Transcript: The scramble for a new EU leader

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘The scramble for a new EU leader’

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Wednesday, January 10th and this is your FT News Briefing. 

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Chinese companies are using repurposed chips to get around US sanctions. And the European Union is scrambling to replace Council President Charles Michel. Plus, a UK television drama has put the spotlight on injustice against Post Office workers. 

Henry Mance
I mean, it’s like, Kafkaesque. I think you enter into this situation and then you’re having to prove your innocence. You just see how you get deeper and deeper into the quicksand of it. 

Marc Filippino
I’m Marc Filippino, and here’s the news you need to start your day.

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Chinese companies are struggling to get their hands on the chips they need to develop artificial intelligence. The US has banned exports of high-performance semiconductors to the country, so these Chinese companies are now taking Nvidia graphics cards made for computer games and repurposing them. Industry experts say this strategy is a pretty rough workaround. These gaming chips have a lot of raw computing power, but they can’t do the kind of high-precision calculations that you need to train AI. As one analyst put it, it’s like using a kitchen knife to create artwork. It’s doable, but the results aren’t great. Now, I’ve never made art with a kitchen knife before, but it just goes to show how desperate Chinese companies are to find workarounds to sanctions.

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The battle for the European Union’s top job has just gotten a little bit more interesting and a little bit more high-stakes. The current European Council president, Charles Michel, announced a few days ago that he was stepping down and running for parliament. Politicians are under a lot of pressure to elect a replacement. I’m joined now by the FT’s Brussels bureau chief, Henry Foy. Hey, Henry. 

Henry Foy
Hi, Marc. 

Marc Filippino
So Henry, Michel is stepping down. What’s the process here to replace him? And why is everyone in such a hurry? 

Henry Foy
So typically what happens every five years, these three top jobs in Brussels come up. You have the European Council president, as you’ve just mentioned, Charles Michel, you have the commission president, and you have the high representative. These jobs are normally negotiated and haggled over months and months and months. And around the autumn, so three months or so after the summer elections, they’re announced as three.

What’s happened now is Charles Michel is saying he wants to run in those elections. If he wins a seat, which is very, very likely, he’ll have to step down to take his seat in mid-July. That means if they don’t have a candidate to replace him by then, under EU rules, it falls to the person who leads the country that at that point — and bear with me — holds the rotating presidency of the council of the EU. That, through a wonderful calendar quirk, is Hungary, which means if they don’t find a replacement for Charles Michel, Viktor Orbán, who’s actively campaigned against the way the EU works at current, would assume one of the most powerful jobs in the bloc. Everyone is desperate to avoid that. 

Marc Filippino
Well, OK, so if member states can’t elect someone before Michel probably takes on a new job in July, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán would automatically become council president. What would that mean for the EU? 

Henry Foy
So it’s difficult to say for sure. I mean, that role would give Viktor Orbán the ability to set the agenda for the European Council summits, the most senior decision making body in the EU. He could make sure that certain items weren’t on the agenda if he wanted, and basically just cause a fuss. He could make things very difficult to pass any kind of consensus. He could rush through certain debates or drag out others. It gives him a lot of scope if he wanted, and if he had that power to really affect the way that the Union is run. 

Marc Filippino
OK, so who might run for this position then? 

Henry Foy
So look, I mean, a health check on this — we’re six months out, there could be lots and lots of changes between now and then. But the names we’re hearing: Mario Draghi, most prominently, former Italian prime minister, former ECB president. The guy is as close as you get really to Mr Europe. He famously saved the euro during the eurozone sovereign debt crisis. Other names being floated — a lot of socialist prime ministers or former prime ministers because the socialists are likely to come second in the elections, so Mette Frederiksen, who’s the prime minister of Denmark, is being bandied about by some. Pedro Sánchez, prime minister of Spain. There will be other names that will come up, but at the moment Draghi’s the guy that a lot of the sensible people in Brussels are saying he could do this job for us. And right now we need to come up with somebody good, someone strong, someone dependable. Because if we don’t and we end up squabbling, Orbán’s gonna kind of step in and pick up the powers. 

Marc Filippino
This seems like there’s real pressure on the EU to get this right. I mean, is this kind of a make-or-break moment then for the EU? 

Henry Foy
I don’t think it’s make-or-break, Marc. You know, ultimately, Viktor Orbán is a member of the EU. You know, if they’re too scared to let him have more power, they should probably think about whether or not they want him in the club. Nobody’s getting to the point where they think Hungary should be expelled. I think people are taking this pragmatically and saying, OK, this is a reason to do this properly and to get this wrapped up nice and early. Let’s get a good candidate we all agree on and just make sure it’s solid. So I don’t think we’re in a territory of like, oh, if the EU doesn’t fix this, it’s in major trouble. It’s more that, OK, we have to take this seriously. 

Marc Filippino
Henry Foy is the FT’s Brussels bureau chief. Thanks, Henry. 

Henry Foy
Thanks a lot, Marc. 

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Marc Filippino
A true-life TV drama about the Post Office has gotten audiences hooked across the UK. 

Clip from Mr Bates vs the Post Office
We’re fighting a war against an enemy owned by the British government, while we’re just skint little people. 

Marc Filippino
The show is called Mr Bates vs the Post Office, and it tells the story of an old scandal where Post Office workers were wrongfully prosecuted. Now elected officials from all parties are calling for justice. Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer, and he joins me now to talk about the scandal. Hey Henry, thanks for joining us. 

Henry Mance
Hey, Mark. Good to be here. 

Marc Filippino
All right. So first give me the background to the real scandal behind the TV series. 

Henry Mance
So over 20 years ago, the Post Office implemented a new IT system to record all the transactions made in its branches, thousands of them, around the country. And pretty soon a small number of post offices started to see real discrepancies between what they thought their figures were and what the figures were actually coming out as. And unfortunately for them, their contract said if there’s a cash shortfall, you make up for it. And so it ended up in a real Kafkaesque situation where these postmasters were accused of fraud or theft. They pleaded guilty because they didn’t know how they could contest what this computer system was telling them. They lost their businesses, they lost their work, in many cases suffered very serious health consequences. A small number of these sub-postmasters killed themselves as a result of the stress of this situation. And it took many, many years of campaigning for the truth to come out for the Post Office, which is the organisation that really was responsible, to admit that they had not in fact found fraud among their employees. And it’s now widely called the widest miscarriage of justice in Britain in the 21st century. 

Marc Filippino
Now all this is recounted in the TV series, but like you said, the scandal happened a while ago and it isn’t a secret or anything. So why do you think this show has resonated with the public now? 

Henry Mance
Right. I mean, it’s an amazing David vs Goliath tale, but it was actually about a slightly arcane bit of accounting and it didn’t come to life for people. And here you have it on the screen, and it stops being a question of accounting, and it starts really being about the emotional toll, the human toll. And I think also there’s a mood in Britain at the moment that things don’t work, that whether we’re talking about electricity companies or we’re talking about sewage companies, that they’re not doing the jobs on behalf of ordinary people that they were set up to do and that is expected of them. And so it’s really another example of feeling that there’s a system out there that is amorphous, that has very bureaucratic processes, and that if you get wrapped up in it, as some of these sub-postmasters did, you will really struggle to clear your name and it may have a huge personal toll on you. 

Marc Filippino
So how are politicians responding to this public attention? 

Henry Mance
Right. The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has said that he wants to make sure that compensation for the victims of this miscarriage of justice, that that compensation comes much sooner. And he’s told his justice secretary to work out ways of making sure that those who were criminally convicted are exonerated much more quickly. There’s also an ongoing public inquiry, and I think there’s real urgency about more questions being asked of the companies involved. So you see this huge sort of head of steam build up to try and get some kind of result. 

Marc Filippino
Yeah, after all these years. But I’m wondering, Henry, do you think the huge public scrutiny of the way the scandal was handled will have long-term repercussions on how things are done in Britain, not just at the Post Office, but more broadly? 

Henry Mance
I think the real problem is that if you talk to lawyers who are involved in the Post Office scandal, and in representing the victims of that, they would say, look, the justice system in Britain has become so underfunded. You know, the odds are weighted so much against the little guy that there could be lots of these miscarriages of justice. And what it requires is more diligent campaigning, more willingness on politicians to hear out the complaints of ordinary campaigners. So I think what we are more likely to see is a whole number of other campaigns being shone light on. I think that could be the legacy of this. 

Marc Filippino
Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer. Thanks, Henry. 

Henry Mance
Thank you. 

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Marc Filippino
You can read more on all of these stories at FT.com for free when you click the links in our show notes. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Make sure you check back tomorrow for the latest business news. 

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