Transcript: Who’s behind the Tory plots?

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Who’s behind the Tory plots?’

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Lucy Fisher
How serious is the plot to unseat Rishi Sunak? This is Political Fix from the Financial Times. I’m Lucy Fisher. And I’m joined in the studio today by my FT colleagues George Parker. Hi, George.

George Parker
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And the FT’s Robert Shrimsley. Hi, Robert.

Robert Shrimsley
Hey, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
In a moment, the dire state of local authority finances. But first, just how serious is the conspiracy against the prime minister? Simon Clarke, former levelling up secretary, has gone over the top calling for his ouster. He was followed by a little known aide called Will Dry. Not exactly household names here. George, how much trouble do you think Sunak is in over this plot?

George Parker
Well, I think he is in trouble. And I think the trouble revolves around the fact that the more people like us are writing and talking about plots, and the more that seep through into public consciousness, the more dangerous that is for the prime minister. We’re heading into an election year. The public hate divided parties, and the overall impression that this gives is of a party being a bit of a rabble. And to be honest, the plotters themselves typically are also a little bit of a rabble as well, I think we’d have to agree.

I mean, I’d just say that there’ve been different parts of this. It’s in a sort of slow-motion sort of rebellion, hasn’t it? You had the Telegraph poll last week, the “mega poll” showing that the Tories were heading for a 1997-style defeat, followed up by the rebellions on Rwanda as well; 60 Tory MPs defied Rishi Sunak. Then Sir Simon Clarke coming out and calling in the Daily Telegraph for Sunak to go. And then, nothing.

And I think that is the key, isn’t it, that when Simon Clarke went over the top, it reminds people like Robert and I are old enough to remember the dying days of the Gordon Brown administration, when Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt, in the dying days of that government, went over the top, thinking that that could precipitate a leadership challenge from David Miller. That was never materialised. So, frankly, I think he’ll be hitting a bit of a sigh of relief at the end of this week that it hasn’t been any worse for him.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah. So I think, as George says, Robert, Downing Street think that they have contained this for now. And there has been this backlash against Simon Clarke, I think, just the sort of the viciousness of his language warning of a massacre of “extinction”, the way in which, you know, his intervention was presented for maximum impact I think has focused minds in some way. What do you think of the flashpoints ahead? I mean, I’ve spoken to some of the rebels on the right who are really pointing out that February the 15th, we’ve got two by-elections. That’s a key moment for Sunak. When do you think we might see other people potentially speak up if they’re unhappy?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, I think the problem is that the the whole year is full of flashpoints. As you say, you’ve got February the 15th for the by-elections. We’ve got at some point the return of the Rwanda bill to the House of Commons, depending on what’s happened in the House of Lords. We’ve got a Budget on March the 6th, which should theoretically be a good day for the government, but there’s probably a decent chance it doesn’t go far enough to satisfy a number of the rebels. And then we’re into the local elections in May, which people expect to go badly.

And it’s just, I think this is the problem, is that although I don’t think this portends a specific risk to Rishi Sunak’s place as prime minister, not least because it isn’t at all apparent there’s anybody who could really just step up and change the dynamic for the Conservative party. It’s just this point that people are so convinced it’s over that they don’t care about doing these things to the party, either because they’re engaged in a battle for what happens to the party after they’ve lost, or because they think things are so bad there’s no harm in trying to make the argument. But it’s a doom loop that he’s in of ever decreasing circles. And when a party gets like this, it’s very, very hard to see how they get out of it.

Lucy Fisher
I think that’s right. George, let’s just talk a bit more about who we think is planning, who is orchestrating some of these moves.

Robert Shrimsley
It’s Baldrick, isn’t it? (Laughter)

Lucy Fisher
Baldrick. So this shadowy group calls itself the Conservative Britain Alliance. Is it a group? Is it a faction? Is it a movement? Who’s part of it? What do we know?

George Parker
Is it anything at all, I think is the question. It seems to have no imprint on the internet. It doesn’t actually exist as an organisation. It’s the front for a number of anonymous Conservative donors who funded a very expensive opinion poll in the Daily Telegraph, the so-called mega poll that we mentioned earlier, which people say probably cost somewhere in the order of £20,000 to £40,000. So not small change, but a reasonable amount of money. Nobody knows who those donors are. Some of the big names that people have speculated on we’ve spoken to and they’ve ruled themselves out, like Paul Marshall, for example, and Lord Peter Cruddas have said it wasn’t them. I’m told by someone who claims to know who they are that they were quite not household names necessarily, but . . . 

Lucy Fisher
And just remind our listeners that the two you mentioned, Marshall and Cruddas, they are previous Tory donors, aren’t they, people with perhaps the means to make such an intervention financially. But they’ve ruled themselves out.

George Parker
They’ve ruled themselves (out). They’ve got plenty of money and exactly. So, you know, there are these donors who’ve got together, put together this poll but plainly with the intent of causing trouble for Rishi Sunak. And the way that the poll was interpreted by the Daily Telegraph, which published the poll, and by Lord David Frost, who was the sponsor of the poll, it gave the impression that the Conservative party had to tack very firmly to the right to head off the risk of the Reform party and Nigel Farage. And so you can see clearly what the intention was of those donors. But as you say, at the moment, we don’t know exactly who they were.

Lucy Fisher
Robert, do you think that this picture of chaos that’s emerging will have any bearing on thinking in Downing Street about the timing of the election? I think, you know, last week at Davos, we heard a lot of rumours swirling that May was possibly more in contention than some of us, including myself in that, had given serious thought to. This week I was working with some colleagues on a story about how European diplomats think. It’s one reason that Rishi Sunak has yet to name a date for the European Political Community meeting that the UK is supposed to be hosting in the first few months of this year is ‘cause he hasn’t totally ruled out a snap spring election. What is your thinking?

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, I get the argument and certainly if you think it’s just an endless weeks and weeks of attrition, there comes a point when you say, how is it gonna be any worse going in May? I still don’t think he is going to go in May, however, because look at where the opinion polls are. This is not a good moment to call a general election. So he’s always left his option open on May. He has never ruled it out completely. But if you look at where the polls are, if you look at this infighting, if you look at any tax measures that he wants to bring through in the Budget that won’t have come through if he goes to a May election, Rwanda flights won’t have taken off. It’s very hard to see what going early brings him other than the respite from the internal infighting. So although I think he’s keeping the option, I’m still sceptical. By the way, I’m still delighted with the sound of Marshall and Cruddas, which I think sounds like a department store in the North. Where did you get your sofa? Oh, Marshall and Cruddas.

Lucy Fisher
(Laughter) Oh, well, if they’re listening, maybe that’ll give them ideas to deepen their fortunes further. And Robert, it’s not just thoughts of the polls that might prevent him from going early. I slightly wonder how far the Tories are in determining what is actually gonna be in their next manifesto. We’ve had, rightly, a lot of discourse about what Labour’s lining up as their key pledges. It’s not as clear from the Conservatives, is it?

And another sign of trouble for Sunak. We’ve got the emergence of yet another faction, the “Popular Conservatives”, the PopCons, launching on February the 6th. Now they’ve kicked Simon Clarke off the line-up for their speakers event because I’m told by those familiar that they are a group that is all about policy, not personality. They’re not about changing the leader, but they do want to influence what’s gonna be on that manifesto.

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah, and I think it’s really interesting because one of the things that’s behind all the attacks on Sunak, apart from the sense that they are going to lose, is it’s this sort of Faragist side of the party that thinks he needs to be tougher on immigration, more populist, go after, you know, woke stuff, ditch net zero. That’s all been part of that Reform UK, Faragist, nativist agenda. And that’s what those MPs have been pushing. But the PopCons with Liz Truss have all of that but also the sort of free market agenda that we all enjoyed during her brief premiership. And the two don’t necessarily align very well.

So, for example, Liz Truss as prime minister was very relaxed about immigration. She thought the numbers should go up. So although I think there’s an interesting thing in the Popular Conservatives, there is an argument they’re trying to make, and I think it reflects the broader shifts in Conservative movements across democracies, which is that they’re seeing themselves moving away from a more laissez-faire approach to politics towards a more active state. And I think it’s an interesting policy development. There is this fundamental division between what the Conservative right stands for. And even if you look at the speaker line-up for that conference, you can see the gaps there. So it’s not clear how they resolve that, let alone the manifesto.

Lucy Fisher
George, let’s just turn to Labour briefly. Obviously, Starmer has been making hay with this turmoil engulfing his opponents. He’s called it, you know, akin to a plot line in EastEnders. It’s obviously a gift for Labour in many ways. I just wanted to focus in on a new sort of attack line that we heard debuted in prime minister’s questions, which is turning on its head the attacks he gets from the Conservatives about his past as a former director of public prosecutions. We heard him attack Sunak over his investment banking career. Just remind us what he said and how effective or sort of dangerous is that line of attack, do you think?

George Parker
I thought it was a pretty dispiriting round of prime minister’s questions. It was absolutely, absolutely terrible. I mean, and I think I was disappointed that Keir Starmer, given how much real ammunition he had at his disposal, decided to go down that very personal attack on Rishi Sunak and indeed, to draw attention to a couple of things that were floating around on social media which weren’t entirely true.

Having said that, turning your fire on the prime minister over his record as a hedge fund manager or investment banker, whatever, I think is an interesting line of attack. I mean, first of all, it’s slightly strange when you are the Labour leader who’s trying to reconnect with the City and prove yourself to be pro-business and pro the City and pro-banking and so forth. But I think it could potentially be effective as a weapon against Rishi Sunak. And I’ve always thought that Rishi Sunak’s wealth never really mattered as a political factor as long as he was the chancellor of the exchequer handing out billions of pounds through the furlough scheme, appearing to be the competent person running the Treasury.

But in the middle of the cost of living crisis, when all the experiences of many people is of public services not working particularly well, this idea of planting the idea in people’s heads that Rishi Sunak’s out of touch, probably can’t wait to get back to his old world of high finance — it is a line of attack I think we’re gonna hear a lot more from Keir Starmer during the course of the campaign.

Lucy Fisher
Robert, what’s your take?

Robert Shrimsley
I’m never very impressed by most of these, but I don’t think the public cares. I think it has a fairly low opinion of all politicians. But I think it’s a bit like whether you’re a cool kid or an unpopular kid at school. If you’re an unpopular kid, anything that’s said about you works and everyone else stands around laughing at it, and if you’re a cool kid, none of this has any impact. So I think it’s all about if you’re down, as Rishi Sunak is, then attacks seem like they work. If it’s all going well, it’s water off a duck’s back.

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Lucy Fisher
This week also saw the government pledge an extra £600mn for local government to stave off some of the worst of the financial pressures councils are facing. The FT’s William Wallis has been writing about the challenges for local authorities and joins us now. Hi, William.

William Wallis
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
William, let’s just talk about the state of the local authority finances. And it can sound quite a dry and boring topic, but when you step back, we’re talking about bin collections, libraries, leisure centres and social care, in many instances. What is the picture of local council finances before the government stepped in this week?

William Wallis
What you had is in the last decade, you had local government taking some of the most severe hits during the period of austerity. And then following up from that, you had the pandemic when there was a bit of relief from government. But you’ve more recently, during the cost of living crisis, had a period in which demand for services on local government, including adult and children’s social care and the cost of delivering it have both been going up.

So local government was already slightly on the bones of its ass, but then it had this tremendous pressure coming in because of inflationary pressures that have worsened the situation very significantly, so that although some councils had already fallen over partly because they’ve been badly managed or made poor investment decisions, you’ve now got pretty much every council in the country facing acute pressures on their finances.

Lucy Fisher
Well, it’s a very bleak picture. And William, you got the scoop on the government bringing forward an extra £500mn for social care for local government and another £100mn on top of that. How far will that go to plugging the gap?

William Wallis
Well, speaking to people in local government, they’ve certainly welcomed that. And they’re also fully aware that state finances are under severe pressure all round. So while it’s not just a drop in the ocean, it definitely goes some way particularly to meet the pressures that are on adult social care and children’s services. In terms of the huge deficits that they’ve been forecasting, it doesn’t really go very far and most councils across the country will still have to face very difficult choices of where to cut services.

Lucy Fisher
And you’re also writing this week about the soaring numbers of homeless people who are needing temporary accommodation and how that is tipping some councils towards insolvency. You pointed out that housing benefit subsidy has been capped since 2011 and that’s one reason that so many councils are struggling to afford this without more money coming from central government. That problem is linked in part to migration. Is this to do with the closure of some of the hotels that were housing asylum seekers? Where are these kind of rising numbers of homeless people coming from?

William Wallis
A growing number of asylum seekers have been showing up homeless, adding to much wider pressures that are really related to the housing crisis and the lack of social housing stock, which has just been getting worse and worse year on year.

So what it means is that local government, as people have come under pressure during the cost of living crisis, as mortgage rates went up and more people are getting into difficulties, local government has had to house more and more people in temporary accommodation for longer and longer periods of time.

And the rate at which they’re reimbursed for doing that has not improved since 2011. So you can imagine the gap between what they’re spending and what central government is giving them back is getting bigger and bigger. And so you are getting a large number of councils in very severe difficulties because of just that — councils that may be very well-run but just can’t cope with the demand.

Lucy Fisher
I remember you came on the podcast back in September as well, and at that point we’re talking about how Birmingham and other councils were facing potential effective bankruptcy because of historic equal pay problems. Can you just update us where we are on that?

William Wallis
Well, I have to say, I’ve just spent the day in Croydon, which was one of the first councils to go into effective insolvency back in 2020. And I was looking at what happens to services, what happens to a council when it’s been in that situation. And Croydon really is struggling to emerge from it because it’s got these huge debts, which it has to make payments on, as well as, like everywhere else, this rising demand for services.

And it is a rather dystopian vision that you get of libraries closing down. Many of the places like youth centres have been closed down in the past, so libraries have become quite an important community hub. You’re getting bins collected less regularly. Adult social care is being cut. A place that was already slightly boiling the bones is really looking very, very shabby.

So that’s the kind of worry for places like Birmingham and Nottingham also, which have more recently gone into this situation where they’re under really strict rules about what they can spend money on. And essentially that’s only the very essential services with a lot of the funding, for example, that they gave to the voluntary sector already out the window.

George Parker
William, what’s the expectation in town halls about the possibility of more money from the Treasury, in Jeremy Hunt’s Budget on March the 6th? I was speaking to someone in the Treasury this week who said that there’s been a lot of focus in the Budget on tax cuts — and of course, we’re gonna get a huge amount of tax cuts — but also an expectation that Jeremy Hunt will have to do more on throwing some money at some of the big social problems in the country, notably the ones you’ve just been describing. Do you think there’ll be some more money for councils in the Budget?

William Wallis
Well, one of the big frustrations, I think, for local government officials is that the government has raised the minimum wage without accounting for how that affects local government. And it means that, given that they haven’t been given much more yet, they’re facing like even bigger pressures than they were already. I don’t think that there is a great deal of hope and the money that came this week for next year’s financial settlement was welcome.

But it did come under quite severe pressure because you had 46 MPs writing to the government, more than 40 of whom were Tory MPs threatening essentially not to back the local government financial settlement for next year unless they improve the offer. That did seem to shift the dial. I think it very much depends how much pressure the government comes under from its own backbenchers, and I think constituencies’ MPs are beginning to see that the crisis in local government as more and more of a liability for their own political prospects.

So it’s certainly become an issue that’s on the map now in a way that it perhaps wasn’t before. Therefore, the government is under more pressure. There isn’t a huge amount of hope that there’s going to be any significant improvement in what they’re given.

Robert Shrimsley
Correct me if I’m wrong, William, but one of my other memories of the austerity period was that as well as making cuts to these grants, the government sort of encouraged local councils to use their own revenue-raising powers to fill the shortfall. So it didn’t look like it was central government taxation; it was local government taxation. And obviously this remains an option, doesn’t it, for local councils. But I’m not sure at this stage in the cycle that putting up council tax wouldn’t feed back to the government as well in the end in terms of popularity.

William Wallis
Well, actually, again, looking at what’s happened in Croydon, their council tax is under a special dispensation from government, central government, were raised by 15 per cent last year and they’re gonna be raised by a further 5 per cent at the end of April this year. People are really very unhappy about that because what they’re getting is fewer and fewer services, worse and worse services, for a lot more money. Many of the local authorities that have already got into this severe difficulty have had to raise council taxes by substantial amounts. And I think most authorities across the country will have to do by the maximum amount allowed. So, rising taxes and services that are being cut — it’s not a great look.

George Parker
Just one other observation, William. I was just thinking, as you were talking there, about my conversations with people in the Treasury during the austerity period and when they were cutting back on things. And I remember them saying that they were surprised at how easily they’d been able to make cuts to local authority budgets. There was one area where they thought there had been least resistance, and they kept going longer and harder, harder with local government, than with other parts of the public sector. And you can see now the chickens coming home to roost.

William Wallis
Yeah. I mean, I think, one of the interesting things about local government, because it has this statutory responsibility to balance the books, unlike some other public institutions, you’ve seen that it’s actually been much better at managing its own decline than, for example, the NHS perhaps. That’s been happening, though, for a very long time. So there really isn’t a lot more to cut. And we’ve got into this situation where the public is really noticing because you notice it also in the potholes on the road and roads across the country are peppered with potholes, because there just isn’t enough money to fill them.

Lucy Fisher
William Wallis, thanks for joining.

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Well, let’s just stick a moment on this issue of the public finances. We had a pretty stark report out from the IFS this week on the state of public debt. We had the head of the fiscal watchdog, Richard Hughes, calling the government’s plans for spending on public services after the election worse than a work of fiction. Robert, I’m interested in what this means for Labour and its inheritance if, as expected, they win the election. We’re expecting Labour to make a tax pledge, you know, going into the election campaign, promising not to put taxes up. But they’re gonna have to, aren’t they? And if they do, do you think they should do that straight after an election, take advantage of saying, well, gosh, now we’ve seen, you know, the books and the state of things and, you know, we have to tell you the truth, we’re gonna have to put things up. Or do you think that they should wait a bit?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, I mean, I’ve always believed that taxes are going to go back up again after the election whoever won, even if it was the Conservatives because the numbers don’t add up. And clearly, what the OBR is warning against, what it’s worried about is that any fiscal headroom that Jeremy Hunt has, he’s going to spend on an election rather than thinking about the long-term future of the country. And clearly, if that is how it works out, that just makes life a little bit harder for Labour. And the OBR’s also warned about how hard it’s gonna be to get the debts down. And given some of Labour’s promises are contingent upon getting debt down or at least slowing debt, that it’s gonna be a serious problem for the Labour party. In terms of what they should do, you can see why they don’t want to make any tax commitments about putting up taxes, certainly taxes the people understand, before the general election.

There’s always those odd little ones. And I still think we haven’t seen everything from the Labour party. I still think there’ll be a couple of complex taxes which come in straight after the election, when they’ve opened up the books and discovered how it’s much worse than they expected. I mean, I remember Gordon Brown’s, you know, dividend tax credit raid straight after the ’97 election, which I think there had been a slight warning about that people hadn’t spotted. It was a really big deal. Had enormous ramifications for the pension industry. And I think they’ll be . . .

Lucy Fisher
Do pensions too — perhaps pension relief?

Robert Shrimsley
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, pension relief is one option for Labour and that’s a little bit too visible. But I think there will be things that they haven’t talked about yet. Maybe they’ll mention them before the election or maybe not, but I would. I don’t see any way around it.

George Parker
I think one thing . . . I think for sure is they won’t mention it before the election. I mean, everyone you speak to on the Labour side say the tax rises we’ve identified, the paltry little things on private equity bosses and private schools and non-doms, those are the ones they will talk about before the election. They’re scarred, aren’t they, by the 1992 shadow Budget, the disastrous shadow Budget by John Smith, where he came with a whole load of tax increases on better-off people, which nevertheless allowed the Tories to run that famous Labour’s tax bombshell thing. So I agree with Robert, I think they will. I mean, I think if you did any statistical analysis of what chancellors do after they’ve won an election, you would find that they always put taxes up. Of course they do, you just do it at the start of the cycle, when you’ve still got a bit of political capital in the bank.

Lucy Fisher
But don’t you think, given the traditional attack against Labour, you know, tax bombshell you just cited, that they’ll have to, they’ll be bounced into making some kind of tax lock pledge in the campaign that might come back to bite them?

George Parker
They might do. I mean, they may make a promise. I mean, they’ll say these are all tax promises and they’re all small. I think I spoke to Paul Johnson of the IFS, who said that even on an optimistic scenario, the tax rises that Labour have announced will only amount to about £10bn, or quite a bit less than £10bn. It’s a drop in the ocean compared with the kind of public service pressures that we’ve just been discussing with William. So I don’t think they’ll be bound into any sort of specific tax lock.

I mean, I suppose they could always rule out increases in VAT and income tax and national insurance, which was sometimes what governments do. If I was betting on it, the thing you were just discussing there, Robert, the pension tax relief, is something which is visible, but it’s something that most people don’t understand. And the fact that even George Osborne was considering having a look at that. There’s a lot of money involved there for high-rate pension tax relief, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they go down that route, but they won’t talk about it before the election.

Lucy Fisher
No, no. Quite. And George just to throw back at you the question you asked Robert. You know, you’ve picked up this mood music in the Treasury that there’s gonna be suspending on public services, not just all that headroom used on tax cuts. Where do you think we might see some of that spend?

George Parker
Well, there’s a fascinating YouGov poll I think it was the other day which suggested that the public aren’t particularly, they would rather that Jeremy Hunt spent more money on repairing the public services than cutting taxes. So I think that’s a factor as well as the facts on the ground that William was just describing very eloquently. So I think there is, you know, there will be demands for some additional spending on public services, probably something for health, maybe something for nursery education, which is something that’s very much in the news, pre-school education, very much in the news at the moment.

But then you’re talking about, you know, the headroom starting to look a bit sort of under pressure, isn’t it? I mean, in the Autumn Statement there was £13bn worth of headroom, which historically is still really quite low and tiny, I think was the word that Richard Hughes from the OBR used this week. There have been some projections that the headroom, before he does any tax-cutting or extra spending, could go to £20bn. Let’s say it goes up to £25bn. You know, let’s say he keeps the headroom at £13bn. He’s got 25 of headroom, he’s got £12bn to play with.

Robert Shrimsley
And it still has the great lie about the pretence that they’re gonna put up fuel duty.

George Parker
That’s all built from the fiscal fiction that the OBR were talking about this week. Well, a 1p cut in the basic rate of income tax, that’s cost about £7bn. So you could see a sort of income tax cut and maybe £5bn for public services. I mean, I’m just using indicative figures, but they’re not political game-changers, are they? I think we could probably agree.

Robert Shrimsley
And I think certainly, some of the talk about inheritance tax being used, I find it very hard to believe, given the points George was just making, that they would use this money on abolishing inheritance tax. I mean, it could be a manifesto pledge, but to think they’d actually use it at this time when public services are so understretched I think is very difficult, unless it’s only about shoring up a base to prevent a catastrophe rather than any attempt at winning.

George Parker
I think they will steer away from anything on inheritance tax at the Budget. Labour have indicated they oppose any reduction or scrapping of inheritance tax, and it gives Labour a brilliant opportunity to put a switch spending. You know, the Tories would spend, let’s say, £7bn abolishing inheritance tax. That’s £7bn we’d spend on nurses in the NHS. I mean it’s a ready-made election leaflet for you there.

Lucy Fisher
Also, I think, very dangerous. Even if the Conservatives were to pledge a cut or the abolition of IHT in the manifesto, it leaves Sunak personally very open to the attack that that is a tax cut that would benefit his own children to the tune, God, I don’t dare to think, of hundreds of millions of pounds. So I think on that front, it’s a bit of a trap.

George Parker
Indeed.

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Lucy Fisher
We’ve just got time left for the Political Fix stock picks. Robert, who are you buying or selling?

Robert Shrimsley
So I was looking at a spreadsheet that was circulated of all the picks we’ve made, and I was mulling on that and George’s brilliant but cynical operation last year. We just picked people immediately ahead of a cabinet reshuffle. And I noticed on this spreadsheet a glaring investment opportunity that none of us have actually ever bought Keir Starmer. So I am going to bulk up on a large batch of Keir Starmer. I feel it’s a growth opportunity this year.

Lucy Fisher
That’s nicely done, Robert. George, how about you?

George Parker
Well, at least you and I today, we’ve been talking about the plots, Tory plots and Downing Street pointing the finger at people around Sunak, pointing the finger at Suella Braverman, who I think last time I looked is still second in the betting odds for the next Tory leader. I’m selling Suella Braverman.

I think if she was to have any chance, and I frankly don’t think she does have any chance of becoming the next Tory leader, it would have to be, I think, in the gruesome spectacle of a pre-election Tory leadership contest. I think that’s become increasingly unlikely this week. The Simon Clarke rebellion petered out. I think even some of Suella Braverman’s supporters think there’s no chance of changing the leader before the election. I think after the election, her time will have come and gone. So I’m selling Suella.

Robert Shrimsley
So what are you telling your broker this week, Lucy?

Lucy Fisher
Well, I might copy you in choosing someone rather obvious, hiding in plain sight — I might sell Rishi Sunak. I’ve discovered I’ve still got some in my portfolio, but it’s looking bad and increasingly pessimistic, if not fatal, for him.

But I’d also perhaps buy Paul Waugh, who — the journalist — at least until recently was a journalist at the i paper. A good pal of ours, George, I think it’s fair to say, who is going for a Labour seat, we understand. So I think if he gets a seat and I doubt he’d have gone for it if he didn’t think he had a very good chance.

George Parker
Local lad in Rochdale.

Lucy Fisher
Local lad in Rochdale following sad death of Tony Lloyd. I think Paul Waugh will be a potential future Labour politician to watch. Robert, George, thanks for joining.

Robert Shrimsley
Bye, Lucy.

George Parker
Thanks, Lucy.

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Lucy Fisher
And that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. I’ve put links to subjects discussed in this episode in the show notes. So do check them out. They’re articles we’ve made free for Political Fix listeners. There’s also a link there to Stephen Bush’s award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You’ll get 30 days free. And don’t forget to subscribe to the show. Also, leave a star rating or review if you have time. It really does help us spread the word.

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 next week.

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