Transcript: Destination Rwanda?

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Destination Rwanda?’

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Lucy Fisher
What next for Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda bill? I’m Lucy Fisher. This is Political Fix from the FT. And with me in the studio today are Political Fix regulars FT columnist Miranda Green. Hi, Miranda.

Miranda Green
Hello, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
I feel we’ve not been in the studio of late. I’m so happy to see you.

Miranda Green
It’s been such a long time, I know. Thank you for having me back.

Lucy Fisher
And Stephen Bush. Hi, Stephen.

Stephen Bush
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
We’ll be joined later by the FT’s Peter Foster. He’ll be here to tell us more about his scoop on the dire state of the finances of many British universities. But first, the rollercoaster of the Rwanda bill. After victory in the House of Commons, Rishi Sunak is adamant that the Lords will not thwart his plans.

Rishi Sunak in audio clip
There is now only one question: will the opposition in the appointed House of Lords try and frustrate the will of the people, as expressed by the elected House, or will they get on board and do the right thing? It’s as simple as that.

Lucy Fisher
Right. Well, I wanna throw forward and talk about where this bill goes next, but let’s just recap where we are, Miranda. He did get the bill through the Commons unamended, but not unscathed. You know, we saw 11 Tory MPs rebel against it, vote against it, a three-line whip, a flagship government policy. We saw two deputy Tory chairmen have to quit and another ministerial bag carrier in the business and trade department. This is problematic, isn’t it? It’s not been a good week for him, even though the headlines have been pretty good saying revolt melts away.

Miranda Green
Yeah, I completely agree with your summary. His authority is really badly dented. And I think there’s a kind of attrition that happens in politics when a leader sort of has to keep going back and having these negotiations, then sort of defiant stance against their own backbenchers and then squeaking it through. Every time that happens, you kind of sacrifice a bit of your political capital. And you know, Sunak, I think, although he has absolutely got his bill through the Commons, is damaged by the experience.

And actually, he gave this quite strange press conference the morning after the bill survived. And in a sense, it was trying to do two things really badly. And I thought it was a really good example of where it left Sunak’s leadership. And he was both trying to kind of revisit, as we heard in that clip, the kind of Brexit language of the will of the people — you know, the unelected peers who were very reminiscent of, you know, those front pages accusing the courts of being the enemies of the people and the kind of populist rhetoric that Boris Johnson’s team used in the final stages of the Brexit fight.

But at the same time, he also sounded quite sort of robotic and weakened in terms of his voice, his projection of his own power in a sort of almost a kind of Theresa May-type feel about it. I don’t know if you shared that sort of view, but repeating lines endlessly ad nauseam, we’ll stick to the plan, stick to the plan, a bit like Mrs May’s “Nothing has changed, nothing has changed”. And you know, there is this weird atmosphere in politics where you can just almost visibly see people’s authority start to sort of bleed away from them. And it does feel like that with Sunak. So you’re absolutely right.

The bill is through. It’s not out of the weeds yet. He’s not home dry in any sense because it’s got to try and get through the House of Lords, where there are loads of lawyers who are really upset about this idea of the UK contravening international agreements. So it will go probably go backwards and forwards between the Lords and the Commons again. But also, I think you’re right. Politically, this is a problem for him. Even though there’s weird groups of rebels on the right who call themselves the “Five Families” in that weird kind of Mafia language, they did sort of melt away and agree to do as the police required them to do on the night.

Lucy Fisher
There’s loads to unpick there, and I want to come back to what those rightwing rebels might plot next. And as it happens, I do agree with you that Sunak was very robotic in that press conference and saying some of those lines, which clearly, debut of campaign slogans, without a lot of conviction. Stick to the plan . . . 

Miranda Green
So scripted, didn’t you think, in a way that doesn’t go over well.

Lucy Fisher
And this idea of, you know, back to square one. For me doesn’t wash. It also doesn’t make sense to me. In what way would we go backwards? Stephen, keen for your reflections on that, but also throwing forward, what do you think is gonna happen in the House of Lords? You know, it’s gonna be a couple of weeks yet till it’s introduced. And we know that timing is of urgency for Sunak to try and get this bill through, get flights off the ground. Can you give us a sense of the sequencing of how long things are gonna take?

Stephen Bush
Well, timing wise, I mean, and to be honest this links back to the some of the problems with Rishi Sunak’s press conference, right? Nothing much of interest will happen in the House of Lords. There may be a single “Are you sure about this Lords amendment?” then will be sent back, what we call ping-pong between the the two houses when, you know, the House of Lords puts an amendment in, the House of Commons, takes it back out. But it will not be an extended round of ping-pong if there is any changes at all, you know. So the Labour party in the Lords will let it pass, because it’s obviously in their strategic interest to be able to say, you know, you’ve spent X number of hours, X number of money and the only people you’ve successfully sent to Rwanda are government ministers, right?

And that was actually not just the problem with Rishi Sunak’s press conference, say, but in general, the problem with a lot of what Rishi Sunak does politically — and this was true when he was fighting Liz Truss, and it’s true when he fights Keir Starmer — is this seems to be a man who doesn’t ever sit down and work out that his opponents will try and win too. So he kind of continually goes like, hey guys, can we talk about my glass jaw some more? Obviously, the House of Lords is not going to block this for loads of reasons.

Lucy Fisher
OK, but bear with me, indulge me. Let’s just pause for a moment on what we think the Lords will do, because I think there are people like Alex Carlile, senior barrister, who, you know, are concerned that this is contrary to international law. It also wasn’t in the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto, which means the peers do have a little bit more manoeuvre room to play with this and try and amend this.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. And I think if there is a silver lining, it will be that the civic society, as it were, appointees to the House of Lords, former counterterror people, you know, people who are there because of their service to the legal profession, some former Conservative ministers will want to amend and weaken it.

Lucy Fisher
And some of those experts are cross-benchers. So I think they have a sort of special respect for many members of the public, because they’re not seen to be playing political games in the same way, are they?

Stephen Bush
Yeah. And I think it also, it’s hard to suggest that some of these cross-benchers, you know, don’t care about the security of the country. Many of them on that aspect have much more impressive CVs than the the Lords ministers from the government will have, let alone than the one that the prime minister’s. I mean, I was talking to someone who’s relatively recently become a working peer, and they were saying the thing which is wonderful about it, but also terrifying, is they said, yeah, you know, when you’re giving your speech, someone will stand up and then go, well, actually, when I helped write that or actually when I was, you know, in charge of that.

So all of that will be difficult and kind of personally conflicting for some of the ministers putting it through the House. But I actually think, you know, the Lords arena is going to be much more difficult for the main opposition than it will be for the government, because, simply put, they will be attacked from their left for facilitating it. Passing; then of course, once it passed, of course, then the question of flights, whether or not they’re actually gonna take off, the various flaws in the bill become more of a problem. It becomes a government issue.

But I think really, actually, the most interesting thing in the Lords will be how the Greens try and finesse their criticism of Labour, because they, of course, will vote against it at every stage and the, you know, Labour peers will do what they have tended to do, which is basically amend and then acquiesce.

Lucy Fisher
Well, I think that’s really interesting and quite an unorthodox take in some ways, that the Lords stage will be more complicated or difficult for Labour than the government. Miranda, you’re dying to get in. Do you agree with that?

Miranda Green
Well, no. I mean, I think in terms of what will happen, it’s absolutely on the money. And in fact, I was talking to a member of the House Lords recently who said, well, of course Sunak will get his bill. And as Stephen said, you know, Labour will have to facilitate it and there’ll be some political embarrassment there.

But I think we might be underplaying the problems for Sunak on the way to that, because, you know, as we’ve discussed, having this fight over a policy that’s gone badly wrong and where he has backed himself into a corner of his own volition, draws attention not just to those power and authority issues we were discussing, but also to what a bad strategist he is. You know, this is like a game of chess where he can’t see the next step, let alone the end of the game and how it might conclude. But, I mean, I would say his opponents in the Tory party also suffer from that. I mean, what rebels this week thought they were going to achieve it is impossible to tell. What did they think was gonna happen?

Stephen Bush
Oh no, no. You see, it’s a genius plan to resign on the Tuesday or to abstain on the Wednesday.

Miranda Green
Madness. And if they push their point, then get a general election that they don’t want to have now. It’s crazy.

Stephen Bush
What you don’t understand is, voters really don’t like parties that have failed to stop the boats, but they love parties that have failed to stop the boats but have got their internal divides up in everyone’s business, tedious push notifications from the BBC about MPs you’ve never heard of during your evening shop, right? Voters love that. (Lucy and Miranda laugh) They’re really fond of it. And it’s actually really clever to wound but not kill a prime minister who you have no, literally no method . . . There is no process for the rebels to get rid of Rishi Sunak, right?

Lucy Fisher
So you think that Lee Anderson is a genius here by resigning, in order to back an amendment to the bill that didn’t pass, but then abstaining on the final vote rather than voting against it and joining the most hardline right?

Stephen Bush
Yeah. Machiavelli had nothing on this guy. (Miranda laughs)

Lucy Fisher
OK. We’ve gotta come back to Lee in another episode. Miranda, so let’s imagine we do see Sunak get the bill through the Lords with a battle that might yet cause problems for Labour. Is he gonna get flights off the ground in any significant number? What about the role that the civil service have been put in here? Because one part of this, I think, has not been discussed enough, is the fact that Matthew Rycroft, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, has had to amend civil service guidance instructing officials now to ignore international law, ignore these Rule 39 orders from Strasbourg judges ordering flights to be grounded or removals to be deferred. If a minister decides that is the direction they want to go, that does put, you know, officials in a fairly invidious position as Dave Penman, the head of the FDA union that represents officials, has said, doesn’t it?

Miranda Green
Well, yes, it does. And you would have thought that a kind of baseline assumption for the UK is that everyone involved in the process of government obeys the law. So, yes, that is kind of a moment to mark that that’s been diverged from. And I think also as well as that on a sort of global level, you’ve got the spectacle of Paul Kagame of Rwanda himself saying this UK business can’t drag on forever, and maybe we should just let you have your money back because, you know, as you’ve said in your stories this week, they’ve already had £240mn of UK government funds. There’s another £50mn, I think, to come. And if Kagame himself is running out of patience with the plan, you can see how the whole thing sort of unravels. So it’s extremely questionable whether anybody will ever be sent to Rwanda under this scheme.

Lucy Fisher
And may I say, I thought, very notable for me one of the headlines from that news conference he gave was his refusal to put a date on any flights taking off.

Miranda Green
Absolutely. So it’s become a sort of symbolic policy in every sense. And the problem is it’s a policy that symbolises his lack of grip over a topic. And it’s very interesting also on this question of how important immigration is to the voting public. Clearly the spectacle of people dying at sea is intolerable. And so the problem does need solutions. But in terms of kind of automatically thinking that a certain set of voters are so anti-immigration that they will back anything because it’s about immigration is extremely sort of politically crude.

Lucy Fisher
OK, so big headache for Sunak. Stephen, can I put to you, my thought is if — and it is a big if — even one flight gets off the ground to Rwanda, it then becomes a problem for Labour, doesn’t it? Because the question will immediately be right, there are now asylum seekers in Rwanda. What would Labour do? And I think if Starmer to say, well, we’ll bring those people back to the UK, that will be anathema to those people very concerned about legal migration, the idea of bringing more asylum seekers on shore, even if it’s a handful, I think will go down badly.

And if he says, well, we’ll see, all those people will stay in Rwanda for the time being. That’s an implicit acknowledgment or acceptance, isn’t it, from him that Rwanda is a safe country and therefore, you know, asylum seekers can be removed there? And I just think were he to end a policy that is actually under way rather than theoretical, it would be a gift to the Tory right to say, well, look, you know, we had it up and running, but it wasn’t given any time to sort of see if the deterrent effect worked. Labour kind of crushed it out. They’re not serious about dealing with this problem of our borders and illegal migration.

Stephen Bush
So I struggle with it, partly because, to be honest, I find the hypothetical so hard to believe (Lucy laughs) that you know, it’s a little bit like if I were to win the London Marathon, what would that mean for my life? I think, so you can see that the Labour party has consciously shifted from going, it won’t work, which was their preferred argument for a long time. They kind of didn’t want to get into the specifics of, you know, is it any good or not?

Lucy Fisher
And is it ethical.

Stephen Bush
And is it ethical. To a more “We just don’t like the policy and it’s a waste of money” position. Now, of course, that is a position with, as you say, risks. However, broadly speaking, I just don’t really believe that a day in which the word Rwanda scheme is anywhere in British public life is now good for the Conservative party.

The big question in terms of the polls at the moment is not will there be a Labour government? It’s, can the Conservative party avoid a historically bad defeat by getting that group of don’t knows. So when we look at their sort of issues profile of fairly obviously traditional Conservative voters and then people who say they’re going to vote reform, but then in every election they seem to just stay at home. Can they get those people to vote Conservative? And I think that it probably would help the Conservative party as a message to get those voters to come home rather than stay home if they can say the Labour party would stop or reverse an actual flight.

Lucy Fisher
Interesting. On the subject of polls, just a final word from you, Miranda. On that Monday morning splash on the Daily Telegraph, the Tories’ home journal, saying that the party’s headed for a ’97-style wipeout; that, you know, Labour’s on track for an 120-seat majority, that every seat won across the red wall from Labour in 2019 would be lost. Eleven cabinet ministers will lose their seats instead of Jeremy Hunt. What have you detected about the psychological impact that MRP, that huge poll of 14,000 voters, has had on the party?

Miranda Green
Well, there’s a wonderful way in which, you know, three-letter acronyms and, you know, the talking up of some polls is more scientific than others does spook people in politics.

Lucy Fisher
But can you remember what MRP stands for?

Miranda Green
No, I absolutely can’t. It’s a bit like that Monty Python sketch where they say, bring in the machine that goes ping, you know, and it just makes people sort of believe in the science more. And I say that because the polling aside, the way that the Telegraph, as you say, very important with the Tory audience, used the data to tell a story around Sunak’s disastrous leadership, I think is really significant because they’re painting the Conservative leader as doomed and as taking his troops, you know, over the trench into the line of fire in a way that will result in a massacre. And I think that’s incredibly bad psychologically for the Conservative party where they are now.

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Lucy Fisher
We heard this week in an FT scoop that university finances are in a terrible state, with many of them at risk of falling into deficit. Peter Foster, the FT’s public policy editor, is here to tell us more. Hi, Peter.

Peter Foster
Hi.

Lucy Fisher
You’ve spoken to the boss of the sector’s main lobby group, who blames it on the sharp decline in foreign students. She said that many of them had been put off by the government’s hostile rhetoric. Tell us a bit more about that, and how much international students — perhaps weakening demand there — is putting the sector in jeopardy.

Peter Foster
So there are a bunch of factors going on here. There’s been a currency crisis in Nigeria. You’ve seen the government wrapping international students into the migration debate, some kind of quite hostile policy moves to remove the right of actually only master’s students to bring their dependants, their family members — undergraduates never could. But all of that signal gets picked up in big markets like India. So you look at the Indian press, you see those stories picked up and amplified. And you ally that to the fact that some of the data show that particularly from India to Nigeria to big markets, really surprising drop-offs, and that has spooked the sector.

So Vivienne Stern — who you mentioned, the head of UUK, which is the big sector lobby group, 140 of the universities — giving us some really strong quotes telling the government to back off, to stop sending out these very negative signals about the sector, which on the one hand, the government lionises by saying science superpower, more Nobels than any other sector, look at us, rah rah rah. But on the next minute it’s blaming the sector for being flabby, low-value courses, too many migrants, we need to keep migrants down, etc. There’s very mixed messages.

And I think the second piece of the puzzle is that the UK sector is increasingly reliant. So 20% of its income now comes from international students. Home fees, the £9,250, have been frozen effective for a decade. And that was kind of OK ‘til inflation came along. But suddenly costs are going up, but prices are flat. And so the sector estimates that those fees are now worth about £6,000 in real terms. So they’re running a £2,500, £3,000 loss on every single student. So they have to go to the international sector to get foreign fees to cross-subsidise. So on the one hand, they can’t put their price up. On the other hand, their other route, which is international students, is being hit by this anti-government rhetoric and by a tightening international market.

That’s another piece of the puzzle, is that we saw a big growth during the pandemic because we kept our borders more open. And the US and Australia, two big competitive markets, and Canada shut their markets down much harder than we did. And so when those markets opened up and our universities were competing with US, Australia and Canada again, they’ve also found that they were losing out students to those markets. You put all that together and it’s a tough picture for the universities.

Lucy Fisher
And just how tough . . . let’s just drill into that. Are there universities at risk of going bust, do you think?

Peter Foster
Well, there’s a really interesting question. The answer to your question is yes, there are universities at risk of going bust. You hear on the grapevine that at least one is in talks with the government. The bigger question is, would the government allow a big university to go bust? In theory, the answer to the question is yes. When the sector was opened up and commercialised, the idea was there would be moral hazard; that the market could take over and that a university that wasn’t performing would go bust.

I think that’s an interesting question, because a big university is often a big employer in a local area, has a large estate, lots of buildings. Would the government actually let one go bust? Because the one that’s going to go bust is most likely, you know, it’s not gonna be Oxford and Cambridge or York. It’s gonna be a university that’s lower down the food chain, probably a university that has a lot of students who go to university for the first time — I think socially very difficult to shut it down. What do you do with the faculty? In theory, the university is supposed to have plans to place all the students in other universities. They’re supposed to have a plan to do that. What would you do if a big university shut down? Where would those kids go? What would it say to the rest of the world about the viability and the strength of the UK sector?

So I think that is a question that the government may find itself confronted with over the next 12 months if more can’t be done to prop the sector up. My personal bet is, and this goes against what ministers will privately tell you, no, no we’ll let one fall over if we have to. But would they really? I don’t know, I have my doubts. Miranda’s probably got views on that, but I have my doubts.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah. Let’s hear it from you, Miranda.

Miranda Green
Yeah. No, I completely agree. I think they feel they have to say, hold that line because of the moral hazard point. But actually, what people are really talking about is will there be quite a lot of mergers. And that could be merging courses but it could also be merging institutions because we’ve actually already had examples, particularly in the larger city regions, or very successful university mergers. You can rationalise that way.

I mean, where I really strongly agree with Peter is that if institutions do go under, or even if whole courses go under, it’s gonna be the ones in third-tier organisations, which are actually in some cases very highly rated, excellent courses where they’re already having to make two-thirds of the academic staff redundant because they haven’t got the students in there because the students have all been admitted to higher-up-the-food-chain institutions that have relaxed their entry requirements to get their hands on more fee income.

So there’s been a kind of terrible shakedown already in the sector. And I spoke to somebody who said they thought there were five to eight universities in trouble. Lots of people getting in touch with me saying they’re having to interview for their own jobs again in departments under pressure.

Peter Foster
Actually the the bigger problem here is that as this stuff feeds through, it’s probably not big institutions falling over making front page headlines. It’s about bigger class sizes, less professors per student, actually even quite, you know, towards the top end. I talked to a professor at a very prestigious university who said he was marking 80 essays this year, not 30 that he was doing five years ago.

So when you’re relying on international fees — and they’re expensive — you have to remember that EU students now, and international students, they have a choice, right? And if the student experience starts to deteriorate here because of essentially everyone stretching their budgets, that will feed into the system, you know. So you don’t get away with it now. It’s the social media. There’s all sorts of ranking sites that people go to.

Lucy Fisher
And it harms the reputation of the sector and beats a story we worked on together last week was around York University lowering the entry requirements for some overseas students, allowing people in to do undergraduate courses with BBC grades at A-level or equivalent, allowing people in to do postgrad courses with 2:2 degrees in the undergraduate. But that was only lowering it for overseas students. So there is a political dimension here that we could see a backlash from voters, from UK citizens that they are, you know, being discriminated against in favour of these international students who pay higher fees.

Peter Foster
Yeah, absolutely right. And actually, those narratives are already gathering force, and they’re gonna get bigger because of the demographic bulge that’s coming through. So about 750,000 18-year-olds trying to get a place at university this year, it’ll be a million by 2030.

The university sector would say without international students, you don’t have universities, you know. So it’s no good attacking international students cause they’re literally keeping the show on the road.

So if you’re not prepared to pay higher fees or at least start to index-link the £9,250 to inflation, and you’re not prepared to allow us to attract international students by putting in all these hostile policies, if you’re not gonna help us in that regard, then you have to let us go somewhere, right?

And I do think that there needs to be a much more open debate about what you do about the sector, because it’s one of the jewels in the crown, one of the few things that actually goes well in the United Kingdom at the moment.

Lucy Fisher
Yes. And you point out Sunak, you know, talks about the UK being an R&D superpower. This completely underpins that. The question I want to ask you is what would be different under Labour?

Peter Foster
Oh, there’s a good question because Labour doesn’t really wanna bite the tuition fee bullet. I think you would see some different things going on under Labour. I think, I mean, Stephen would have views about this, but I think Labour will try and make better access to maintenance loans — which haven’t kept up with inflation — to enable kids from less advantaged backgrounds to afford to go to university. Because right now, with the cost of living crisis, the maintenance loans, even for those that qualify for the full loans, aren’t covering the full show. So I think you can do that around the edges.

But fundamentally, the Labour party is gonna have to face the fact that it can’t do nothing. It won’t get to the end of the five-year parliamentary term, in my view, without doing something more fundamental to address the problems. And I’ve spoken to university vice chancellors with good connections with Labour, who do think they will see stuff in the first spending review that will address this problem. Whether that’s over-optimistic or not, I don’t know.

Lucy Fisher
Well, should we ask Stephen?

Stephen Bush
So the thing is, when you talk to people in the Labour party, they also give the oh well, we you know, we thought a lot about what would happen if, you know, a university keels over in our first couple of weeks in office. And then they also talk about, oh well, the important thing would be finding places for students. I just think the contagion among lots of Labour MPs, if a Labour government went, we’re willing for these institutions to fail because it’s not just safe Labour seats. If you think about the seats that a Labour government would have had to win, people are not gonna be relaxed, you know, about if you’re, you know, the MP for the Stokes constituencies or Stafford about the idea that you just let anchor institutions go to the wall.

But of course, for all the reasons you set out, the Labour party is privately very divided over tuition fees and also the other policy challenge here is broadly speaking, British students are now choosing more expensive courses than they used to. British students are taking Stem courses more than they used to. And essentially the way, you know, in the period when the £9k was actually worth what it was in 2012. One of the things that happened was arts courses cross-subsidised Stem courses. There are fewer and fewer arts courses to the subsidy. So mostly in the Labour party you hear very similar things to what you hear from Conservative politicians about how, you know, but . . . 

Peter Foster
But higher education is a public good, right? That’s the other thing here, right. If you treat it like a market, except they can’t put the prices up. And then you know, say well, you’re gonna fail, you’re gonna fall over. Well, in a competitive world, you’d be able to put your prices up.

But then also at some level, we’ve stopped thinking of higher education university as a public good, right? If we wanna live in a knowledge economy, if we wanna have a workforce that’s fit for Keir Starmer’s fastest growth in the G7 supply side, etc, the government at some level is gonna have to think about what it wants to contribute, and so is industry in business, right? So the sector will also say, actually we want, you know, to think about the ways in which industry, who receive these graduates, who make money for these graduates also contribute. But right now it’s become a very much kind of disgruntled consumer conversation where actually the country needs this sector to work.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah. Miranda?

Miranda Green
I think that they don’t have an answer to the tuition fee question, the student finance question in the Labour party, which has been a nightmare for every single political party that’s touched it, as we know. But I think they do have a completely different philosophical take on what universities are there for and their role, as Peter said and as Stephen has said, as regional engines of economic prosperity.

Lucy Fisher
Last word to you, Pete.

Peter Foster
I agree with all of that, and I hope that Labour has the courage to detoxify the debate, because I think the really sad thing that’s happened . . . The bonkers thing, in my view, that’s been allowed to happen, is that the universities have become a pawn in the kind of culture war, and that is incredibly shortsighted and destructive. You see pieces in the Daily Telegraph saying the best thing would be happen if the sector fell over. You know, actually, young people want to go to university, right? The people sitting around saying, oh, everyone’s fed up with university low-value courses. They’re all old people, right? We want our kids to go to university. Well, guess what? So do everyone else want their kids to go to university.

Lucy Fisher
Well, I think that speaks to a theme you tackled this week in your excellent column, Stephen, about the UK not necessarily valuing the things it’s good at. Peter Foster, thanks for joining.

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Peter Foster
My pleasure.

Lucy Fisher
Well, there’s just time left for the Political Fix stock picks. Miranda, who are you buying or selling?

Miranda Green
Well, I’m gonna sell Humza Yousaf, the first minister of Scotland, leader of the SNP. Not only is he unbelievably beleaguered by all the scandals he’s inherited from the Nicola Sturgeon era, but also, he’s just given an interview in which he says that he’s even doubtful about the word national in the name, in his party’s name, Scottish National party. I mean, you know what he means, right? It’s nationalism has bad associations, but maybe they should all think about a bit more about that. I think this attempt to portray Scottish nationalism as civic nationalism or I suppose, “cuddly nationalism”, even he might have come up with against the idea that it’s a bit of a tricky one to pull off.

Lucy Fisher
Great. I think a few other us have also sold him in recent weeks and months. His share price continues to tumble. Stephen?

Stephen Bush
So I’m going to sell James Cleverly. As listeners will know, I have a lot of James Cleverly in my portfolio, and I’m afraid I have to announce a major writedown of the future value of the stock. Now, there are a variety of reasons. The biggest, of course, is he is now home secretary. And I think what we’ve seen over the course of this week is essentially anyone who either voluntarily — Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman or involuntarily — James Cleverly — comes into contact with the Rwanda policy, ie, it’s a form of leadership kryptonite. I basically think every single person who’s had a named walk-on role in the last week of Conservative intrigue, their political prospects have sharply deteriorated. So, yeah, I’m afraid I’m just dumping all of my James Cleverly stock. Taking the “L”, I am accepting that, you know, I’m asking for sympathy in a difficult time for the Bush trading fund.

Miranda Green
How about you, Lucy?

Lucy Fisher
I’m buying Rachel Reeves. I’m pretty sure I already have her in my portfolio, but she’s been at Davos on the magic mountain this week, and in a really sassy move, she’s had this kind of West Coast VC tech bro breakfast with Andreessen Horowitz. I think that’s how you pronounce the name of this venture capital firm. And in particular, that will really sting for Rishi Sunak, because he’s been super proud that he’s managed to persuade them to choose London as the new outpost for their overseas office. And I think the fact that she’s been chowing down on croissants in the mountains will be something that really gets under his skin in Downing Street.

Miranda Green
It goes down really badly with the Labour left, doesn’t it, seeing their leadership at Davos, but it’s obviously, the sensible thing to do, sensible place to be.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah. Well, is it? I’m struck, I don’t know about you, that Kemi Badenoch had decided not to go, I think as business secretary, quite a curious move, but maybe I thought she might be thinking the same thing if she has her eyes on the prize of the leadership, that it doesn’t look too good to be hobnobbing with the global elite.

Miranda Green
Well, when you’re on the way up, networking is absolutely crucial, isn’t it? Maybe we should say unkindly, on the way down. (Lucy laughs) It might not be the same set of calculations.

Lucy Fisher
Slash and burn. Miranda. Stephen, thanks for joining.

Miranda Green
Thank you.

Stephen Bush
Bye!

Lucy Fisher
That’s it for now. My thanks to Miranda Green, Stephen Bush and Peter Foster. Political Fix is presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and was produced this week by Philippa Goodrich. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. Music and audio mix by Breen Turner. The FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. We’ll meet again here next week.

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