Transcript: Who’s an extremist in the UK?

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Who’s an extremist in the UK?’

Lucy Fisher
They say, choose your friends wisely. How’s that working for the Tories? Welcome to Political Fix, your essential insider guide to Westminster from the Financial Times, with me, Lucy Fisher.

Coming up, who’s an “extremist” in the UK? The government devises a new definition, just as a Tory party donor is accused of racism and calling for an MP to be shot. With me here in the FT studio to discuss some of these issues: our political fix regulars, Stephen Bush. Hi, Stephen.

Stephen Bush
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And Robert Shrimsley.

Robert Shrimsley
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
Hi, Robert. And also joining the show today is Hannah White, director of the Institute for Government think-tank. Hi, Hannah.

Hannah White
Hello.

Lucy Fisher
So, Hannah, we’re going to talk to you shortly about why prime ministers fail to implement their agendas and how reforms to the centre of government could help. But I wanted to kick off with something else, which is extremism. The government’s come up this week with a new definition of what counts as extremism, and how it will identify groups it considers too extreme to fund or engage with. Communities secretary Michael Gove had this to say to the BBC.

Michael Gove voice clip
I think it’s important when government seeks to work to counter hatred when we are working on the ground in communities with grassroots organisations, that we’re able to choose our friends wisely. And in so doing, we want to avoid some of the errors of the past where government money and sponsorship has gone towards individuals and organisations that have been extremist.

Lucy Fisher
So Robert, before we get into what the definition is, who it might net, let’s just step back. Why is the government saying that it needs to redefine what extremism is?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, I mean, it’s a good question. Officially, it partly has to do with the gap between the hate speech laws that exist currently and the current prescriptions on extreme organisations. But I think it’s been a long-standing bugbear of Michael Gove’s. It’s something that he had wanted to do for a long time. He has pushed the government in this direction on its strategy towards extremists.

Obviously some of the things the Conservative party has been doing since the Hamas attack and the bombing of Gaza have pushed this agenda forward. And we saw Rishi Sunak talking about it a couple of weeks ago. I think it’s like a combination of all these things wrapped up together. They think the climate is there, they think there is an issue and some of them have been pushing on it for a very long time.

Lucy Fisher
Stephen, just take us through what this definition encapsulates and how Michael Gove has rolled it out this week.

Stephen Bush
Its definition of extremism is people who support ideologies based on violence, that seek to negate fundamental rights and the operation of the United Kingdom as a liberal democracy. So some of those bits are already the bits which are controversial within the Conservative party and outside of it. But then the extra bit is anyone who creates a atmosphere which is conducive to people doing the first two things. I would say that the bits which are politically difficult, even within the Conservative party, is one, you could argue that innately liberal democracy is unfortunately conducive to people who want to destroy liberal democracies, right? That’s why they are more vulnerable than other forms of government.

And then the second is then quite a lot of culture war debates. Both sides of them would argue. Then the other side seeks to negate fundamental rights of others, right? So, you know, for example, if you are pro reproductive rights and reproductive freedom, you think that your opponents are seeking to reduce the fundamental rights of women, and you are promoting abortion. And if you are anti-abortion, you think that your opponents are negating the fundamental rights of the unborn. Right?

So there’s already an argument that this definition is too expansive. But the essential policy problem it’s seeking to solve is that in the past, most violent terror attacks were directed, ie by an autonomous terror cell or by someone, you know, planning something somewhere. And now they are increasingly what the security service call inspired ie someone watches a bunch of videos by the extreme right terror group or by an Islamist terror preacher, and they go, oh, I know what I’m going to do is I’m going to, you know, get in a car, drive into someone, plan a nail bomb.

And so the idea is that you broaden the definition of extremism to make it easier to catch in your net people who are inspiring rather than direct.

Robert Shrimsley
But I think it goes broader. I think it goes broader than the issue of terrorism as we normally think of it. It goes to the question of cultures of intimidation, which people have felt at different levels of government and public life. And it’s about saying to government bodies, people like this are not the people you should be taking advice from. So that’s where I think it goes beyond the conventional form of terror. Some of these organisations, they’re not people to be trusted on preserving the values that we like and I mean in the Commons, he then went on to name under privilege five organisations, three of them involved with British Muslims and two of them from the far right. I have to say, I don’t think either of them rather liked to be called in to advise on government strategy. (Lucy laughs) But it’s around that territory, too.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah, but Rob, I think you make an interesting point that it’s quite limited in what it does. Yes, if you’re named under this definition — and part of it is about naming and shaming — then the central government is blocked from engaging with you or, you know, channelling taxpayer funding to you. But at least to begin with, it won’t bind councils or arm’s length bodies, the CPS, police forces, universities, others. So in some ways, I’m not surprised that Labour have come out and said, almost counter-intuitively perhaps, it doesn’t go far enough.

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah. I mean, I was surprised by the relatively limited nature of it, but I think it reflects what Stephen was alluding to about the backlash that’s come from people within the Conservative party who worry about how this might be used when they’re out of office, which they recognise could be not that long away. I saw a significant figure on the conservative right, Robert Colvile, who runs the Centre for Policy Studies, who was attacking a new document by HOPE not hate, which he said when you went through it, it was full of pictures of members of the Conservative party — Suella Braverman and the new conservatives, and also Nigel Farage. So you can just see how this kind of policy thinking could be turned back on them very, very quickly if they’re not careful. And I think that’s partly why it’s a bit more muted than some of the fanfare might have suggested.

Lucy Fisher
Hannah.

Hannah White
The question for me is what the political gain is here, because there’s ability to sort of look like you’re being tough with these groups. And there’s a response to some of the debates which we’ve been having lately, but I’m not clear, given how little time there is now before the next election, what difference it’s actually going to make. I didn’t know what are your view is on that?

Stephen Bush
Obviously, the thing which is a bit weird about all of the fanfare isn’t there already exists a mechanism to prescribe organisations.

Hannah White
Exactly.

Stephen Bush
And simply naming some more but not prescribing them is pretty weak sauce. The thing that, you know, I certainly bore on a lot about is, in both 2010 and in 1997, the governments of John Major and Gordon Brown were doing these kind of like death or glory runs of things, and they desperately wanted to get done before they got turfed out. And in some ways, really, this is basically the closest equivalent to Harriet Harman doing the Equality Act, John Major trying to put rocket boosters under the peace process.

Hannah White
Theresa May doing net zero.

Stephen Bush
Theresa May, yeah. (Overlapping talk)

Robert Shrimsley
Although we  often were always drawn to the “this is wedge politics, isn’t it” electoral thinking. And you do have to love the fact that they just believe this. They actually believe in this.

Lucy Fisher
But is the electoral mileage in this, Robert? As Stephen says, this is a kind of a pet issue of Michael Gove’s. He’s long advocated for the “drain the swamp” policy towards, you know, Muslim groups with Islamist leanings. But as we approach the end of this week, as, again, as Stephen pointed out, he’s ended up upsetting the Tory right. Do you think it could restrict freedom of speech, freedom of worship with regards to abortion rights, assisted dying, opposition to trans rights? He’s also annoyed the centrists in his party, who are concerned that this could net mainstream Muslim groups and therefore unfairly demonise people.

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, I think there’s a lot of electoral mileage, not least because the issues that are primarily concerning the country are not this one. They’re the NHS, they’re the cost of living and then now comes immigration, which you could say made this touchy for some people, but not really. But I do think that if you are looking for any electoral gain, it is just conceivable that it pulls back people from the Conservative fringe who might have gone to Reform. But now I think if they’re hoping for electoral bounce off this, they’re gonna be disappointed.

Lucy Fisher
Well, let’s move on to the row engulfing Frank Hester, the healthcare technology entrepreneur who’s the Tories’ biggest-ever donor after he gave a whopping £10mn to the party last year, and it should be added a personal donation to Rishi Sunak — or donation in kind, I should say, in the form of a £15,000-odd helicopter ride. The Guardian revealed on Monday that he’d previously said that looking at Diane Abbott made you just want to hate all black women and that she should be shot. He accepts that he made rude remarks about Abbott; he insists they had nothing to do with the colour of her skin or her gender. Stephen. Huge problem for the Tories, this, isn’t it? How do you assess how they’ve handled this, and Sunak in particular?

Stephen Bush
They’ve handled it badly. I mean, you know, the...

Lucy Fisher
Understatement of the episode?

Stephen Bush
It’s a good example of how they had very few political options, right? Obviously those remarks as reported are open-and-shut racist, right? It’s literally like the dictionary definition of, you know, you can’t say them like an individual person makes you hate all people who share their race and gender characteristics, and then if you turn around and say it had nothing to do with her race and gender, it raises questions like, do you understand English or speech or concepts? But obviously the Conservative party doesn’t have £10mn spared down the back of a sofa; they actually can’t give the money back, right?

So if you are Rishi Sunak, very obviously what you needed to do is say right away, of course, this statement as reported is racist. And then actually you should just front up the fact that you can’t return the £10mn because you’ve spent some of it and you don’t have £10mn just lying around somewhere. I mean, technically he does, but probably not in a liquid state that he can give the Conservative party. Instead of doing this sort of slightly ridiculous theatre of first saying it was wrong, but, you know, not being able to articulate why, sending out ministers to also do this — so I think Mel Stride was the one who had the unfortunate, although, you know, these comments weren’t about gender or race.

And it’s like, well, for a party which likes to go on about how other people don’t know what a woman is, apparently they don’t know what a woman or being black refers to. And then, of course, at about 4:00pm, Kemi Badenoch said, what obviously Rishi should have said. And then he took another couple of hours to get to that position. And I think the thing that has spooked a lot of Conservative MPs is, unlike the Lee Anderson row, when Lee Anderson said that Sadiq Khan had given London over to his mates and then Islamists had taken control of the London mayor. You know, there is a constituency for that kind of remark within the Conservative party, whereas there is not a single Conservative MP who thinks that those remarks, as reported, are defensible, right.

There are some Conservative MPs who might go, well, I wouldn’t trust anything that’s in The Guardian, but it raises the question for lots of MPs of, well, if you can’t deal with this fairly open-and-shut case when there’s nothing politically difficult to manage yourself around in which you have very limited options, because you can’t give the money back and you can’t defend it. How is this guy and how was this operation going to hold up during an election campaign?

I think it’s why, you know, we are gonna see, I think, more and more of the sort of ritual whispers you get whenever a leader is in trouble where people start going, oh, you know, he’s poorly advised, need to get different people around him, etc, etc.

Lucy Fisher
I mean, Robert, Stephen points out it took Rishi Sunak more than 24 hours to actually come out and say that these remarks were racist, and he was essentially bounced by Kemi Badenoch. Or at least that’s what, you know, many of his colleagues are saying privately. Stephen also pointed out that he dispatched his spokesperson. He dispatched Mel Stride, a cabinet minister. He dispatched Graham Stuart, another minister, on to the airwaves to hold this line, avoiding calling these remarks racist, before he eventually himself did say they were racist. I mean, that kind of thing — throwing your colleagues to the wolves — that leads to the breakdown of discipline and real resentment behind the scenes, doesn’t it?

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah, I mean, it’s what Boris Johnson did during the Partygate affair, essentially. He sent people out to defend himself. I jokingly (inaudible) sent out that tweet, setting out how the different steps they’ll go through, getting each one wrong and being 24 hours behind the curve. And it’s almost been proven step by step.

And I do think it’s an extraordinarily simple rule of politics, which certainly this government is very bad at, which is look ahead and figure out where you’re going to be in three days. And if it’s a bad story, how about getting there in one? Time to just get the pain out of the way. And as Stephen said, the absolute red line for the Conservatives is the money. So get everything else out the way early. It’s incredibly inept. It really is terribly bad for discipline, as you say, because people think they’re sent out to take these impossible positions and then they’re the ones left looking stupid.

But I mean, fundamentally, you can’t blame this on advisers. You can’t blame this on anybody else. It goes to the person at the top who, for some reason or other, is reluctant to call what this is, and it’s not the first time, and it just speaks to a real sort of lack of political nous, which is an odd thing to say about somebody who’s managed to become prime minister.

Lucy Fisher
Hannah, what’s your take?

Hannah White
Well, I was just really noticing the fact of the people who even I think before Kemi Badenoch, Andy Street was out there saying this isn’t a decision that, you know, I’m not telling the party what to do, but this isn’t a decision that I would be able to hold the line on. I would give the money back. And we’ve also seen the same from the Scottish Conservatives and I think not much (overlapping talk).

Robert Shrimsley
That money. I’d give it back.

Hannah White
That well, that is really striking though, in an election year that people are definitely seeking to differentiate their position when they’re looking to their own electorates and not going in behind the prime minister on this because, as Stephen says, they’re fairly clear on where they would want to be seen by the electorate and that is gonna play into their own prospects.

Lucy Fisher
Well, we’ve also seen the Tories try to attack Labour on one of their megadonors — Dale Vince, the green energy industrialist. He’s given £2.5mn to the party to date, including a £1mn cheque last year. Stephen, the Tories have picked up on the fact that Dale Vince said late last year with regards to Hamas that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. They think this is appalling and that Labour should give back the money as a result. What do you think?

Stephen Bush
I think the problem is, although those remarks are — yeah, I mean, unfortunately, the kind of (inaudible) and people who haven’t really engaged with the region have said about Hamas for a very long time. One, the fact that those remarks predate the October 7th atrocity makes them less politically difficult for the Labour party to navigate, but also for precisely the reasons Robert laid out about the timing of how the conservatives would move, that kind of where they needed to get on day one. And now this point, he just comes across as desperate scrambling. And I think also at this point for the Conservatives, they just don’t want to be on this story because it raises questions about Rishi Sunak’s judgment. And really they just need to get off it.

Robert Shrimsley
It’s also, I mean, it’s a very dangerous place. The Conservatives really don’t wanna get into the broader issue of party donors. It’s not a safe space for them. Above all, because the only alternative to party donors is state funding. And party donors is a system that massively favours the Conservative party. They get more money most of the time. They have more people likely to give them vast chunks of cash. So they are the party that least want state funding. So they really, really don’t want this to turn into a broader row about how politics is funded. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lucy Fisher
It’s been such a hectic week, and there’s almost too much to discuss. But of course, we must mention Lee Anderson’s defection to Reform UK, which happened on Monday, in what seems like ancient history.

Robert Shrimsley
Was it this week? We lose track.

Lucy Fisher
Let’s just step back, Robert. With everything that’s happened this week, Lee Anderson’s defection has prompted talk of up to 10 other Tories also making the leap. I think perhaps we should take that with a pinch of salt. But there’s this febrile atmosphere among the Tories. It’s prompting lots of questions about Sunak’s authority.

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah, I mean it’s all going terribly, terribly wrong. You know, whenever the grid they have in Number 10 Downing Street have announcements, it’s not working out. The one thing I would say about Lee Anderson’s move is that it’s not like normal defections in that he didn’t defect from the Conservative party to Reform; he was thrown out to the Conservative party and then decided that he belonged with Reform. So it’s slightly different. Also, people can recognise that he might consider his chances of holding the seat to be stronger outside of the Conservative party. But it is — it’s really bad because there are people who are sympathetic to him. And he was . . . he’d become quite a big figure in the Conservative party, which also, by the way, goes back to Rishi Sunak’s leadership because Rishi Sunak promoted him, because he recognised that Lee Anderson spoke to a part of the Conservative coalition, that he didn’t, and he needed that part. But he promoted him, put a sort of, you know, a wild card into the pack. And that wild card’s . . . that metaphor is completely exploding on me. That wild card has not worked out to his advantage, but the hand was dealt. (Laughter)

Lucy Fisher
Nicely smoothed off. Well, let’s change gear and talk about Labour. They’ve been doing a pretty good job of trying to keep themselves out of the news of late, allowing the Tory melodrama to dominate. But Robert, you had a brilliant column this week that was fascinating on Labour’s plan to rebuild relations with the EU. What’s that cunning ploy?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, I think, as you know, Labour has defined its European policy in negatives, which is all the things it’s not going to do: not rejoin the single market, not join the customs union, no freedom of movement. And the only things they’ve talked about in terms of making Brexit work are really quite incremental things around veterinary deals, youth mobility, suchlike. And they picked up in the past the trade agreement that we had post-Brexit. And there’s a review due early in the next government and they could use that to get a better deal. And I think they’ve begun to realise off the soundings with Brussels, that’s not the way it’s going to work.

And so they’ve started to come up with this new plan, which is to use the idea of an EU-UK security pact — a new one, which everyone can see the case for, particularly given Ukraine and the possibly of a Trump presidency — and then define security really, really broadly so that it takes in economic security, environmental security, security from criminals and say these are ways we can push ourselves back into the European orbit. So, for example, we might accept a little bit of jurisdiction of the ECJ to get better access to Europol and Schengen data. Or we might sign up to the CBAM, the carbon border levy. Or we might look at working together on sourcing critical raw materials.

And all these things bring the UK back into the European orbit and build stronger relationships with the EU and the Commission. And perhaps this way you can start to breach the dams that the Tories have erected around their Brexit polls. Now, obviously there are some several caveats we put into this as to whether it could work, but that is the way they’re now thinking.

Lucy Fisher
Really interesting intel you’ve picked up. Hannah, will the EU buy this? They famously hate cherry-picking.

Hannah White
I mean, I think Robert’s right that the EU has absolutely not been thinking about this review in the same way that it’s been talked about here, and for them, it’s much more a technical review of the way in which the agreement is working. That said, security is absolutely the place in which the EU are most likely to look favourably on ways in which they might have a closer relationship with the UK. It’s the area where we have something genuine to give, where they value the UK’s input and say, this isn’t such a bad idea. I do think if you want to get the EU interested in developing a more of a closer relationship.

Lucy Fisher
So you’re optimistic about the EU going for it. Stephen, what about the public? I mean, does this leave Labour potentially open to the Tory attack line, that they’ll reverse Brexit or can’t be trusted on the EU?

Stephen Bush
I think in an election campaign, one of the Conservative messages will be that, yeah, Labour will be freedom of movement out behind the back door. And I think one of the known risks to Labour in the election campaign will be a shadow cabinet minister saying something like, yeah, of course, Brexit is a disaster. Because, let’s face it, we all know that’s what they all believe. And so that will . . . that’s kind of a risk to them, regardless of where their policy position is. I think, however, the idea of a security arrangement is broadly fine. That’s not going to be politically difficult for them.

I actually think the political problem Labour will have is at the moment, if you are any form of civic society organisation, if you’re an orchestra or the CBI, or indeed, as Minette Batters, the departing gen sec of the NFU — National Farmers’ Union — basically revealed in her sort of farewell interview in The Times, you know, essentially there’s this general feeling if you want to get a hearing from most government ministers, you have to be willing to do your kind of shibboleth of Global Britain making Brexit work even if you hate Brexit, everything about it and everything about it has made your sector worse. Look, the Association of British Orchestras, or the NFU, or any of these organisations, or touring theatres also, is not going to feel remotely hamstrung in saying to a Labour government, Brexit’s terrible, this deal doesn’t work, why aren’t you fixing it?

Because that will be popular in the Labour grassroots. You know, every cabinet minister or junior minister who wants to show that they’re, you know, doing something that the membership likes at a time when they’re gonna have these very tight spending rounds, he’s going to want to emphasise their own closeness to the European project. And I think that will actually be the political challenge for Labour. The political class and civic society will want them to get much, much closer than really the EU27 is interested in and much, much closer than the voters Labour worries about who make up that third of that coalition which did want to leave will want.

Robert Shrimsley
And I think Stephen’s right. And actually, probably the greater danger for Labour doesn’t come before the election but after it, which is that when it stops doing these kind of things, if they prove just too incremental for everyone and they re-emphasise the point that actually, given what you think as Remainers, what you really ought to be doing is rejoining the customs union or making the case for the single market. So I think it doesn’t get Labour off of any hooks. The question is whether they begin to move faster and they feel a bit freer talking about this after the election than before. 

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Lucy Fisher
Hannah, let me turn to you. So on Monday, the IFG, the Institute for Government, your think-tank, launched a report from a year-long commission on the centre of government. It was launched by Gordon Brown and John Major — some pretty hefty heavyweights. And you had a very impressive cast of commissioners — Sajid Javid, Louise Casey, Sally Morgan, I could go on — who’ve all been involved in this really meaty piece of work. I’ll link to the full report in the show notes for any listeners who want to see the detail, plus my briefer write-up in the FT. But just tell us, first off, what is the centre of government? Why did you think it’s failing or too weak to fulfil its duties?

Hannah White
So our definition of the centre is basically Number 10, the Cabinet Office and the parts of the Treasury which interact with the Cabinet Office and Number 10. And we felt there was a strong case looking back at events of recent years, but also much further back, that actually these institutions are largely,  many of them established in the 19th century but haven’t really been seriously looked at and changed and updated as the business of government has significantly changed over those decades and centuries. We looked at examples like Covid, where the centre really struggled to find the decision-making mechanisms to respond. It got there in the end, but as we’re seeing through the Covid inquiry, there were really serious problems with the culture at the centre and that it really wasn’t supporting ministers to be able to make decisions they needed to make in that context.

We also looked at examples like big cross-cutting policies, which we know are increasingly things which government wants to pursue. You can’t silo your policy objectives into single departments. You have to find ways of making government respond across the piece. This is something that Labour is saying it wants to do with missions and so on. Levelling up is an example of a policy where what essentially happened was the centre wasn’t sufficiently strategic about what it wanted to achieve, and we ended up with a situation where the Treasury set the budget before the policy had been defined. And so policy had to be retrofitted into the space left by strategy essentially set by the Treasury. And we just think that’s the wrong way around. We need a strong centre which has strategic capability, and the priorities of the government should drive the priorities in the spending review, which determine how the Treasury allocates money across government. Too often that’s not the case.

Lucy Fisher
And I wasn’t surprised to see two former prime ministers involved in launching your report, because we often hear from former inhabitants of Downing Street that they try to pull levers and realise there’s nothing attached to them. And multiple prime ministers — to my mind, Tony Blair has been the most candid and articulate in talking about how he failed to achieve, you know, as much of his agenda as he would have liked, in part perhaps due to these issues at the centre of government.

There were lots of interesting eye-catching recommendations in your report, but I wanna focus on two. Firstly, you call for the Cabinet Office to be scrapped altogether. Just explain. I mean, obviously, listeners will know what the Cabinet Office is in some senses, but in others it’s sort of an odds and sods department. Just remind us of what it is and why it’s not functioning well, and what you think should replace it.

Hannah White
Well, originally the Cabinet Office was designed to be the bit of government which serviced cabinet. The clue is in the name. And one of the key parts which remains are the secretariats, the bits of government which essentially service the cabinet itself and all the cabinet committees provide their papers and interact with government departments in order to take the business of government to the cabinet.

But over time, the Cabinet Office has grown and it now is markedly larger than it used to be. It’s accumulated all sorts of other things — things that make sense to be at the centre, at one point in time or other, but get left there; things, which together as a group don’t make any sense. And the consistent feedback we had across our year of work as a commission is that the Cabinet Office has really lost credibility. It’s got this half which does sort of secretariat work. It’s also got all the functions, which are the things like procurement and finance and so on, which are functions which make sense to be at the centre, but really make the department itself quite incoherent. And those have grown enormously in recent years.

Lucy Fisher
And so you’re calling for it to be replaced by?

Hannah White
So we’re saying you need to take those things which are about running the civil service out of the Cabinet Office and put them into a separate civil service department, where there can be a real focus on government reform and ensuring that the civil service has the capability to deliver on the priorities of government. And then you need to take the secretariats, the bits that work directly to the prime minister and cabinet and put them into a department of the prime minister and cabinet, which is Number 10 plus the secretariat functions.

We think that would reduce overlap, it would reduce confusion, which often happens when Number 10 and people in the Cabinet Office are tasking bits of government with things that they think are priorities. There’s often a lot of overlapping, confusion, and we think you need to beef up that central department to really support the prime minister and the cabinet to deliver on their priorities.

Lucy Fisher
Now, another key recommendation of your report is for the prime minister of the day to overlook cabinet, which has become far too bloated. I looked it up; there are currently 32 ministers attending at the moment, and it’s become something of a rubber-stamping forum rather than really a forum for decision-making and proper policy formation. And instead, the prime minister should surround themselves by, you said, three or four ministers, a sort of VIP cabinet, to do all those strategic decisions. And interestingly, this is something that Labour is quite interested in taking up.

Hannah White
Well, this is obviously something, a recommendation we’ve been developing over the course of the commission and talking to lots of different people about, and we’re really pleased that Labour has shown an interest in it. We think it’s a recognition of the reality that most prime ministers, actually, over the course of their premiership, evolve this sort of at least informal mechanism. They all decide eventually that cabinet doesn’t work as a decision-making mechanism, and they end up with a smaller group of ministers who they put the key strategic decisions to before taking them to cabinet.

We say, why not recognise that? Why not set it up from the start? Give it the proper support it needs in the form of a secretariat, and acknowledge that this is something that in the modern world, you have to have those key strategic decisions made in a smaller group. It’s a lesson you take from the private sector. No private sector company would have 32 people around the table when they’re trying to determine and stick to the priorities and the outcomes they want to achieve.

Lucy Fisher
Robert?

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, I just . . . one thing I wanted to ask you about and it was a fascinating and very persuasive report. But one thought that occurred to me was, you have all these prime ministers saying we must toughen the centre and do more to make the centre stronger. And the corollary to that is the absolute enfeebling of all the departments and all the cabinet ministers who run those departments, and that actually, particularly when you get weak figures being put in to run those departments, weak cabinet ministers.

And I just wondered whether, to some extent, we ought to be looking at the fact that what this is sort of saying is all our Whitehall departments, they’re all rubbish. We absolutely can’t count on them to do any of the things that they’re meant to do. So we’ve got to have more civil servants at the centre. And even if we have 6,000 civil servants, which are still dwarfed by what there is on all the departments, and actually, maybe what we ought to be looking at is not the centre. but all the departments.

Hannah White
So what we would say is that actually this isn’t about accumulating more people at the centre, and this isn’t about the centre doing the job of departments. This is about the centre being really clear about priorities in order to be able to delegate. I absolutely agree with you that we’ve had too much in recent years of sort of relatively weaker secretaries of state not able to determine their own policy, because that’s been pulled right into the centre by the prime ministers, various prime ministers.

Actually, we would advocate for strong secretaries of state leading their departments. The role of the executive committee is not to make policy for different departments. It’s to do the big strategic stuff, which is about setting your fiscal rules, it’s about determining what your, essentially, your big things are that you want to say by the end of parliament to the public. These are the things we’ve delivered on and to keep a focus on that. And the secretaries of state should absolutely be getting on with the individual policies which are sitting beneath that.

Lucy Fisher
Stephen?

Stephen Bush
I think the fascinating thing about cabinet, which has become yeah, as the report said, really bloated, is what I think of as the Esther McVey problem — no offence to Esther McVey, if you listen to this podcast, right — which is successive conservative prime ministers have in a bind — and this is not just a Conservative problem, but just the most recent manifestation of it — in a bind, going oh, the riot of the party is getting cranky. Oh, I know, I need to get someone with credibility with the right in on a non-job. Time to have Esther McVey attending cabinet, which I think she’s done as a Cabinet Office minister, she’s done housing minister and a third job which temporarily escapes me.

But this is one of the reasons why the cabinet has gone — when you compare it even to what it was in 1997 under Major, where they were all significant figures with real power bases during the first term of Tony Blair — isn’t there a problem, where this is a great structure on paper, the political imperative to bloat for reasons of patronage is a big part of why the centre is dysfunctional?

Hannah White
I think there’s absolutely something in that. I think that the advantage of what we’re proposing is that you can keep your large cabinet. Cabinet is obviously constitutionally very important. And we’ve seen in recent years how you sometimes need the cabinet to do its job in terms of removing a leader, essentially, if things aren’t working out. You can achieve all those different sorts of balance, party balance, other sorts of balance that you want across your larger cabinet. But in terms of your key strategic decisions, you have this smaller group to whom you might up to invite other secretaries of state for particular decisions and so on. It doesn’t have to be particularly exclusive, but you have those strong characters who you really want the advice of sitting at the centre.

And another advantage of this is that often we think that too many decisions are made bilaterally between a prime minister and the chancellor, and in the end, the chancellor often has the whip hand in terms of, there is no money, prime minister. If you introduce another couple of ministers into that dynamic, that can really help in terms of making it a more sort of strategic and not just money-driven decision.

Robert Shrimsley
I have to ask, are you more embarrassed that you broadly agree with Dominic Cummings, (laughter) or do you think he’s more embarrassed that he broadly agrees with you?

Hannah White
We have often agreed with Dominic Cummings in his analysis of the problems. We don’t always agree with him on his solutions.

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

Robert Shrimsley
Well, I was thinking of selling the Tory treasurers for the reasons we’ve discussed, but since I can’t, I should definitely remember who the current head of the Treasury team is. I think it’s Graham Edwards. I’m actually gonna revert and actually I’m gonna buy Kemi Badenoch because this week she showed her own party what political leadership looks like, a little bit, in jumping into the Hester row and saying this is racism, and also then doing a feint to her right by saying, but we should accept apologies when they come. She showed an understanding of how you get your party behind you, how you take a position, get ahead of the curve and showed up Rishi Sunak into the process. And I think she will have appealed to both sides of her party — not just about the country, that’s a different matter — but Tories really talking to themselves at the moment.

Lucy Fisher
Well, I’m also going to leap in because I’m buying Kemi Badenoch, too. We haven’t really discussed it.  (Overlapping audio) No, no, I think it’s all . . . It’s great. I just wanted to make sure I’m not, you know, outdone in the buying Badenoch stakes. I thought, you know, fascinating that some of her allies are talking up the fact that she was the first senior minister to comment on the government intervening on the Telegraph sale. And as the government has finally indicated this week that it is going to take action to prevent foreign governments from buying British newspapers. Again, I think her judgment seems pretty good. Hannah?

Hannah White
Well, as you might expect, I think I would sell the Cabinet Office because having just explained to you why we think it stays ought to be numbers, we hope that that is something that whoever forms the government after the next election would take on board.

If I’m allowed a second one, I would potentially buy Pat McFadden, who currently, of course, is leading the campaign planning for Labour but has been talked up in the context of importing that Labour is interested in our ideas about this executive committee or quad or whatever you call it at the centre, should they win the election. He’s been talked up as a member of that, and that would be an interesting role for him to take on.

Lucy Fisher
Stephen.

Stephen Bush
I am gonna buy stock in Diane Abbott, who obviously is the person who’s been, you know, personally insulted by these remarks, who, as listeners may recall, had lost the Labour whip after she sent a letter to The Observer suggesting that Jewish people and people from a Gypsy, Roma or Traveller background did not experience racism, they experienced prejudice, for which she had the whip revoked.

Robert Shrimsley
Prejudice akin to having red hair?

Stephen Bush
Yeah, indeed. I mean, look, I think it was correct when she had the whip taken from her, and I find it frustrating that I think what’s happening this week is a manifestation of what happens whenever someone experiences racism. Then there’s this kind of weird referendum on the character of the person who’s experienced it, right?

And so, in an odd way, what happened is, because the remarks as reported are so open-and-shut racist, it’s kind of like what’s happened is people have decided that it means Diane Abbott can’t have done anything too bad with her statement in The Observer, which means a bunch of people across the Labour party — you hear it from Harriet Harman to Angela Rayner — have called for her to get the whip back.

It also does give the Labour leadership a way of giving her a path back into the parliamentary party. They are worried about how it lands electorally. If you end the career of the first black woman ever to be elected to parliament by removing the whip from her, and so I think this will in the end mean that she does get the whip restored. Of course, she may then in the end decide that she doesn’t want to stand of her own volition, but I think it does mean she’ll get the whip back.

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Lucy Fisher
Stephen Bush, Robert Shrimsley, Hannah White, thanks for joining.

Stephen Bush
Thanks, Lucy.

Hannah White
Thanks, Lucy.

Robert Shrimsley
Cheers, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
That’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. I’ve put links to subjects discussed in the episode in the show notes. 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 get 30 days free. And don’t forget to subscribe to the show. Plus, do leave a review or a star rating if you have time. It really helps us spread the word.

Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Audrey Tinline with help from Leah Quinn.  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.