Is Rishi Sunak’s net zero U-turn a vote-winner?

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Is Rishi Sunak’s net zero U-turn a vote-winner?’

Jim Pickard
The reality on the ground is that the car industry is still being forced within six years from today to make 80 per cent of the cars they sell in Britain be electric cars.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lucy Fisher
Welcome to Political Fix, your essential insider guide to Westminster from the Financial Times with me, Lucy Fisher. You heard there the FT’s Jim Pickard talking about how the UK’s car industry could be affected by Rishi Sunak’s net zero U-turn. More from him later. For now, I’m joined in the studio by the FT’s Robert Shrimsley. Hi, Robert.

Robert Shrimsley
Hi, Lucy.

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

George Parker
Hi, Lucy.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lucy Fisher
Thanks both for joining. So we’re gonna talk this week about Rishi Sunak’s surprise U-turn on some of his key net zero policies. But first, let’s just hear a clip from Sunak himself from that hastily arranged press conference on Wednesday.

Rishi Sunak
We seem to have defaulted to an approach which will impose unacceptable costs on hard-pressed British families, costs that no one was ever really told about and which may not actually be necessary to deliver the emissions reduction that we need.

Lucy Fisher
So first, let’s just recap quickly for listeners exactly what he has announced. He said he will push back the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030-35. He’s pushed back a ban on new oil boilers. He’s introduced exemptions for an existing target ban for new gas boilers. George, let’s start with you. I want to move to talk about the political fallout here. What is Sunak’s calculation with voters? It seems to me that he is trying to balance off appearing pragmatic on the side of those worried about the cost of living, particularly in the red wall. And I was struck in his speech, he mentioned a household in Darlington as a key example of the people he was trying to help. And of course, this allows him to present himself as a change candidate, a break from the past. Is this a gamble that’s gonna work in electoral terms?

George Parker
Well, the first thing to say, of course, is this has nothing to do with politics, Lucy, (Lucy laughs) you understand that, obviously. As the prime minister repeatedly said, this is all about making tough decisions in the long-term interests of the country and being honest with the people in brackets in a way that his predecessor, Boris Johnson, wasn’t, and setting arbitrary targets, for example, on climate change, in this case.

What he’s trying to do is to do two things at the same time. One thing is, I think, a genuine attempt by Rishi Sunak to address serious issues facing the country and you know, we’ve been discussing on the podcast before the HS2 decision and the possibility he might scrap that; reforms to education, possibly, and so forth. So I think he does look at this and think, hang on a sec, some of these targets that Boris Johnson set on the boilers, for example, are just not feasible or they’re gonna place too much of a burden on people.

But the massive but, of course, is it’s intensely political because what he’s doing at the same time as saying it’s all high-level stuff, he’s setting a short-term political trap for the Labour party. He wants to put himself on the side of hardworking families struggling with their bills, and he wants to present the Labour party as being on some sort of, I think the words of Michael Gove, some sort of religious crusade on the environment, eco-zealots who are putting their fanaticism about the climate ahead of the interests of ordinary working voters. So that’s what he’s trying to do. He sort of presented it rather well given the chaotic circumstances in which the press conference was held and the fact the story had leaked. But in the end, I think the public will take away from it, whether it’s for good or ill, for the Conservatives, that Rishi Sunak doesn’t care quite as much about the environment as the Labour party.

Lucy Fisher
So Robert, what do you think about how this has landed? What does it mean for potential swing voters who are young, who are more liberally minded, perhaps more prosperous, have the money to make some of these green changes?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, the first thing says it’s not aimed at those people. If you are deeply, deeply signed up to net zero, Rishi Sunak isn’t going for your vote. This is aimed . . . 

Lucy Fisher
And just to ask you, what, he’s already lost those people or he’ll offer them something else?

Robert Shrimsley
I think pretty much, yes. On the politics of this, this I think is a measure which a) brings some heart to the troublesome right in his own party. He gets them off his back for a while, b) gives him an area to fight on, which ever since that Uxbridge by-election, they’ve been spoiling for this fight and c) I think this is a measure that moves people from grumbling, you know, angry Tories; might move some of them out of the don’t know and abstention and voting for reform UK column and back into the Conservative column. And that’s important when you’re as far behind in the polls as him. If they get over time some of those back, the polls narrow a bit, that will give them heart, will bother Labour. I mean, I was very struck in his presentation when he talked about, you know, the two extremists. On the one side you have climate change deniers and on the other side you have the Labour party. So, you know, clearly the framing of this argument is intensely political.

But there is the practical part of this goes to the politics, too, because in one part, Rishi Sunak is clearly right that these targets were beginning to become impractical and unachievable. You know, the EV target is six years away, just about. So they weren’t achievable given the amount of work that’s been done on infrastructure. So there was a deep problem there. And what he’s sort of saying is I’m the guy who does the practical. I’m the prime minister who says we only do things once, we can make them work. So I thought that pitch was quite sensible and quite clever, and I thought it had potential to work with a lot of voters with the one caveat that it exposes them to the question, well, you’ve been in charge for the last 13 years and this has been your policy for quite a long time. So if the work has not been done to make this happen, who exactly are you blaming?

Lucy Fisher
Well, seems to me he’s quite clearly blaming Boris Johnson. Very thinly veiled.

Robert Shrimsley
He’s Boris Johnson’s chancellor. He hasn’t done enough work yet to separate himself from his Conservative predecessors. He hasn’t thus far succeeded in saying convincing to the public, I’m not the same kind of Conservative leader that you’ve had all these last years. So I think he’s simply the heir to all of them. I don’t think he can cut himself adrift from them.

George Parker
Lucy, you made the point about him wanting to be the change candidate. And I think we’ve only just started this week to see the beginning of a complete and utter, you know, carpet-bombing of the Boris Johnson reputation. There’s an extraordinary interview this weekend by Suella Braverman, the home secretary on the Today programme from Radio 4, where she was talking about the targets, which at that point were still the government’s targets. And they’ve been set, as Robert is saying, when Rishi Sunak was the chancellor exchequer, which she said were going to bankrupt Britain. They were arbitrary, they were punitive. She was describing the government’s own policy.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah.

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah, but don’t you think he’s been, I mean, he’s been prime minister for a year. If you’re going to be the change prime minister, you have to start that change when you come in.

Lucy Fisher
Well, in Downing Street, I think the argument made by some of his aides, some of his allies in the parliamentary party is that heretofore he’s been constrained by circumstances — Ukraine war, the sort of the aftermath of Covid — and that actually, he hasn’t been able to govern according to his natural ideological proclivities. You know, he’s not sort of pro-big state. He’s not been pro this green stuff. And there are now sort of allies of his pointing to a letter he sent while chancellor pushing back on some of Boris Johnson’s green measures. So I think you’re right, Robert. For me, it’s still up in the air whether he can convincingly present himself as the change candidate. But I think as George says as well, this is the moment where we are seeing, as one ally put it to me earlier, you know, the gloves come off. He feels the sense that he’s freed up now. He’s a bit fired up. His back’s against the wall, the party’s 20 points behind in the polls.

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah, I’ve just seen this too many, I’ve just seen this game before. (All laugh) A totally beleaguered, embattled prime minister and all the people running, oh, let Rishi be Rishi. Their gloves are coming off this time and the country’s just looking the other way.

Lucy Fisher
But it is significant policy change, isn’t it? And it does feel like we’re going to have some other bolder gambits. Whether or not they work, it does feel like those are in the pipeline.

Robert Shrimsley
Well, it’s a significant policy announcement. I mean, nothing will actually happen except things won’t be getting done. One of things Rishi Sunak mentioned correctly is that there are real limitations on the National Grid and its ability to meet the demands of the net zero agenda. But the question is, are we really gonna see a significant change to where we are in the next year? We’re already in election mode.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lucy Fisher
Well, I think, Robert, that’s a great moment to bring in Jim Pickard. Thanks for joining us in the studio.

Jim Pickard
Hi.

Lucy Fisher
So Jim, you’ve been really drilling down into some of the detail this week. To start with, one scoop you’ve also been involved in is this idea that although Rishi Sunak’s signalling, you know, we’re pushing back, forcing anyone’s hand on electric vehicles, something that has annoyed business, that people briefed on the government’s plans still say that the UK car industry will have to meet mandatory electric vehicle sale targets from January.

Jim Pickard
And not only does the car industry have to meet these compulsory EV sales targets, but it’s on the same trajectory as it was a week ago. So we have the really weird situation where we have the prime minister standing up in Downing Street giving a speech to the nation saying, look, guys, I’ve been listening. I’ve realised that electric cars are far too expensive for a typical struggling family during a cost of living crisis and that the infrastructure for charging these EVs is not there. But at the same time, the reality on the ground is that the car industry is still being forced within six years from today to make 80 per cent of the cars they sell in Britain be electric cars and the remaining 20 per cent, which will be made up of petrol, diesel and hybrid, that’s who will reduce pretty quickly over the following five years. So if you were a car industry executive right now you’d think, look, we’re pouring all this investment into Britain, we’re producing these electric vehicles. You keep moving these dates around. We’ve had 2040, we had 2032 talked about, we’ve gone to 2030, back to 2035. And you are also basically telling consumers more or less that it’s OK to buy petrol and diesel cars. You know, the mixed messaging for industry is not that useful for them.

Lucy Fisher
And we certainly saw a furious response from the Ford UK chair in between the leak that Rishi Sunak was going to pivot on the 2030 ban and the actual detail coming out. And she made this point, as you said, that Ford has invested £430mn in the development and manufacturing of its electrification programme and that, you know, they’ve done so on the basis of that initial target. But there were doubts about whether the grid was ready for this 2030 ban. Was it achievable?

Jim Pickard
I think the grid is less the issue than the question of just, is there enough physical infrastructure to charge your electric car? You know, if you were to drive from London to Machynlleth or Cornwall, do you feel confident that you can charge your car on the way? Do you feel confident you can charge your car when you get there? And the answer for most consumers is still no. And I think if you look at this in the macro, you know, all this stems from what happens with the Ulez backlash in Uxbridge in that by-election a couple of months ago. And politicians stopped and they looked at and they said, should we have hypothecated taxes, green taxes, where consumers can see how much they’re paying towards net zero? Or is there a different way of doing this?

And Labour has a different way of doing it. Their green prosperity plan is all about borrowing money and doing this, you know, in a macro governmental kind of way. Even on to their refined slightly smaller green prosperity plan, the government would still borrow something like 100bn quid over a parliament and they would be the ones paying for a load of electric car infrastructure, wind farms, more nuclear. They’re throwing money, insulating millions of homes and doing it in a way that, yes, the consumers are paying for it, because when you pay taxes, you know, of course it comes not out of thin air, but it’s not labelled as a green cost. It’s not hypothecated like the Ulez.

Lucy Fisher
And on Labour, obviously they have come out saying that they would reinstate the 2030 ban on new petrol and diesel cars if they win power next year. Is that a vote winner for them? Is that going to, you know, cement their reputation as being the pro-business party, do you think, or have they walked into a trap set by Sunak?

Jim Pickard
So what they would say is that they’ve avoided an awful lot of the very obvious Conservative traps. So on the boiler changes, Ed Miliband said some stuff on the radio and the aides clarified that they are not going to reverse policy back to where it was a week ago on getting rid of boilers and replace them with electric heat pumps. They would basically just stick with what the government’s doing. So, you know, that would have been a very easy Conservative attack line to say, look at these Labour lefties, they’re making you replace your full ground gas boiler with an electric heat pump that would cost 10 grand or 12 grand or whatever it is. So they’ve eliminated that threat.

I think the electric car issue is gonna be a wedge issue at the election. I think Robert’s quite right that for a lot of voters, but typical voters probably don’t like the idea that they are being forced to buy more expensive electric vehicles. I think the question is whether people will understand the nuance here, which is that the government is basically going down the same route, they’re just not kind of boasting about it in that if only 20 per cent of cars sold after 2030 are gonna be non-electric, then we are moving in similar directions with either form of government.

Robert Shrimsley
I think it’s a really interesting point that you made that Labour has stood firm on the 2030 target on EVs, but the far bigger, actually in terms of net zero, far more important issue of boilers, Labour’s gonna go along with the new Tory position, which is it’s interesting in terms of the impact on Britain’s emissions. Boilers are far more important than EVs.

Jim Pickard
But I think on the boiler point, you know, I think you could see the fact that something like 1.3mn people were facing this ban on their oil boilers, which was coming in 2026 with nothing affordable to replace. I think that was just common sense to delay that one. I think the thing about 2035 is that the way that which is the point at which originally no one was gonna be able to install a new gas boiler. The way Rishi Sunak dressed that up was to almost pretend that this was this magnificent change that you’d only now have to do it if you were replacing your old boiler. That was the whole policy before. The only changes introduced, I mean, is a fairly big one, is this exemption for we don’t know precisely who, but a fifth of the public for whom this would have been difficult. And I think Labour just looked at and thought, well, yeah, there are millions of people who would really struggle for practical reasons to put all these boilers in because they are pretty big. You know, it is one of those difficult things where they’re just being pragmatic.

Lucy Fisher
I think it’s also interesting they’ve been a bit less than honest about some other policies that Sunak claims to have scrapped. He said proposals to tax meat, proposals for flying abroad, proposals to bring in a mandatory seven-recycling-bin system, which all seem to be totally back-on-an-envelope stuff that was never really seriously being talked about. On a more substantive point, Jim, Sunak claims that despite pushing back these targets, he is still able to meet the overarching aim to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Is he being dishonest on that, from what you can tell, having looked into this issue quite a lot and spoken to some of the experts?

Jim Pickard
So the original answer I’d give you is that he’s pointing out that the ban on petrol and diesel cars is not that dissimilar to other western nations. So France, Germany, Italy, Canada, (inaudible).

Lucy Fisher
Well, he’s moved them in line with the EU, hasn’t he?

Jim Pickard
Yeah, we’re now only in line with them. So it’s not as if we’re sort of retreating to some kind of totally anti-net zero move there. So the question is, you know, if this makes it impossible for Britain to reach net zero, then surely it makes it impossible for these other countries unless they’re doing some other magical stuff that we’re not aware of. And I don’t think that they are. But you know what the experts are saying, what the committee on climate change, what various professors are saying is that, you know, this is problematic and makes it an awful lot harder than what was already a very difficult ask.

And, you know, to hear Sunak on the radio suggesting that there hasn’t really been any sort of watering down of our intent here, you know, it is slightly ludicrous because it was always a question when you’re trying to get to 2050 net zero, which is in itself a very difficult target. You know, in theory you could sort of do a curve which starts off very slow and then kind of goes exponentially in the final five years or so in theory. But that would put enormous costs in that final 2040s. And it’s always been presumed that you do it in a straight line and that’s why you have these binding carbon budgets where every five years you have to hit a target.

And Rishi Sunak says, well, over the last 10 years we’ve outperformed, we’ve done brilliantly. And he’s tried to pretend that because it’s gone really well over the last 10 years, that you can carry on that line and it’ll carry on being easy. But the low-hanging fruit was the decarbonisation of the electricity system with things like offshore wind and solar. That’s already been done. The more difficult stuff was always gonna be transport and heating. And therefore he is being very, very disingenuous on that point.

Lucy Fisher
And George, certainly the pro-green lobby in the Tory parliamentary party have reacted with wild fury. Chris Skidmore’s called it a “slow-motion car crash”. Alok Sharma has said, the former COP president has said resigning from these policies could leave the planet on life support. Since we’ve heard the detail from Sunak himself, what’s your assessment of how big the rebellion’s actually going to be when it comes to the vote that we know is coming down the line on the movement of the car ban?

George Parker
Well, certainly in the sort of 24 hours before the prime minister’s press conference, when details started to leak out, you and I, Lucy, Robert, I’m sure spoke to MPs who are in a state of panic, those MPs from the south of England who thought this will be the death knell. I spoke to one Tory MP who said this will remove the last vestiges of support we had amongst the liberal middle classes and the young. And how is this gonna play in Surrey? I suspect when it comes to the vote — I think there will be a vote on this after the King’s Speech at some point — a lot of the opposition, I think, will start to fade away, partly because Rishi Sunak presented it in a fairly sort of measured way and made it look like he’d been through it. Also because MPs thinking about voting against the government have got to make a calculation here about the advantage of displaying their green credentials versus the disadvantage of making their government look like an absolute rabble if they can’t get through the prime minister’s now high-profile policy.

Robert Shrimsley
The really interesting question, to me at least, is if Rishi Sunak had started from scratch on this and we didn’t have any background or any other context, you might look at this and say, well, look, this is a serious prime minister bringing some practicality to some airy-fairy ambitions. But we know that there is a cynical agenda behind it. And so the question people are gonna be asking themselves at the moment — I’m not convinced they’re gonna jump in the way he wants them to — is, is he serious or is he cynical?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lucy Fisher Well, Robert, you mentioned that this is now being given definition by Sunak as a key wedge issue. There’s another issue that’s become a real dividing line between the Labour and Tory parties this week, and that is on relations with the EU. So George, you were with Starmer last weekend in Montreal. (Laughter) Firstly, do you want to tell us what you’re up to there with him before taking us through what he said on building a closer trading relationship with Brussels?

George Parker
You know, when you go on these trips abroad and at the FT’s expense, you’re always hoping that the person you’re interviewing is gonna say something interesting. Otherwise the bean counters will be on your case when you get back. And in fact, he did say some stuff that was very interesting. He talks about Brexit. It was just ahead of his meeting with President Macron in Paris, and he went further than he’s previously done about the way he wants to improve our relationship with the EU. Across the board, he said he wanted better relations. He wants to improve trading relations beyond what he’d already said: security, energy and all the rest of it.

But I thought what was most interesting is that he put it in a very personal context. He said that I’ve got a 15-year-old and a 12-year-old and I am not prepared to leave office with them not having all the opportunities they could have had, and having a worse deal than they could have had in terms of Brexit. So he set himself some quite high targets there in terms of rebuilding the relationship. Now, of course, we might want to come on to this. The question is whether he can deliver any of that because of course the EU might think that Brexit is something they’d rather put into a lead-lined casket and never talk about again. They’ve got plenty of other things to worry about in the EU.

Lucy Fisher
So to go and answer your own question, do you think there would be any willingness in Brussels? Obviously, Macron later this week has talked about a new idea of associate membership for the EU. But then would Starmer potentially be walking into a trap of Brexit betrayal, the Tories would say?

George Parker
Yes. I mean, Starmer made it clear he didn’t wanna go back into any sort of formal relationship like that. So then you start to ask the question, what sort of relationship would you get? And at the moment, he’s focused a lot on this review of the trade deal that Boris Johnson did, which the review is scheduled to start in early 2026. Now the EU regards this and it says in the treaty itself that it would be an implementation review. So they see this as quite a technical exercise and nothing much to see here. But between now and then there’ll be a British general election, there’ll be European elections next year as well. So we have a totally different cast of people who haven’t necessarily been scarred by all the Brexit negotiations of the last five years, maybe looking afresh.

And I think that’s Keir Starmer’s big gambit; that he thinks that by showing goodwill, putting things on the table and this will be transactional, the EU wants to know what is the Starmer government going to offer? And it could be in terms of security guarantees or paying money into the Erasmus student exchange scheme. Whatever it might be, it’s gotta be shown to be us putting stuff on the table and it’s got to be shown to be mutually beneficial to both sides. They may be a little bit more relaxed about doing a deal with Britain if it’s in the EU’s interest as well as the UK’s interest.

Lucy Fisher
Mm-hmm. Jim, when I saw George’s big scoop, I wondered, well, this is something we’ve long suspected — that Labour, if they get into power, would hope to try and forge closer relations with Brussels. And I slightly wondered whether Starmer had accidentally been a bit too frank, disarmed by the famous Parker charm into showing a bit of ankle. He didn’t mean to. But it does feel like the Labour party is really kind of leaning into this idea that they do want this to be a dividing line with the Tories.

Jim Pickard
Yeah.

Lucy Fisher
Has that surprised you?

Jim Pickard
I mean, what I think about is quite interesting is that he’s taking a bit of a risk here because it’s a bit like when the Tories talk about health they aren’t trusted as much as Labour. When Labour talks about defence, they’re not trusted as much as the Tories. If you’re Keir Starmer and you were the person who put Labour in a position of backing a second referendum on Brexit, yet he has tried his best to convince British voting public, particularly former Labour voters in red wall seats, that he now believes in Brexit. Every time he flirts with the idea of close relations and hints at closer trade deals and all the rest of it, he’s opened himself up to broadsides from the rightwing press. So he just, he needs to tread a little bit carefully because there is the possibility that everything he says can be misinterpreted in the way that is potentially damaging in some of these seats (inaudible). Robert’s shaking his head violently!

Lucy Fisher
Robert, you’re shaking your head. Robert, can I ask you, off the back of what Jim said, it looks like you disagree vehemently. Can I put to you, I mean, there’s a lot of polling now showing that Brexit regret is at a record high since the referendum. I think YouGov in the summer said 55 per cent of people would vote to be in the EU if there were a referendum happening today, whereas I think it’s only around 30, 31 per cent who would back Leave.

Robert Shrimsley
If you are incredibly passionate about Brexit, either passionately pro or passionately anti, your positions vis-à-vis Labour and the Conservative party are set. You are not going to vote Conservative if you hated Brexit and you are not going to vote Labour if you still think Brexit’s the most wonderful thing to happen. So he’s talking to a group of people who mostly are those who think Brexit’s not gone terribly well, even if they thought it might have been a good idea. And as long as he appears to be someone who’s saying we’re gonna make this Brexit better rather than we’re going to unpick the whole of Brexit, then I think he’s pitching his appeal correctly.

The one thing I would say, however, which is why I slightly disagree. What Jim was saying is there’s one place where that’s not true, and that’s Scotland, where Labour is getting whacked by the SNP continually as being no better than the Tories, as being a Brexit party, as being Tory-lite, and Labour have begun to pull up some quite useful polling momentum in Scotland. But there is a suggestion that it might have peaked and that these SNP attacks might be damaging, so something that just reminds voters that he is gonna do something positive to undo the damage of Brexit is I think useful to him. I think Starmer’s more or less where he needs to be. His poll technique is to say as little as possible while giving off the right vibe before the election and worrying about it afterwards.

Jim Pickard
So my riposte to Robert is that . . . 

Robert Shrimsley
Riposte? How dare you, sir? (Lucy laughs)

Jim Pickard
So you’re right that he’s probably technically in the right place, which is kind of flirting with the place or relationship with EU without rejoining the single market or customs union or the EU itself. But all I was saying was that whatever he says is gonna be misinterpreted by his enemies, vocal enemies, Conservative MPs, rightwing press and therefore, because people find that Europe quite boring. Typical voters, including myself, find Brusselsy stuff fairly boring and they’re not paying much attention to the details.

Lucy Fisher
You can’t say that when you work for the Financial Times.

Jim Pickard
(Laughter) And therefore stuff can be misinterpreted very, very easily on that.

Robert Shrimsley
But if you’re listening to the interpretations put on Keir Starmer’s lectures by Nigel Farage on the Daily Telegraph then I’m prepared to wager that you’re not innately sympathetic to Starmer in the first place.

Lucy Fisher
I just wonder if there are people who perhaps voted Remain who are perhaps very amenable to close relations, who just don’t want that the . . . 

Robert Shrimsley
The whole psychodrama.

Lucy Fisher
The whole, yeah, psychodrama reprised.

Robert Shrimsley
Does Keir Starmer exude psychodrama to you? I mean, this seems to be . . . 

Lucy Fisher
No. But if . . . 

Robert Shrimsley
 . . . a Mogadon approach to Brexit. He’s saying as little as can be said, while indicating that he wants to unstick some of the problems. That seems to me strategically exactly where he should be.

Lucy Fisher
To me it feels that a key thing he has to convince the public of is that in 2026 this idea of a renegotiation is set in stone and it’s gonna be a big moment, whether it’s Labour or the Tories, rather than just a sort of a review that’s just, you know, gonna be a small thing.

George Parker
Yeah, I mean the EU sees it as a tidying-up exercise. They think the Brexit agreement they did with Boris Johnson works pretty well in their interest really. But the interesting thing, talking to Keir Starmer and people around Keir Starmer, they see this as a really important moment. So let’s say it starts in 2026. If Keir Starmer wins the next election, he’ll be in office for a year to think about it. And look, I totally agree with Jim. You don’t want this to be something which, you know, becomes all-consuming in the way — I shudder to even think back to 2018 and 2019. But that won’t be like that. It’s gonna be a kind of technical thing. There’ll be lots of intense discussions behind the scenes in Brussels, but there won’t be anything, I really hope anyway, anything like the drama of 2018, 2019.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lucy Fisher
Let’s finish off by talking about your political stock picks. Robert, who are you buying or selling this week?

Robert Shrimsley
OK, so I’m going back to the big theme of the week that Rishi Sunak’s net zero stuff, I am buying Liam Booth-Smith and James Forsyth.

Lucy Fisher
Remind us who they are.

Robert Shrimsley
Who are Rishi Sunak’s chief of staff and political secretary. And two of the people who’ve been pushing him to be more aggressive and more combative. And the reason I’m buying them is not because I’m saying the strategy is definitely going to work, but because what we’ve seen definitively is that their argument is the one that’s won out in Downing Street, that he has to be a different kind of prime minister in the last year. And what this announcement has shown us definitively is that we are gonna see this more combative, aggressive Rishi Sunak that they have been saying he has to be.

George Parker
I’m gonna buy Peter Kyle.

Lucy Fisher
Good. I think I’ve got some of him in my portfolio. (Overlapping audio)

George Parker
I think your portfolio is (inaudible) Peter Kyle.

Lucy Fisher
Just remind the listeners who he is.

George Parker
So Peter Kyle is a longstanding, I think he wouldn’t mind me calling him a Blairite. He’s the MP for Hove down on the south coast and very much a Labour moderniser. Very, very much in with Keir Starmer. He was the shadow Northern Ireland secretary. He’s just been promoted to become the shadow science secretary of state. You’ll see a lot of him during the election campaign. He’s a great media performer. The reason I’m buying him this week is because he has been put in charge of masterminding for Labour the Mid Bedfordshire by-election campaign where the Labour party started quite a long way behind, at least if you looked at the betting odds behind the Liberal Democrats . . . 

Robert Shrimsley
So you are calling Mid Beds for Labour then, aren’t you, George?

George Parker
As they challenges the Tories. Now if you look at the betting odds and just feeling the vibe of the two parties, it feels to me like Labour are going to supplant the Liberal Democrats as the main challengers in that seat. And I think that a large part that goes down to the hard work that he’s been doing, the organisation he’s been putting into that seat, which at the start of the campaign, I think those people would have said was a Lib Dem target.

Robert Shrimsley
I thought we left it to Jim to call by-elections, didn’t we?

Lucy Fisher
Go on Jim! You’re gonna go . . . 

George Parker
You’ve got a stellar record on calling by-elections.

Lucy Fisher
You’ve won against Robert, are you gonna go against George?

Jim Pickard
I think Mid Beds, what is quite interesting is whether because the Lib Dems and Labour can’t agree who the main challenger is, whether the Tories could actually scrape through because everyone else is fighting to be the successor. The person I’m selling is Richard Tice because Reform UK . . . 

Lucy Fisher
Yeah. Remind us . . . 

Jim Pickard
Challenges from the right, the sort of the phoenix of the ashes of the Brexit party, which was the phoenix of the ashes of Ukip and they were hoping to shift from a kind of Brexity vibe to an anti-net zero campaign. They’d been hating net zero for ages and ages, wanting a referendum on it and all the rest of it. And I think the wind is probably taken a little bit out of their sails by what Rishi Sunak did this week.

Lucy Fisher
I’m actually not gonna sell a specific person this week. I’m going to sell shares in the publishers of political biographies. Last weekend I read Rory Stewart’s and he is a really beautiful writer, I will give that to him. But his answer to most politics problems is that, you know, no one put him in charge. Then on Monday, I heard Liz Truss give a speech defending her disastrous economic legacy. And she touted at least three times that she’s got a big political biography coming out in April.

Jim Pickard
Great!

Lucy Fisher
And Robert, I have to say this. This may sound very, very lazy to anyone listening, but I am not going to do any more with Theresa May’s book Abuse of Power than read your excellent review, because again, it just sounds like she, like Liz Truss, has absolutely no reflections on her own failings in power.

Robert Shrimsley
In fairness to Theresa May, I haven’t read it, I think it’s a good call, don’t read it. (Lucy laughs) But in fairness to Theresa May, this book is attempting to be more interesting because she’s actually advancing an argument about the way that officials on authority, government, local government, police abuse power and fail ordinary people. And that’s quite interesting. But as you say, the one authority that she doesn’t examine perhaps forensically enough is her own.

Lucy Fisher
Well, I’m not sure we can expect much more for Truss when hers is out either. Robert, Jim, George, thanks for joining.

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And that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. If you like the podcast, don’t forget to subscribe. You’ll get all the latest episodes as soon as they’re released. You can find FT articles linked to today’s podcast topics in our show notes, and they’re free to read for listeners. Don’t forget to sign up either to Stephen Bush’s award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You’ll get 90 days free. Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by 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, same time, same place next week.