexit and deliver goodies for vast parts of the country. So without the pandemic, it might have been a very different story. We just don’t know. 

Lucy Fisher
Well, I think that’s one reason why — and John, you totted this up — that fewer than half the Tories’ key original manifesto pledges in 2019 have been met as we head into the next general election, which is a marked decline in competence compared with earlier governments. John, you’ve written a bit about populism versus deliverism when it comes to the Tories. Just explain what you mean by that.

John Burn-Murdoch
Yeah. So this isn’t my framing, but there’s this idea of a distinction between popularism, which is saying things that you think the public agree with you on, and deliverism, which is saying forget about what we say, let’s just do things so that people then can look at tangible things that have happened under this government.

And I think, first of all, Robert is completely right about the impacts of the pandemic. That has impacted the extent to which the Tories could have been deliverist, as it were, less money to build things and get things done. But I do think in one sense, this Conservative government has been one of the most data-driven ever, but that has been through the very narrow levels of simple polling questions on every single thing they floated.

And it’s pretty much true that all the things the Conservatives have said under Johnson, under Sunak, possibly even under Truss, are things that people would have said, yes, sounds great, you know.

Lucy Fisher
Give us some examples.

John Burn-Murdoch
You know, tax cuts, stopping the boats is probably the perfect example in that people of all stripes isn’t just sort of anti-immigration rightwingers. Plenty of liberals also think, you know, the situation in the Channel is not good. Whether that’s because people want fewer people coming or because it’s just a dangerous and messy situation, people wanted the boats to stop.

But of course, saying that is one thing, delivering on it is another. And they said it, they didn’t deliver on it. And it’s just been the thing after thing after thing. Cancelling the rest of HS2 was a thing where it was felt that, well, people think that, yeah, this has been a bit of a waste of money. And when we asked them, should we scrap this and do give you loads of other money, they say yes. But then of course, has anything else happened with that money? No. There were, announcements were made on that day which were, you know, giving tram networks to cities that already had them, that kind of thing.

So I think, yeah, it’s been a government of where people have had an excellent idea of where public opinion is on various issues and therefore what things should be said. But as everyone has been saying here, you can keep saying things, but if you don’t do things, then it starts to sting.

Robert Shrimsley
But it’s also, isn’t it? I mean, every losing party and leader, party leader for the last 20 or 30 years will tell you that all of their policies tested very well and they were very popular. But the point is the public makes a decision on the people first. And if they decide you’re no good, it doesn’t matter that they like your policies.

Lucy Fisher
And George, do you think . . . of course, we’ve got the most kind of avant-garde, up-to-date kind of polling methods, focus groups that are exploited and loved by party strategists. Is there a downside to that, that they can then, as John’s kind of described, come up with policies that poll beautifully in isolation but don’t hang together as a coherent vision for the country?

George Parker
I think there is a real danger of politicians being led by the polls rather than leading the polls. I don’t think Margaret Thatcher spent her whole time agonising about whether popular policy, individual policies would be popular at the time. She had an idea, she thought it through and the ideas became popular. And I think a lot of us actually would like to see a day when politicians are less driven by the polls and actually try to find ways to, you know, follow through on ideas and make themselves popular.

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, Tony Blair has a really interesting example of this point when he talked about, you have polling questions that this is your three-second answer, your 30-second answer and your three-minute answer. So say, well, do you think that, you know, the electricity companies should be renationalised? And you’ll get a big positive yes to that. So OK. Do you think that electricity companies should be renationalised if we’ve got to spend X billion pounds taking them back. And they go, then the number starts to fall a bit more. And then there’s the three-minute answer, which is: do you think they should be renationalised if we’ve got to spend lots and lots of money and it’s gonna take us a year and a half to do this, and all these other . . . I think the point is that most politics and most policies are really complicated and that actually, if you just go for the three-second answer, it’s nearly always misleading.

Lucy Fisher
And I wonder if there’s something in the lack of sort of coherence to the Tory vision that explains, John, as you’ve kind of pointed out, that while previous parties that have lost election usually haemorrhage votes in one direction, kind of one flank, but in this election the Tories are losing votes to the right and the left.

John Burn-Murdoch
Yeah. I mean it’s massive losses across the board. And in fact, people who identify as a bit more culturally Conservative rightwing are actually more likely to have ditched the Tories than the more sort of centrist Tories they were last time.

So yeah, I think that’s happened because, as you say, the pledges that were made were never even consistent. I mean, you had people who would have read that 2019 manifesto and thought Johnson is more sensible. He’s, you know, they maybe even remember the London mayor version of Johnson and he’s perhaps not a sort of hyper rightwinger in the way that some Conservatives are.

But then, of course, when you have people like Suella Braverman coming out with the rhetoric, some of the rhetoric she used on immigration, then you start losing those liberals who maybe thought that Johnson could have been a good vessel. A better example almost is when Sunak came in. And of course, Sunak was very popular with Remainers. People thought he was, you know, very centrist, very reasonable and when . . . And then, of course, the policies and the rhetoric that he and his government have championed have pushed those people away.

But at the same time, the failure to deliver on some of that more anti-immigration rhetoric, for example, has got rid of the right. So, yeah, it’s the inconsistency. But also, again, I think a lot of this is just incompetence, that for as much as some people are planning to vote Reform think the Tories should be tougher on immigration, they fundamentally just don’t trust the Tories to deliver on immigration.

Lucy Fisher
So we could see, if the polls are right, the Tories lose somewhere between 7mn and 9mn of the 14mn votes they secured in the last election. Robert, you’ve been writing in the last week about what the opposition will be in parliament if that poll indication is confirmed.

Robert Shrimsley
Well, yeah. I mean, there’s been all this talk about who will be the real opposition, you know. Could the Tories be a real opposition if they’re under 100 seats or just over 100 seats? Could they be overtaken by the Liberal Democrats? And these are all quite fun. But in a sense, if you have a Labour government with a huge majority, pressure comes not from the opposite benches. It’s the people within you in the Labour party.

And actually, although I’m not suggesting that I think he’s gonna face rebellion after rebellion, I think there is a huge rump of, you know, basically, you know, reasonably moderate, soft left, as we call them, Labour MPs who have gone along with what Starmer has done because it’s gonna win and they want to win, they’ve been disciplined. But once they’re in power, there’s a limit to how long they’ll put up with anything that looks a bit like austerity again. And so I just think there’s lots of pressure points coming down the line. And I think quite soon they will get fed up toeing the line, especially if the line is towards austerity. So I think that’s where he’s got to look.

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Lucy Fisher
Well, I want to turn now to look at another way in which the result could be striking in this general election. And that’s your prediction, John, that it could be the most distorted results in British electoral history. Explain what you mean by distorted.

John Burn-Murdoch
Yeah. So this is if you look at the . . . take each party and look at the share of votes it wins and then the share of seats it wins in the House of Commons and you’re sort of tallying up the gap between those two numbers. So if you had a perfectly proportional system, then a party that gets, say, 42 per cent of the vote would get 42 per cent of seats and so on and so forth through the parties.

What we might well be on course for here is Labour getting something like 41 per cent of the vote but as much as 71 per cent of seats and the Conservatives getting about 20 per cent of the vote but maybe only 13, 14 per cent of seats and Reform possibly getting 15, 16 per cent of the vote and a few . . . zero seats, they’ll probably get a couple. But there’s this big disparity between votes and seats. And that means in the first past the post system, which is a system that works best with two parties, coming third gives you nothing. And first past the post is, as it sounds, it’s a race to the line, and whoever comes over that line first wins and no one else gets anything.

So if you had in every single constituency one party getting 30 per cent of the vote, another getting 25, another 20, another 15, and so on, despite the fact that the winning party was only getting 30 per cent of the vote nationally, they would get 100 per cent of the seats because they were first to cross the line everywhere. Of course, that is never quite as simple as that. But the general pattern is that parties that aren’t close to winning anywhere really get very, very little despite winning a significant amount of the vote.

So as I say, we could easily have Reform getting . . . One in six people in the country could vote Reform and Reform could have zero seats because of this system. And the important thing is that this time it’s the right who are the big losers.

Lucy Fisher
Robert, what do you think? I mean, if we do see the kind of scenario that John outlined with Labour getting far more seats than votes in terms of proportion and Reform being really shut out of the system to some extent, will this be a flash in the pan straight after the election when people talk about PR, or will this kind of lead to a new movement or feeling of anger among the electorate?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, obviously there’ll be a different group of people who are angry, as John has implied. I mean, fundamentally, you’ve got to have one of the two major parties supporting a change in the voting system before it will be changed. Either Labour or the Conservatives are gonna have to do this. And Labour, as you said, with a great majority, are not going to do it. And the Conservatives might still think their best chance is getting on and coming back.

I mean, we have to remember one of the things that this voting system does is essentially it requires groupings to form their coalitions before the election rather than afterwards. So in a system with PR, all the different parties get their share of the vote. Then they agree to a coalition afterwards, after we’ve all voted.

In first past the post system, what happens is the big parties form a broad coalition to maximise their vote. And what’s actually happened to the Conservatives is that coalition is fractured massively and it’s fractured two ways. They’ve lost the people they’ve lost to Reform, and they’ve lost all the people they’ve lost on the left of the Conservative party who were sort of socially liberal, moderately minded, who don’t like the direction it’s gone in. And the point is, the system acts as an incentive to parties to keep their coalitions broad. So what it really discriminates against is a parties of extremes. If you’re in the centre ground broadly, you can normally find a home. If you’re on the edge — if you’re the Greens, if you’re Reform party, if you’re a communist or whatever — then it won’t help you.

Lucy Fisher
George?

George Parker
One thing, I was gonna just say that the British public have got very good at working the system, haven’t they? Tactical voting. And John, you have data on this, but, you know, it looks unusually like the Liberal Democrats, let’s say they, I think they’re polling around 11 per cent at the moment. That would imply about 60-odd seats. Well, we think that’s roughly what they’re going to get. And that’s because people have got very used to voting Liberal Democrats in areas where they’re the party best placed to be the Conservative candidate. Equally, one of the reasons why Labour appear to be doing very well is their vote share seems to be going up most in seats where they can beat the Conservatives when and with the votes being distributed extremely efficiently. And that’s partly because people, I think, understand how first past the post works, and they are prepared to vote tactically to remove the Tory candidate.

John Burn-Murdoch
Exactly that, yeah. And I think, as you say, this is definitely a surge in tactical voting. But I suspect that it’s not just about more and more people embracing tactical voting. It’s the fact that, again, this government is so unpopular, a lot of people’s primary reason for voting the way they are this time is to get that government out. And therefore, if that is a more singular motivation than the choice of any particular other party, there is even greater incentive to make damn well sure that your vote gets them out.

Robert Shrimsley
I always think we’re a bit myopic about tactical voting, in that we only ever really notice it when it tends to be people voting Liberal Democrat to get rid of the Conservatives, when there’s that clear narrative in that split on the left. Actually, people probably vote tactically all the time. They may have voted tactically to stop Jeremy Corbyn, they may have voted tactically to do other things. You know, in Scotland they vote tactically on the grounds of the independence issue. So people vote tactically in different ways that we don’t always pay quite such clean attention to.

Lucy Fisher
And John, just ‘cause we’ve been talking about first past the post versus proportional representation, something that really interested me in your piece that reversed what I think is received wisdom is that people who defend first past the post say that it tends to lead to more stable governments. But your research has found that’s not actually the case.

John Burn-Murdoch
Yeah. And I should say this, that part of it was actually researched by someone called Dylan Difford at Make Votes Matter, which is an electoral reform campaigning organisation. But yeah, they looked at the results and outcomes of elections across many developed democracies over the last sort of 20 years and compared various things, including how long governments stay in power, how much churn there is among ministers, that kind of thing.

But I think we don’t even have to look that far. You can look at the last decade or so of British politics and, you know, this is a thoroughly first past the post system. And we’ve had more political churn since Brexit, certainly, than, I think, any time we’ve got data on. And even to the extent that people who were opposed to proportional systems say that well, as we’ve been discussing at least, it reduces the influence, sort of suppresses the extreme parties. But, you know, one of the big stories of the last five years or seven, eight years has been the increasing influence of the radical right on the Conservative government.

So I think, you know, we can go back and forth on this all day. And I think Robert’s made some good points about how, you know, you don’t just want these governments, they just go from coalition to coalition to coalition and nothing really gets done and the voters almost don’t have a choice anyway. So I think there are certainly arguments against proportional representation, but I think the stability versus chaos dichotomy, as it were, has proven to be a false one and either system can produce either sort of result.

Lucy Fisher
And Robert, in another recent column of yours, you’ve talked about this being centrism’s last chance with Starmer, that he needs to move fast and build things if he does win the election next week. Otherwise, the kind of the ability of mainstream parties to fend off the challenge from the more extreme wings is not gonna hold.

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, actually, I have to be fair, the move fast and build things, I have to credit to our colleague Miranda Green, who came up with that line. (Lucy laughs) I do. I think there’s . . . And this goes back to something John was talking about, which is delivery versus populism, which is actually populism is most successful when things are not being delivered. It’s not just about talking about delivery. It’s, if people in the country see a normal, mainstream government delivering for them, they feel that things are getting better, things are improving and that, you know, their own sense of identity around, you know, the job I have, the prospects for my children, the home I might, my kids might be able to afford is aligned to the country’s delivering, the country’s working — when those things fade away, then people fall back on the kind of identities the populists appeal to, how things were better before and the nostalgiaism and that kind of thing.

What worries me is that it is quite possible to see the Conservative party moving to embrace Faragism, if not Farage, and reaching the, I think, completely erroneous conclusion that the reason they will have lost so badly is because they lost all these people to Reform where in fact, the main reason is because the country decided they were no longer up to the job. But they will reach that false conclusion and that you could have a situation, quite possibly in four or five years’ time, where a Labour government hasn’t done well, is floundering and the only, all of a sudden the only viable alternative is a populist, radical right Conservative party/Reform, whatever it is.

And so I think if we have another round of, you know, what we would call a mainstream party government, and at the end of it, people are still feeling poorer — that will be in what, 2020, you know, ‘28, ‘29? And that will be nearly two decades of people feeling poorer. And that’s exactly the breeding ground where populists kick in. So I do think in a way, you know, centrism’s the last chance — I did say this and maybe that’s a little bit headliney — but I do think fundamentally, we’re not gonna be able to keep going on saying to voters, stick with ordinary politics, which isn’t working for you.

George Parker
I think the whole world will be watching what happens in Britain if Starmer wins over the next few years, precisely for the reasons Robert mentions, because we will be in a very unusual situation here of having what looks like a centre-left party run by a technocratic, sensible, moderate person, with a very large majority, surrounded by, potentially in America, a Trump presidency; potentially in France, the far right; across the whole of Europe, in fact, the right’s advancing; Germany not looking especially good at the moment either for the centre left.

And so the whole world will be watching to see whether Starmer can deliver. Now, of course, in ‘28, ‘29, it could be that everything’s gone wrong in America and the French experiment with populism, if it happens, is not going so well. And that helps to cement Starmer. But, you know, it would be fascinating to see whether he can pull it off.

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, it does come down very much to whether they can get the economy moving. Someone said to me, I thought it was a great phrase, someone said to me this week you can’t do social democracy on 1 per cent growth, you know. And that’s what Labour’s trying to do at the moment.

George Parker
And you can’t do anything on 1 per cent growth. I think that, going back to our earlier conversation about Boris Johnson, if the economy had grown at 2 per cent a year, if we hadn’t had Covid, he could have been a very successful prime minister. He could have been the Boris Johnson we knew as London mayor, feel-good Boris Johnson handing out money, building some bridges and some hospitals. One per cent growth kills you.

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Lucy Fisher
Well, that’s all we’ve got time for today, George, Robert and John, thanks for joining.

John Burn-Murdoch
Pleasure.

George Parker
Thanks, Lucy.

Robert Shrimsley
Thank you.

Lucy Fisher
And that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. We’ll be back on Friday for a round-up of the week. Do check out the free links I’ve put in the show notes. There are 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 star rating or review. Plus do leave a review or a star rating if you have time. It really does help us spread the word.

Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Persis Love with Audrey Tinline. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Original music and sound engineering by Breen Turner. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. We’ll meet again here on Friday.

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