Rishi Sunak’s ‘questionable radicalism’

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Rishi Sunak’s ‘questionable radicalism’

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Jennifer Williams
There is a danger that the symbolism of scrapping a railway line to Manchester while standing on a stage in a former railway exchange in Manchester might play into a kind of deeper narrative about northern betrayal.

Lucy Fisher
Hello and welcome to Political Fix, your essential insider guide to Westminster from the Financial Times with me, Lucy Fisher. You heard there the FT’s Jen Williams talking about the message it sends to the North that Rishi Sunak this week decided to scrap the northern leg of the High Speed 2 rail link that was due to connect Manchester and Birmingham. More from her later. But first, joining me in the studio now are the FT’s Robert Shrimsley. Hi, Robert.

Robert Shrimsley
Hey, Lucy.

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

George Parker
Hi, Lucy. I just wish to say, Robert and I are both nursing conference colds so we’ll try and sit a bit further away from the microphone than usual.

Robert Shrimsley
Although obviously collegiality requires you to have caught it by next week.

Lucy Fisher
So coming up, we’re just over halfway through the gruelling party conference season, as George just attested to there. We’ll look back at the Tories’ get-together in Manchester and what that tells us about the kind of election campaign the Conservatives want to run and we will cast ahead to Labour and the challenge facing Keir Starmer. First up, Robert, you had a fascinating column on what Sunak has tried to achieve with this conference, particularly with his 65-minute, pretty lengthy speech. That was the grand finale of the four-day meeting in Manchester. Tell us, since we haven’t had a chance to read it yet, your thesis of what he’s trying to do?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, I mean, I think we were all aware at the conference that there is a serious effort going on among Sunak’s strategies, among Team Sunak, to present him as a change candidate at the next election, which is a very difficult thing to do after 13 years. The Tories have pulled it off before with Boris Johnson, with John Major, but it’s a hard trick to pull off. And so what they’re trying to do is show him as a different politician, someone who breaks the mould and all that kind of thing. And one of the reasons for it, there’s a very interesting piece of polling that someone told me about, which was presented to Labour’s shadow cabinet, which is that while something like 79% of voters say they want a change from a Conservative government, only 37% of voters say they want to change to a Labour government. And that gap between those two numbers is what Rishi Sunak and the team see as an opportunity.

And what I think they are really trying to say is if we can present Rishi as something new-ish, I mean, you know, he’s not a change candidate and it’s not gonna work as such, but if we can present him as a bit of a change, acknowledge what the country is saying, then we can put the spotlight hugely on Keir Starmer and say, do you really want this guy? He’s the one variable still, I think, in the general election that is to come. We sort of know what people think of the Conservatives. We know what their record are going to be. Nothing that much is going to change. But what we don’t know is what Keir Starmer is really going to do. He’s a quite ill-defined, except as someone who purged the left in his own party. So I think what you’re going to see is a really relentless focus on Keir Starmer for all of the next year as the Tories go after him. They want lots of TV debates and they just think they might be able to make him crumble and persuade people that he’s a risk too far. So even if it’s a change election, there are some changes that you don’t want. And that’s their gamble.

Lucy Fisher
And George, I was interested that Lord Danny Finkelstein, Tory peer who’s had involvement, he’s been an informal adviser to successive Tory leaders. He says there are three kinds of campaign that a party can run. He says if you’re in government and it’s going well, especially the economy is going well, you can kind of run a keep-on-track, stick-the-course campaign. Now, we all know, lagging 20 points in the polls, that option isn’t open to the party.

The two other kinds of campaigns he identifies are sort of the mix of what Robert’s been talking about. One is it’s time for change and the other is better the devil you know. It seems to me that better the devil you know is actually, as Robert’s been talking about, is viable, you know, trying to cast doubt about Starmer.

But can we just pause on the it’s time for change and the substance around the sloganeering that Sunak’s deploying? You know, I think people counted up. He used the word change 30 times in the speech. It’s certainly how he’s trying to position himself. But although he had these three policies — cancelling the northern leg of HS2, this new smoking ban for future generations and also a shake up of the school leaver qualification — is that enough to really present himself as this sort of agent of change?

George Parker
Well, I don’t know. I mean, if you take one step back, I think the original theory was that when he became prime minister, he would present himself as this person who would fix problems and not just the huge mess that Liz Truss left behind economically, but a whole load of other things, including the fallout of Brexit and so on. And he did that quite successfully for six months. Things stabilised on the economy, he got the Windsor framework, he introduced some proposals on small boats, even if they haven’t been necessarily transformative.

But his pollsters looked at the numbers and thought, actually this isn’t going to be enough. You can’t just have him as the problem-solver. He’s got to be something else. And as Robert was saying, and he identifies himself that the message that he had to get across was that he’s going to change things. And I thought the ambition of that was told in the speech, actually, where he was talking about not just being a change from the two or three prime ministers who came before him in the Conservative party but a complete break with politics as it’d been done in the country for the last 30 years. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, right back to Margaret Thatcher. And there is an explicit piece in his speech, wasn’t the way he talked about himself as being the son of a pharmacist and Margaret Thatcher was the daughter of a grocer, and so on. So he’s trying to sort of portray himself as this sort of Thatcherite sort of agent of change, someone who can really reach transformative change on a country, drawing a line under what he called 30 years of the status quo.

Now, the big question, I suppose, is whether the three things you identified there that he announced in his speech amount to that kind of change. I mean, the real thing is basically scrapping a major promise and replacing a promise you’ve broken with a load of other promises you’re gonna do sometime in the future, including promises going out to 2040 in the case of  some of the transport plans. He’s made a promise to change the education system and which will take effect in 2032. On my calculation that’s probably at least two, maybe more elections down the track. And on smoking, well, they might legislate on this in this parliament, but this is, again, a policy which will take effect later in this decade. So, you know, I think the rhetoric was impressive. But whether the substance is enough to convince voters he really is the change, I think that’s open to question.

Robert Shrimsley
I really felt this week watching Rishi Sunak both in his conference speeches and some of his TV interviews that there was something very small and parochial about what he was talking about. Seeing the prime minister on television banging on about war on motorists. It’s an issue, I’m not denying that. You know, that’s transport secretary-level stuff. Seeing him in his party conference speech, we can do the A5, the A6, you know, the roundabout outside your house. I just felt small when you consider that the problems the country’s really got to address, you know: housing shortages, the situations in the NHS, the problems with social care. What’s your strategy for getting the economy motoring again? And what you come up with is I’m cancelling a rail project and coming up with a new form of A-levels roughly similar to the ones David Miliband proposed when he was education secretary, and the smoking ban. There’s nothing wrong with these policies. They’re all fine, but that doesn’t scream transformation to me.

Lucy Fisher
No, I agree. And in fact I thought the FT editorial view on the conference and Sunak’s questionable radicalism as they framed it was spot on in exactly as you say, Robert, just putting into perspective how little this conference did anything to address, you know, low investment, dismal productivity, poor growth in the country as well. For my mind as well, you can see from the conference that the bulk of the big announcements were saved up for Sunak’s speech. But that left this kind of vacuum in the first three days. The other cabinet ministers had their pretty short slots, about 15-20 minutes max behind the podium. We didn’t get much policy meat from the rest of them, and that left this vacuum that allowed the fringe events, particularly those dominated by the right-co-ordinated rallies, to really set the scene and soak up much of the oxygen in the conference.

George, what was your sort of takeaway about the rise of the right — you know, Liz Truss sweeping through the corridors on the Monday of the conference with her entourage and supporters, the likes of Priti Patel, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and then some of these newer 2019 intake MPs were even more radical; perhaps the likes of Danny Kruger, who went as far as to sort of air a conspiracy theory about, you know, shady plans for a world government. They do seem to be on the up, don’t they, in the party?

George Parker
I think that’s definitely true. And you felt the energy that Liz Truss — there was the quote “the great British growth rally” was — I think you were there, Lucy. The energy you could see . . . 

Robert Shrimsley
The great British flake-off. (Robert and Lucy laugh)

George Parker
. . . was completely different. If you compared the energy in the room there listening to Liz Truss and Jacob Rees-Mogg talking about tax cuts and so on with the mood in the main hall. I was looking at the hall when James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, was speaking. It was more or less half-empty. And you’re right, there was a strange vacuum where the main event should have been, which was filled by not only speculation about HS2, which of course dominated the three-quarters of the conference, but these other things going on. And indicative of that was not just the enthusiasm for that sort of message of not just cutting taxes, but also that whole sort of talking about the transgender issue, which dominated a lot of the conference. But then Nigel Farage turning up, of course, in the guise as presenter of GB News, but being feted by Tory MPs. I see one Tory MP suggesting he should be invited to join the party again. You can see where the mood of the party is and you can also see what’s at stake for the Conservative party if Rishi Sunak loses the next election because that is the future of the Conservative party, I’d contend.

Lucy Fisher
I was also really struck by the prevalence of GB News. You know, I sort of naively thought there might be a sense of humility after the terrible week they had, but it just felt, Farage there as a GB News presenter, Jacob Rees-Mogg. Some of the reporters on the station were just very prominent, you know, running around, seeming to be real darlings of the activists. Robert, do you think that this is a wing of the party that could potentially sort of stage a takeover even before the next election, pushing Sunak further to the right, perhaps in cahoots with Suella Braverman? You know, her rhetoric about the hurricane of migrants was very hardline on the main stage.

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah, I mean, there was a real sort of Fox News energy around parts of the conference. You’re absolutely right, Lucy. I mean, I can’t see it happening before the election. All of the energy in the Conservative party is coming from that wing. You’ve got the sort of what you might call the centre-right. Obviously, the centre-right moves rightwards increasingly as well. But those people who are almost fighting a defensive position, a rearguard to stop the party moving too far to the right. But the energy is all on the other side.

One shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, they did elect Liz Truss a year ago, so one shouldn’t be surprised that exactly the people who elected Liz Truss were pleased to see her and you always have to be a bit careful not over-extrapolating from a party conference into the wider movement. But that is where the energy is coming from. And when you look at a lot of the talk, I’m sure you both found this when you’re chatting with MPs and activists, it’s all about, you know, who’s gonna take over after they’ve been beaten. There’s a lot of that there, I thought.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah, I think it’s worth adding. You’re right, Robert, you shouldn’t read too much into a party conference. But for me, I was very struck by how few MPs there were there, how few activists. You know, normally the Midland Hotel Bar or that the main conference hotel bar would be, you know, absolutely thronging till sort of 4, 5am. But, just, you know, that’s midnight and it was looking pretty thin on the ground.

George Parker
Yeah, We were up at the Spectator party, which is normally the highlight of the party season at the Conservative conference. I think we probably left roughly about the same time sometime after midnight. And you come down the lifts through the bar at the Midland Hotel, the main conference hotel, and normally, with an election round the corner, it’s heaving with activists, lobbyists, and you could just walk through there fairly easy, straight out the security entrance. And I thought, yes, I thought the mood was flat and funnily enough I found the mood at the Liberal Democrat conference the week before in Bournemouth to be rather flat. And it’s unusual given the proximity of the election. I think it’s partly a function of where we are in the political cycle and where we are economically at the moment, because everybody is so constrained by the grim reality of the economic situation that we borrowed to the hilt, taxes are already sky high. All the interesting things you can do in politics usually require money, and the brutal fact is there isn’t any money. And so you end up having quite small discussions, as Robert was alluding to, about whether you spend money on railways or fixing potholes. And that is why people like Liz Truss energise and excite the conference because she’s talking, she’s painting big, vivid pictures, even if, as we discovered a year ago, they can fall apart at first contact with reality.

Robert Shrimsley
And I think this goes to the point about why I think Rishi Sunak will struggle with this “I’m the change candidate”, because what he actually is is sort of sensible, even disagreeing with all his policies, but he approaches them in a serious manner. You know, he does the work, works terribly hard, does the spreadsheets. There’s nothing very exciting about a spreadsheet premier, even if there’s a lot to be said for them in some occasion. And I think he’s just going to find it hard to be that kind of exciting leader that, you know. Whatever else you say about Boris Johnson, he was an exciting leader and a charismatic leader, and it was possible for people who were on his side to be excited by him. And I think that’s just not there.

Lucy Fisher
I’ve also been interested by, you know, some particularly the One Nation centrist wing of the party, just sort of saying that Labour’s boringness, as one of them put it to me, is actually a benefit. There has been such a period of turmoil that the public don’t want, you know, big, bombastic personalities after all the chaos of Johnson and Truss. And I think perhaps there’s something in that too. But certainly, talking about the centrist wing of the party, they weren’t very vocal but they are very much in despair. And I just feel, although many of them had kept away from the conference, it is a divided party and that is something that’s also gonna come to the fore, the sort of the fractured nature of it, which again, I think accelerates the sense of decay in a party heading out of power.

Robert Shrimsley
But this has been happening centre right parties across Europe and the US for close to a decade. You know, the energy, the excitement is all coming from the sort of populist rightwing and they’ve got more exciting tunes to sing. It’s easier to rally people to those causes and some of the causes they’ve been rallying people to had a point in terms of the neglect of parts of the country and parts of the population. And it’s just very hard to look at the country as it is at the moment and go, what we really want is steady as it goes. I mean, I don’t actually buy into the argument that being boring is an advantage for Labour. I think being reassuring is useful, but at some point being boring is just boring.

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Lucy Fisher
Remember this.

Boris Johnson in clip
I am humbled that you have put your trust in me and that you have put your trust in us. And I and we will never take your support for granted. (Applause)

Lucy Fisher
Well, that was, of course, the former prime minister, Boris Johnson there. He was speaking back in 2019, thanking voters in the north of England for breaking the voting habits of generations, as he put it, to back the Conservatives. HS2 was obviously a big part of the Tories levelling up agenda, an attempt to spread the wealth of the South East to the rest of the country.

We’re joined now by Jennifer Williams, the FT’s northern England correspondent. Hi, Jen. And Jen is based in Manchester, so we’ve all just been together. Jen, take us through your assessment firstly, and I want to broaden out the conversation about where the government’s commitment to the north lies. But just let’s start with the cancellation of the northern leg of HS2 and what’s replaced it. Rishi Sunak has said he will spend every single penny of the £36bn saved on other rail and road initiatives. It’s left Tory MPs happy in many parts of the country, particularly across the red wall, because they get little pots of cash or little local programmes or projects for their own patches. Business is incandescent, I think it’s fair to say. And there are warnings about what the cancellation of HS2 at the northern leg could do to investor confidence. Where do you see what Sunak announced at the end of the conference?

Jennifer Williams
Well, I think his political calculation is fairly brutal and fairly straightforward. I think that they have looked at a project in the form of HS2, which is long-term, quite intangible, doesn’t directly go through large swaths of the country, isn’t sort of easily explainable in a kind of day-to-day context and thought, actually this is not super popular. I think usually the polls have it as sort of three or four out of 10 people support it. We can make that trade-off and instead of doing that, we can do a bunch of other more local schemes that polls show are more popular. So, for example, you know, he’s reallocating nearly a quarter of it to filling in potholes, but also bus services and various rail schemes which have been sort of mooted repeatedly over the years but have never actually got government funding. That’s the basic calculation that they’ve made, that these schemes will be more popular.

Lucy Fisher
And how do you think voters in the north, particularly those who switched for the first time in this big generational break from Labour to the Conservatives four years on from making that shift as Brexit was the key issue. How do you think the government’s sort of treatment and offers to that constituency have gone down?

Jennifer Williams
I suspect that public sentiment on this is actually a little bit more nuanced maybe than the government thinks it is. Polling certainly does not show overwhelming public support for HS2 as a premise, as a project, including in the north of England. However, it depends on what question you ask people. If you ask them, should we leave it half built and never build it to the north? Having spent all the money getting it to Birmingham, you will get a different answer.

So you know, these projects that Rishi Sunak has come forward with in the last 24 hours I’m sure will be popular in many places and they will allow Tory MP two to put them on their leaflets and to tell them that, you know, a line closed in the 1960s is going to be reopened or, you know, whatever the thing may be. But I think that one of the problems, and you sort alluded to it right at the beginning, is that there have been so many of these kinds of promises to the north of England over the last kind of decade or so. Not just HS2, but also plans for east-west links across the north, plans to electrify the Manchester Leeds line, dualling of the A1. I mean, so many things that have been repeatedly promised and then actually haven’t come off. There is a danger that the symbolism of scrapping a railway line to Manchester while standing on a stage in a former railway exchange in Manchester might play into a kind of deeper narrative about northern betrayal. And of course, that’s exactly the kind of narrative that politicians like Andy Burnham feed on.

Lucy Fisher
Yes. So let’s move away slightly from the specifics of the transport announcements of the past week. How are those voters in the North Midlands, particularly those who switched from Labour to the Tories, feeling four years into making that switch, do you think? I mean, you just don’t hear Rishi Sunak talk about levelling up. It’s so closely associated with the Johnson administration. It feels to me like there’s been a conscious decision to sort of junk it by Sunak’s Downing Street. But even still, you know, it’s not like it was necessarily fleshed out with much substance beyond the sloganeering under Johnson. How do you think voters view the Conservatives?

Jennifer Williams
Well, I think it was fairly obvious from the moment that the Tory leadership campaign kicked off last summer that levelling up as a sort of premise wasn’t really within the thinking. And although the Department for Levelling Up still exists and Michael Gove still exists as the secretary of state who’s in charge of it, as you say, it’s not something that you hear a huge amount about. I think Rishi Sunak’s Downing Street has got a different strategy to Boris Johnson for trying to hold on to those votes in the northern Midlands. You know, if you look, for example, at his pledges to motorists, you know, I suspect that that’s predicated on the idea that talking to people about roads and cars is going to be more popular than perhaps some of the previous rhetoric aimed at the red wall. I’m just a little bit sceptical that red wall voters necessarily feel that much differently to people in other parts of the country when, you know, primarily, particularly after the sort of the inflation situation we’ve had over the last year or two. Usually, it’s the economy and how people are feeling in their pockets that’s front and centre of their mind.

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, I do think that one of the outlines of the way the Conservatives are going to fight the election. I was very struck by the number of times that Rishi Sunak kept talking about towns instead of cities. You know, more people live in towns than live in cities and of course, HS2 is very much a big cities project, it was connecting the great cities of England. But even Northern Powerhouse Rail went across the top and the Conservatives under George Osborne and David Cameron had a notion of how to make the north boom, and it was built around the cities. Whereas since Boris Johnson, clearly now under Rishi Sunak, the focus is on the towns. And it’s interesting, for example, that the Treasury campus in the north, it’s not in a city, it’s in Darlington. So I think you can see a notion of where the Tories think where HS2 fitted into this strategy as we’re putting our chips on towns, which is what paid off for them in 2019.

Jennifer Williams
I think that’s definitely right. It can feel in that respect a little bit like you’re rerunning the 2019 election and, you know, have the dynamics moved on from then? I think I completely agree on the towns point. It’s a very noticeable shift from the Cameron-Osborne years. And just because levelling up is no longer a slogan and indeed neither was really Northern Powerhouse Rail, I’ve noticed in the last couple of days but then, you know . . . 

George Parker
Too Osbornite?

Jennifer Williams
Yeah, exactly. They’re not even calling it that anymore. But like just because they’re not talking about the agenda in those terms doesn’t mean that they don’t still think that their votes win towns.

George Parker
I just wondered what Jen, when you look across the electoral map in the north of England and the 30- or 40-odd town seats that the Tories won from Labour at the last election, do you think they are salvageable now for the Conservatives or do you think this focus on the towns is probably misguided because those seats are gonna be lost in any event?

Jennifer Williams
Some of them might be. I mean, we still got a year to go and we don’t know what Labour is gonna be offering given a turn, right? And I mean, I know Oxbridge is a very different part of the country. But I mean, I think Stephen Bush wrote in his newsletter the other day, what Oxford showed was that the door hadn’t quite been closed to the Tories. So whether that’s also the case in some of these red wall seats as well, I mean, I genuinely don’t know, but I think the Conservatives are working on the basis that maybe they’re still in with a shock.

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Lucy Fisher
Jen Williams, thanks for joining us.

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Well, as Jen mentioned, it’s Labour conference coming up in Liverpool from this weekend. And as we are recording, there is a by-election taking place in Rutherglen and Hamilton West in Scotland. George, you just had the odds, didn’t you, on how favourable it is for Labour?

George Parker
Well, we’re recording this before we know the results, so at the risk of making a Jim Pickard-style prediction, (laughter) the betting odds are pretty much it’s a dead set for Labour, 33 to one on for the Labour candidate in that seat. And frankly, if the Labour party is not able to win a seat in its old heartlands against the SNP given the political circumstances and what’s been happening to the leadership of the SNP, they might as well pack up and go home.

Lucy Fisher
If, as predicted by the polls, Labour does sweep it, Robert, that will give Keir Starmer a sense of confidence, front-footedness, coming into Liverpool from Saturday onwards. What are you looking out for? What does Starmer need to deliver at this conference to get a sense of momentum into the rest of the autumn?

Robert Shrimsley
I think Keir Starmer has done a remarkable job in lots of ways as Labour party leader. He should not have been in the position to win this election, Lucy. After what happened in 2019, nobody thought Labour would come back in one term. So he’s done a remarkable job. He has hugely detoxified the Labour brand with Jeremy Corbyn. He’s done part two of his strategy, which is to prosecute the case against the government, albeit with quite a lot of help from the government. But the third part, which I think everybody feels we’re a bit undecided on is the “why Labour” question other than “why Labour will”, because if we don’t want the Conservatives, that’s who it’s gotta be.

And I think what he’s got to show are two things. One is that Labour has some kind of vision for the country, which if you’re gonna say the country isn’t working properly, which is its claim, then it’s got to show how it’s going to get the country working. And secondly, he’s got to sell the country on himself, because the one thing you come across whenever you talk to voters is no great appetite for Keir Starmer, even when he’s well ahead in the polls, apparently. There’s no great affection for him. He may well struggle to get there because he’s not a very demonstrative person. But I do think that what you’re gonna need to see from Labour this week and in the weeks that follow is both that sense of why we’re a hopeful choice for you. You know, the country is ready for change; here’s the change. And secondly, why I would be a good prime minister. And that I think is quite a big ask.

Lucy Fisher
I think we’re likely to hear some bold interventions on policy, George. There’s lots of mutterings about a big offer on housing, which would go some way to offering some substantive policy on one of the big challenges facing the country of the kind that we were talking about earlier that Sunak didn’t necessarily fulfil the brief on. I feel like his conference speeches have tended to be quite repetitive. It’s become a joke now, hasn’t it, that he’s the son of a toolmaker who lived in a pebble-dashed semi, you know. What can he bring to the table in terms of him as leader, given that we know the Tories want to make this a very presidential-style leader-on-leader election campaign?

George Parker
Well, I think, you know, reinventing Keir Starmer’s personality is probably not gonna be something that happens in Liverpool. I think certainly he can make a start by keeping his speeches shorter. But remember when a couple of years ago it was sort of Castro-esque in its length. (Lucy laughs) And I see he’s become open to parody. And, you know, he has this theme about talking about the class ceiling and breaking the class ceiling. I imagine we’ll see a bit of that. But I think, a bit like Sunak’s speech actually this week, I think a lot of it will come down to the policy office he makes as a way of defining himself and what his priorities are. What the Labour party are trying to do desperately is to avoid being defined by the policy choices that the Conservative party want them to make.

Lucy Fisher
Mm-hmm.

George Parker
So if you take, for example, the HS2 decision, as far as we can see in the early response from Labour, they’re basically going to go along with it. The triple lock on pensions, they’re gonna go along with it. They don’t want to be defined by the choices the Tories are presenting on transgender issues, for example, so they need to set their own agenda. Housing would obviously be a good case in point, something which appeals to younger voters. Or something which just touches his personality to the policies that he wants to deliver. When you talk to Labour strategists, they say, as Robert was saying, that they’ve answered the question why not the Tories. But the question that Keir Starmer has to answer in his speeches: if not them, why us?

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Lucy Fisher
Well, that leaves us just with time for the Political Fix’s weekly stock picks. George, who you buying or selling this week?

George Parker
Well, I’m going to buy Suella Braverman, the home secretary, who we were watching her conference speech talking about this “hurricane” of migration coming this way, following on from a recent speech where she said mass immigration was an existential threat to the west, her railing against, you know, the lack of common sense shown on the transgender issue. And these things are the kind of things which we at the FT are not particularly enthusiastic about. But in the echo chamber that she operates in, whether it’s GB News that we were discussing earlier or the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express, playing back into the Tory membership, who ultimately will choose the next leader of the Conservative party. I think rather regrettably, it’s been an extremely successful week for her and noticeable that Rishi Sunak, either because he wants her to be the sort of outrider for him on those issues or because he doesn’t feel strong enough to stop her doing it, has let her do it and the wind is in her sails.

Lucy Fisher
Robert, who are you buying or selling?

Robert Shrimsley
I think I’m gonna sell Andy Street, the mayor of the West Midlands, both in himself. I think he took a bit of a pummelling this week over HS2. He came out to fight it, didn’t succeed. And I think there’s quite a lot of buzz that he might, he will not stand again in the elections next year. He was once heralded as the future of devolution in England, a man who came from business rather than politics. He’d been a huge figure, managing director of John Lewis. I mean, it was bit overhype because he was actually very political all his life, but nonetheless a different way, devolution, listening to the voices on the ground. And I think it’s also been noticeable in recent months how much the Conservative government has moved away from its devolution agenda and how frequently it talks about acting to stop councils and mayors doing things. So for example, if you take the issue of the Ulez pollution charge on cars in London, the Conservatives talk about this as if it’s undemocratic. You know, there are all sorts of things you could say about the Ulez, but it’s not undemocratic. He’s an elected mayor. So I think that I’m picking Andy Street both for him and as a proxy for the retreat from devolution that I think is going on. What about you, Lucy?

Lucy Fisher
I’m buying Nigel Farage. I’ve covered Farage for a long time back in the sort of heady pre-referendum days where Ukip were in their pomp. I followed him around the country, so I well know that the genius for politics that he has and watching him at play at the Conservative party conference was just something to behold. You know, even sort of clips on social media. He seemed to be in sort of rooms partying with and dancing and sort of singing with Priti Patel. I just predict we’re gonna see weeks, if not months of him toying with whether he might attempt to join the party, which George you said, you know, MPs are sort of suggesting he should do.

And there’s been a lot of talk about entryism in the Tory party with kind of those from further rightwing sensibility sort of potentially flooding the party. So far I think some of that is overblown. I don’t think we’ve seen any evidence of that, but it is something that I think they need to be aware of. The Conservative Democratic Organisation run by Lord Cruddas and a few others who are sort of Boris supporters who hate Sunak. They’ve been encouraging people to join their party, even if they’re not Tory members, to sort of try and put pressure on the party. So I just think Farage and his impact on the Conservatives is one to watch.

Robert Shrimsley
It’s interesting. It’s almost like the best reason for voting Conservative is what they might become if they lose.

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Lucy Fisher
(Laughter) We will see. Robert, George, thanks for joining. Well, that’s all we’ve got time for today. Do subscribe and if you can be bothered, please do leave a star rating. My producer, Manuela, tells me it helps push us up the charts. And don’t forget to sign up to Steven Bush’s award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You’ll get 30 days free. I’ve put links to all the articles related to today’s topics in the show notes, they are free to read for Political Fix listeners. The podcast 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.

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