Rishi Sunak’s dash for oil and gas

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Rishi Sunak’s dash for oil and gas’

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Robert Shrimsley
It’s very obvious that Rishi Sunak doesn’t care. He’s not interested in this subject like he’s interested in the economy or immigration. He’s not bothered about it.

Lucy Fisher
Welcome to Political Fix, your essential insider guide to Westminster from the Financial Times with me, Lucy Fisher. You heard there Robert Shrimsley talking about the prime minister’s shift on the eco agenda. Coming up, far from subsiding, the row over the government’s green policies has gathered steam in recent days, dominating headlines for a second week in a row. We’ll examine Rishi Sunak’s new dash for oil and gas. We’ll also look north to Scotland where a by-election showdown between Labour and the SNP this autumn is shaping up to be a major electoral test for Keir Starmer. Plus, Lords reform is on the menu. Here in the studio with me are top FT columnists and colleagues Robert Shrimsley. Hi, Robert.

Robert Shrimsley
Hey, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And Stephen Bush. Hi, Stephen.

Stephen Bush
Hi, Lucy.

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Lucy Fisher
First off the marks, then. What’s been on your mind this week, Robert?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, I’m very taken with the story that yet again, the EU has decided to delay introducing Brexit border controls on food and plants coming in from the EU. And it’s been promising to do this for quite a long time and the moment has never been quite right. First we had the pandemic, then the Ukraine war, and now we’re battling inflation. And these are all good reasons and we should be pleased, I think, that the government’s doing it, but it’s put no new date for the plan. It is talking about it drifting into next year. But the one thing I’m prepared to bet is that it’s not going to introduce something which puts up the price of foods in an election year. So this great Brexit freedom that we gave ourselves doesn’t seem to be something the government’s very keen to exercise.

Lucy Fisher
And Robert, you mentioned inflation is used as the justification for ministers for this latest delay. Of course, as we’re recording, we’re expecting the bank’s latest decision on interest rate rises. Stephen, what’s caught your imagination in recent days?

Stephen Bush
So this is actually much less highbrow. People on Twitter will be familiar with an account by the name of Derek Guy who tweets a lot about menswear and men’s fashion, who actually over recent months has been gradually radicalising against Rishi Sunak’s tweets. During the G7 year, he tweeted a picture of him saying, if fabric rationing comes to Britain. But this week he really did go off on a long, I actually, I’m afraid I do think entirely correct thread about the shortcomings of Rishi Sunak’s suits and the mysteries of Rishi Sunak’s suits, because obviously prime ministers dressing worse than they can afford to is not new. Harold Wilson did it; David Cameron famously bought off the peg when he didn’t need to. But the slightly odd thing with Rishi is he’s buying very nice suits, but they are not suits that suit his frame very well, at least I and Derek Guy didn’t think so. So yeah, that was my moment.

Lucy Fisher
Well, I just have to totally disagree with you, which I hate to do, because I actually very much admire your style. You are a stylish man, but I kind of get it. He’s so slight of frame that having that gap with a bit of ankle showing. I think, a) he looks modern. It’s quite like French. It looks fresh rather than the sort of the baggy sort of ill-fitting suits you see so often at Westminster. So I sort of haven’t really agree to this. Do you have a view, Robert?

Robert Shrimsley
Did you mention that I was stylish as well?

Stephen Bush
No. No.

Lucy Fisher
Uh, hello fellow stylish podcaster.

Robert Shrimsley
I don’t think I heard that. I’m afraid I’m with Steven, particularly since Rishi Sunak could dress head to toe in gold leaf and it would still be a suit that he could afford with money to spare. So he’s made a conscious decision to dress in this particular way. And I think it doesn’t look fabulous on him. I don’t think it matters very much. But I do broadly agree with Steve and I’m not sure what statement he’s making with his clothes. He’s much better in casual wear.

Lucy Fisher
OK. Well, I’ve been outvoted on that. To darken the mood briefly, I just wanted to draw attention to a report this week by the Foreign Office, its own internal assessment of the effects of aid cuts, which I think too often are treated as money wasted on faddish programmes like Ethiopian Spice Girls. But this report finds that this year, as a direct result of bilateral aid cuts, 3,000 more children will die of hunger in South Sudan and an extra 1,500 women will die in pregnancy or childbirth across Africa.

Robert Shrimsley
I think you’re making a really important point, Lucy, because so much of the debate around overseas aid is trivialised and attacked, and actually it’s worth occasionally reminding people what good it does. And the secondary point — and yours is the more important one — but a secondary point is also that it’s an area where Britain did actually punch above its weight, to use a phrase the Foreign Office likes using. Its aid programme gave Britain some soft power and status in the world and cutting it back, that does diminish it. So there’s not only a moral cost. There’s a political cost as well.

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Lucy Fisher
Well, let’s move on to discuss green issues for the second week in a row. Clearly it’s dominated the news agenda in Westminster and was kicked off by Rishi Sunak on Monday when he launched Energy Week with a new dash for gas and oil.

Rishi Sunak
I think it’s really important for everyone to recognise that even in 2050 when we are at net zero, it is forecast that around a quarter of our energy needs will still come from oil and gas. If we’re gonna need it, far better to have it here at home rather than shipping it here from halfway around the world with two, three, four times the amount of carbon emissions versus the oil and gas we have here at home. So it is entirely consistent with our plans to get to net zero.

Lucy Fisher
So, Stephen, I’m interested that you’ve written this week about how we’re suddenly sort of learning just how rightwing Rishi Sunak is. And on this green policy area, he sort of reveals himself, which you think is a strategic risk because it is only moderates that win elections.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. So essentially the political science of this is broadly speaking, one, people associate moderation with competence. And obviously all of us when we talk on this podcast we go, well, actually, look Rishi Sunak’s on the right of the party. But if you look at how voters perceive him, they perceive him as being on the political centre. That is one of the reasons why he is more popular than the Conservative party. I think he is still almost certainly still propping up the Cconservative voting intention share a little bit. And so, yeah, I think it is a bit of a mistake than we are now slightly seeing, you know, to use that fraught phrase, we’re seeing Rishi be Rishi. I basically don’t think Boris Johnson and David Cameron — for all they may have had other faults — were wrong about where the Conservative party needed to be to win elections. And we are kind of seeing a stress test about whether or not they were.

Robert Shrimsley
I also think, actually when you really strip this back, there’s something totally performative and false about all of the things that we’ve been seeing in recent days. The oil and gas licences, the Conservatives really made up their minds on that. And when he talked about producing more of our own energy, 80 per cent of our oil is exported. It’s not actually for use in Britain. Gas of the mix is near a 50/50. But you look at a lot of this stuff and you think this isn’t actually going to make that much difference. These licences have been announced, but let’s see what actually comes of it.

And equally, he and Grant Shapps and others are spending their time saying, no, no, we haven’t retreated from net zero at all. So I suspect they’re gonna end up pleasing absolutely nobody. They’re going to annoy all the people who think that net zero and climate change is a priority. And they’re going to depress their own backbenchers and supporters who actually think they need to go much further in resiling from net zero policy. I think this is all performative. It’s an attempt to put Labour on the back foot to try and establish a big political difference with the opposition. And as Stephen was saying, it’s not entirely clear to me that this is the right one for them to pick.

Lucy Fisher
And Robert, you’ve also sort of looked at how Sunak has tried to position himself as pro-motorist this week, talking about a review of low-traffic neighbourhoods. A lot of back and forth between him and other cabinet ministers about this ban on new fossil fuel cars from 2030 and whether that will remain or not. But you think he’s barking up the wrong tree?

Robert Shrimsley
I think that what he is engaged in at the moment, and from a pure political perspective I see the argument, which is he is trying to shore up the base of his own support, because actually the biggest fear for Conservatives at the moment is not that their people are going to Labour, but that they’re not going to vote at all. They might vote for Reform UK as a protest. And so, the first thing he’s got to do is get those people back in the tent. And you do that by winding them up about things that they’re already minded to be angry about. And one of these things is cars. They sense — obviously this goes back to the Uxbridge by-election, but even before this — there’s a sort of raging motorist out there ready to be hoovered up by people who say what they want them to say, who are annoyed about low-traffic neighbourhoods, about congestion charges, about being stuck in traffic jams while there are wide-empty cycle lanes, about 20 mile-an-hour speed limits, although that’s a slightly different issue to do with child safety particularly, but who feel there is an anti-car agenda, which there is an anti-car agenda, particularly in cities.

And so the Conservatives have an argument they can take to rural areas and say, look, these city types who vote Labour, they don’t understand what your life is like, they don’t understand how difficult things are, and they’ll get a lot of support from that, from the rightwing press — the Sun, the Mail, the Telegraph. And it will cheer all of those people who say Rishi’s taking the fight to Labour. So I get the crude, low-level politics of this and I think there is something there. But it is a base-vote strategy. A core-vote strategy is not a winning strategy. And the danger I think, as with net zero, is that the Tories start going off on tangents and however angry people who drive cars may be, they’re more bothered about the state of the economy. That’s what’s worrying them. And you know, they’re less bothered about having to pay £12.50 for a Ulez than they are about how much their mortgage is going up. So I just think it’s a displacement activity.

Lucy Fisher
I totally agree. I mean, I think that’s right to say that the economic lack of manoeuvre room is one reason the government are alighting on this. Borrowing’s already sky-high and high interest rates mean that servicing public debt is ever more expensive and tax rises mean that the tax burden is heading for a 70-year high in the next year or two. So they don’t have any manoeuvre room to spend more, either on easing the cost of living or on public services.

Robert Shrimsley
You’re completely right. But the other point though, I think, which is a bigger political issue, one that’s gonna play out over a longer period of time, is that the car issue does touch on one broad philosophical point, which is the extent to which the pendulum has moved from a place where it prioritised individual freedom, individual rights, my money, my car, my house, etc to global issues like the environment being the simplest example, not the only one where government is gonna have to be more present and what Labour party calls a strategic state. And the balance between individual freedoms and the surrender of those freedoms for a greater policy good is one of the big arguments of the coming decade. And the Conservatives are positioning themselves to fight that argument. So I do see the car battle as a proxy for something bigger, even if it is a displacement activity in itself.

Lucy Fisher
And Stephen, are there votes for opposition parties, Labour and the Lib Dem in that sort of area? If they position themselves as people who are thinking long-term strategically about the collective good rather than trying to foster selfish individualism.

Stephen Bush
Broadly speaking, right, the median British voter is fairly authoritarian. They’re quite authoritarian on, you know, crime burden-sharing. And like all voters across the world, they tend to resile (inaudible) presented with individual costs. So you can completely see how if you’re Labour or the Liberal Democrats, the sort of long-term bitch is great. Because you go, oh yeah, we need to avoid being dependent on people like Putin and the Saudis. We need to get our climate emissions down. Mumble, mumble, this will cost you a bit more.

And essentially right, the strategic battle, right, is Labour and the Liberal Democrats want this to be an argument about the long term and part of the Conservative party want this to be about the upfront cost. But Robert’s exactly right to say that this is really a kind of proxy battle/howl of dismay about the fact that when you look at the return of protectionism or friend-shoring or de-risking or whatever you wanna call it, in most of global politics when you look at the various sort of geopolitical challenges, even if we get to climate and whatnot, suddenly the state does look to be back not just here and pretty much everywhere else. And for the average Conservative MP, that is not something that you are jumping for joy about.

Lucy Fisher
Robert, we were just talking earlier about how the government has trashed its reputation as a leader in aid on green issues too. With the presidency of COP in Glasgow and successive moves by, first, David Cameron’s administration, cudgel taken up by Theresa May and then Boris Johnson. Are they throwing away some currency on this issue too?

Robert Shrimsley
And Margaret Thatcher of course who was very very early on climate change. Yes, they are but I mean it’s very obvious that Rishi Sunak doesn’t care. He’s not interested and when you talk to people around him, they’ll tell you he’s not interested in this subject like he’s interested in the economy or immigration because it’s such a core political issue. He’s not bothered about it. And so once you get into that place, it’s very easy to be pulled along a) by the loudest voices in your own party and b) by the political arguments about cost. But there is a price that they’re gonna pay for this. And the question that we’re all going to have to wait to see a little bit is the extent to which this tension between the broad public support for tackling climate change runs up against the fact that, well, it’s gonna cost me money, maybe I’m not quite as keen on it after all. He’s rather banking on people being more in the latter camp. But the reputation is it can take an important national hit at a time when up until now Rishi Sunak has largely been seen as a benign figure in world affairs by comparative and allies and leaders, certainly in comparison to what came before.

Stephen Bush
I think the really interesting thing, right, over the last half decade the Conservative party has become much more like the average European centre-right party, with one very important exception, which is the diversity of the top team and of its MPs. Whether that diversity is driven one way, it’s the same which is there are more religious people around the cabinet table than you would expect for a British political party. And crucially, the Conservative party which has always be an outlier on parties of the centre-right in really, really being quite passionate and engaged in climate change as an issue, is now starting to sound a lot more like a boilerplate European centre-right party.

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Lucy Fisher
Well, let’s move on to look at Scotland following the exciting news of another by-election this autumn. On Tuesday, we got the results of the count of the recall petition launched against Margaret Ferrier. To recap, she was the former SNP MP who broke Covid rules at the height of the pandemic by travelling from Scotland to London and back again while infected with coronavirus. Since then, she’s been convicted and earlier this year MPs voted for her to be suspended from the Commons for 30 days. Now local voters in her Rutherglen and Hamilton West seat have triggered a by-election which is set to be a two-horse race between Labour and the SNP. So Stephen, lots of talk about how this is a major test for Keir Starmer to prove his party’s electoral appeal in Scotland. Do you agree with that?

Stephen Bush
So yes and no. It’s a major test because if they don’t win it, something will have gone very badly wrong for the Labour party, opinion pollsters in Scotland, etc, etc. But no, because given the circumstances in which this by-election has taken place, that would advantage the challenger party. Given that we’ve seen that the SNP does suffer the same penalty that governing parties do in by-elections in general, that benefits the Labour party. So only a 5 per cent swing and according to the opinion polls in Scotland, the Labour party is enjoying a rather larger swing than that. So it’s a big test because if it goes wrong for all of those reasons, yeah, I mean someone probably needs to be fired, but it’s not a big test because it’s the definition of low-hanging fruit.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah, it’s certainly a seat that’s changed hands between Labour and the SNP in recent elections. Robert, how big is the independence issue for Labour? Because it seems to me what they’re trying to do north of the border, the Labour party led by Anas Sarwar, is ignore the issue because they’re trying to win back SNP voters who support independence while also projecting themselves as a pro-unionist party.

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah, I think they’re in a difficult spot, although actually I don’t think it’s that difficult. They just have to recognise that they are a unionist party. If they try to be both they will fall between two stools. I think this is gonna be a really ugly by-election. This has all the makings of a very, very nasty contest, particularly since I think the prime SNP attack on Labour is less about independence than about them essentially being a Conservative party. They are a pitch for a long time now has been labelling the Tories are indistinct and the reason they’re doing this is because Labour is the major threat in Scotland to the SNP’s hegemony and they know that Scots are sympathetic to the argument that says just get the Tories out. You know, actually the only way you’re going to get the Tories out is by having a Labour government in Westminster. So it’s worth lending your votes to them. And it’s a very tricky situation for people who are passionately pro-independence because the only path to independence is an SNP majority particularly at Holyrood but also very strong showings at Westminster. If you don’t stick with the SNP, then independence recedes as a possibility which is why coming back to your question, I think Labour has no choice but to lean into the fact that it is an anti-independence party and say to people, but we’re also anti-Tory and that’s more important now.

Lucy Fisher
Stephen, the SNP’s polling numbers have slumped this year following Humza Yousaf coming in as leader. I think the leadership election obviously exposed the bitter divisions in the party over a range of issues and there’s been the pretty dramatic police probe into the party’s finances.

Stephen Bush
By any measure it’s been a pretty awful year for the SNP, you know, previously popular leader having to step down with these questions swirling around her, leadership election which kind of revealed that the very politically lucrative face that they show of being a sort of moderate social democratic kind of small and nationalist party was not really the whole picture. And then the winner who although most in the SNP establishment I think if you look at where they actually compete for votes, rightly did not think it was a good idea to have an evangelical leader on the centre-right trying to defend their seats in the central belt. But nonetheless, in Humza Yousaf very much the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel candidate in the minds of many in the SNP establishment, and yet their polling has suffered. So again, it would be quite surprising if that didn’t lead to them losing elections in both.

Robert Shrimsley
And I think the other point is that the SNP’s primary purpose is to deliver independence for Scotland. And what became apparent even before Nicola Sturgeon resigned is that they haven’t got a plan for it. They had no strategy for forcing the issue because it’s up to Westminster whether they grant the referendum and they couldn’t figure out a way to do it. And it remains apparent that Humza Yousaf has absolutely no idea how to force the issue. And so, then they fall back on their record, which isn’t quite as great. So all of a sudden you’ve got a party saying, we’re the only people who can deliver you independence, but actually, guys, we’ve got no idea how we’re gonna do it. So it is, I think it’s a terrible time for them to have a by-election. And as Stephen says, the only reason why it’s such a huge issue for Labour is if by any reason they fail to win this, then they’re gonna be doing some very, very serious soul-searching.

Lucy Fisher
A final thought from me is that we’ve been talking about the oil and gas licences announced by Sunak this week. That’s obviously very good news for the industry based off the north-east coast of Scotland, and I’ll be interested to see whether the Tories managed to double the number of MPs — six at the moment — to 12, as some in Conservative circles think they will.

Robert Shrimsley
I’m gonna go with no.

Lucy Fisher
(Laughter) Stephen?

Stephen Bush
Yeah, I think although it is a good line for them to take in those areas, ultimately their big problem is that they are polarised in both directions. They are the most unionist party, which is very helpful in some seats, but they are also going to suffer tactical voting from the other unionist parties in this election, basically, right? Broadly speaking, the SNP and the Conservatives do well when the other does well and it doesn’t look likely that either is gonna do that well in the next election.

Lucy Fisher
Well, we’ll have to discuss this more and of course bring you some on-the-ground reporting from Rutherglen and Hamilton West once the writ is moved when parliament returns.

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Well, we’re joined in the studio now by George Parker, the FT’s political editor. Hi, George.

George Parker
Hi Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And we’re talking about, if it’s not too indulgent, given that I interviewed the Lord Speaker, Lord McFall, this week, which is the reason I wanted to talk about this Lords reform, which I know, George, is something you have also written a lot about. And so just remind listeners, the House of Lords doesn’t have a great reputation, does it?

George Parker
Well, that’s putting it mildly. It’s the most bloated legislative chamber in the world apart from the Chinese National People’s Congress. It has almost 800 members, most of them are men, 92 of them are hereditary peers who are only sitting there by dint of the fact that they are members of the aristocracy. None of them are elected, of course. Some of them are political cronies appointed with apparently very little personal merit whatsoever — we’ve probably come on to the recent case of some of Boris Johnson’s nominees. So it has a terrible reputation. People have been talking about getting rid of it or reforming it for well over a hundred years. But of course, it’s still there trundling along.

Lucy Fisher
And you mention Boris Johnson’s recent nominees. I think the one that’s caught the most attention is Charlotte Owen, a 30-year-old who’s only really had a very limited experience of politics in a series of quite junior backroom roles. But she now has a life-long role as a legislator.

George Parker
Well, I mean, this is probably one of the most egregious recent examples that someone who’s been appointed with the right to determine our laws in this country, as you say, until she either retires or dies, knowing exactly sure how old she is. We think she might be in her late twenties or thirties. Very little is known about her. Her CV is sketchy, to say the least. She seems to have very little experience of work at all, apart from doing a few junior backroom jobs. I think her main role for Boris Johnson was acting as the sort of link person between Number 10 and the parliamentary party in what was called Operation Save Big Dog. And yet here she is with a seat in the House of Lords. And some people say people are being a bit ageist about it. It’s not really a question of ageism, it’s a question of experience. What qualifies her to be sitting in judgment on British laws?

Lucy Fisher
Now there is an ongoing debate about reforming the House of Lords wholesale, and in particular, Keir Starmer has vowed to abolish the House. Although since saying that, he’s slightly sort of rowed back, making clear it’s not exactly a priority for a first-term parliament. Do you think he’s really gonna get ’round to doing anything given the political capital, time and energy he’s got to expend when really it’s not necessarily the most headline-grabbing attention, at least for voters?

George Parker
Well, the real problem with reforming the House of Lords is you’ve got to get the House of Lords to vote on reforming itself. And what happens is that prime ministers come in with the best of intentions and then they quickly realise that the House of Lords is quite capable of defending itself in quite a brutal way — in other words, gumming up the legislative process and blocking or frustrating the passage of laws that people really care about, whether it’s to do with health or education or whatever it might be. So as I mentioned, I mean, there have been attempts to reform the House of Lords going right back to the 1911 Parliament Act. We had Tony Blair’s attempts to get rid of the hereditary peers, which was only partially successful. Then most recently during the coalition governments of David Cameron and Nick Clegg, there was an attempt to shrink the House of Lords in half and make 80 per cent elected. That was frustrated by Tory MPs. And the problem is, as David Cameron briefly said, reform in the House of Lords becomes a third-term priority. There’s something you say what you’re going to do when you come in, then you realise you’ve got other priorities and it slips off the agenda and the House of Lords just carries on as it was.

Lucy Fisher
One of the measures that Labour figures are briefing is that the hereditaries could be axed. Those 92 peers who are members of the aristocracy have perhaps even less justification for being in the House of Lords. George, you wrote a fabulous magazine piece a couple of years ago. What did you find and what did you sort of take away about the role the hereditaries play after doing that?

George Parker
Well, the piece really sort of focused on this remarkable rearguard action fought by the hereditary peers during the Blair government where they basically persuaded Tony Blair to let 92 of them carry on sitting in the House of Lords and voting on legislation on a temporary basis until a more permanent solution was found, which to nobody’s great surprise has never been found. So they’re still there. These are people who are descendants of Norman conquerors, philandering kings, royal suck-ups who still sit in the House of Lords.

Now, a lot of them will say with a glint in their eye, Thomas Strathclyde being a good example of this, of course, we fully approve of a fully elected House of Lords. We’re just staying here until the reforms are finally implemented. Yeah. Chin rub, as we used to say (laughter) at school. One or two of them will actually say that there is a legitimate case for hereditary peers to sit in the House of Lords. And I interviewed the Earl of Devon, whose family have been sitting in Westminster since, I think the 1200s, and he argues that political fads come and go, but actually there’s a sort of continuity. These people have got their feet rooted in the soil of the counties they represent, in his case, Devon, and therefore they do have a role in sort of playing the sort of continuity, I suppose, spread of continuity through British democracy. Most people would just say, come on, you know, this is a democracy, you should be elected.

The problem is that the House of Lords is so illegitimate that it really, in the end, and we saw this recently as in the case of the illegal migration bill, in the end, they will always let the House of Commons get its way as the elected democratic chamber. And I think that there is a concern that the more legitimate you make the House of Lords become and this is the kind of thing that Keir Starmer’s talking about, the more the House of Lords will throw its weight around.

Lucy Fisher
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Bush
And the public are already frustrated by the fact that they see the House of Commons as being a bit of a bear pit where things often get held up. If you end up in a situation as you could do in Washington, of course, where you got two houses vying with each other, even more politics, even more delay. Does that frustrate people? That’s the case that some people make for not making the House of Lords more legitimate: that it’s so bad that it knows its place.

Lucy Fisher
Mm-hmm. And another defence, I think we often hear, is that it’s really — and I think this ties in with your point — but it’s an editing chamber. It respects the primacy of the Commons as the fully elected house, but that actually and increasingly under recent administrations, legislation has been rushed through the MP stage and turns up in a bit of a state and the role of the House of Lords, which, you know, houses many expert peers, is to sort of go through it line by line and sort of refine it, but not change the substance too much. And when I recently spoke to the Lord Speaker, he made the argument that, you know, when the Brexit debates were going on, Lord Kerr, who wrote Article 50 himself, was able to contribute to the debate about how it should be interpreted. There are many such experts in their fields, more so perhaps than in the Commons. That’s one reason it should stay.

George Parker
Yes, I mean, that is certainly the main case made by defenders of the House of Lords. It does a good job as a revising chamber and dealing with some ludicrously bloated and ill-thought-through legislation that arrives in the House of Commons. Most recently the government’s levelling up bill, which has become a sort of complete Christmas tree with baubles hung on to it, and House of Lords is having to wade through all these half thought-through plans. So I think it does do a decent job in that respect. I think it’s a shame that there aren’t more experts of the kind you described there, Lucy. I think recently there was a limit put on the number of experts who can be appointed to the House of Lords to two to a year.

Lucy Fisher
You’re right.

George Parker
And as a result, what you have is a lot of basically political cronies like Charlotte Owen or Ross Kempsell, who is another one of Boris Johnson’s lackeys, have been put in the House of Lords going in to do this revising job rather than the kind of people we think probably should be doing that job in the House of Lords — former diplomats, former doctors, surgeons, film directors, lawyers, people with real expertise in their field. I think if there are a few more of those and a few less ill-qualified cronies in there, we have a better place.

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, I think like George and you, I’ve never believed Keir Starmer was gonna get around to doing this and have long said this. But I do think for the reason that you touch on, which is that everyone can agree the problem and no one can figure out the solution. Didn’t Jack Straw put seven proposals forward and all of them were voted down by the Commons. So everyone can see the problem, but no one can work out how they want to replace it. But I do think surely it’s possible to see quite a lot of easy hits for a Labour government who wins. You’ve obviously said getting rid of the hereditaries, that’s one they could do. They could place upper age limits on it. They could require all the parties to scale back the number of people they have and they could theoretically look at the bishops, though I suspect they won’t. But it’s possible to see a Labour government putting a number of those measures in place quite quickly and then kicking it into the long grass with some kind of commission, isn’t it?

George Parker
Yeah.

Lucy Fisher
But I think the issue is slightly that there are so many more Conservative peers that dominate the house that Labour, despite vowing to abolish it, would have to appoint dozens of their own party peers in order to have a hope of legislation to do some of those measures to get them through.

Robert Shrimsley
Although sometimes the mere threat of doing that is enough to bring the Lords to heel.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah, but when it comes to their very existence, perhaps, and that’s what we’re talking about, you know, if their own individual peers ability to continue doing that role as a legislator, picking up their £300-odd a day expenses is threatened, then you’re really asking turkeys to vote for Christmas, aren’t you?

Robert Shrimsley
You’re right. And the other point one has to remember is the issue of party management, as Nadine Dorries is demonstrating quite clearly, the offer of a place in the House of Lords is something you can use to try to bring people to heel and get your MPs to do things that you would do if you’re prime minister. So it’s another piece of patronage that a prime minister potentially denying themselves if they remove it.

George Parker
I agree with Robert. I think there are some easy wins and the most obvious one is to get rid of these egregious by-elections where when a hereditary peer retires or dies, they are replaced from a waiting list of hereditary peers who can’t wait to go and sit in the red benches and they’re elected from within the (inaudible) peers to come in. I mean, it’s a crazy system. So just by removing the by-elections, you would just basically see that old rump of hereditary peers sort of die or retire and disappear over time. That’s one thing you do. I mean, a mandatory retirement age wouldn’t be a bad thing. Although the average age of members of the House of Lords is already 71. So, you know, (laughs) set it quite high I guess.

Lucy Fisher
I was also interested that the Lord Speaker said there are several immediate initiatives that any prime minister of the day could enact, which includes deeper vetting. One thing I think that shocks outsiders is that the appointments commission, known as Holac, only looks at the propriety of candidates, basically. Have they paid their taxes? Have they gone to prison? As Lord McFall put it, rather than have they exhibited the conspicuous merit that warrants them being elevated to the House? And another idea of his, which I also thought makes absolute sense, is forcing proposed peers to commit to participation because so many like the idea of being a Lord or Baroness and then simply don’t turn up.

George Parker
Yeah, I think well, those are interesting ideas. I mean, the problem of then, of course, is you’re asking the Holac to make fairly subjective decisions on whether people have the merit to go in. That gets you into political terrain very quickly. And of course, Holac doesn’t have the right to veto an appointment, as Boris Johnson proved when he put Lord Peter Cruddas in, despite opposition from Holac. So you’d have to beef up the power of that vetting body considerably. And I suspect that’s something, as Robert was mentioning, because of the patronage power of prime ministers, they’d be reluctant to do.

Yes, a commitment to participate, I think would be an interesting idea and I think probably would be welcome. Well, maybe what you do is, you basically if you fail to participate in a certain number of debates, you basically get booted out. I mean, to give you another good example from the Johnson era, the appointment of Evgeny Lebedev, the proprietor of the Evening Standard, to the House of Lords, he turned up and put on his ermine and looked great. But as far as I can tell, he’s been in the House of Commons and participated in debates fewer than most. Certainly, you can count them on the fingers of one hand. I mean, if you’re just there for the title and because you think it was gonna get you a, help you jump the queue in a popular restaurant and frankly, you should probably be out on your ear.

Robert Shrimsley
The other thing you could do is make the financial disclosures required of peers even more stringent than they currently are. They’re still not quite as stringent as they could be. And peers can take a leave of absence if they get a client they don’t want to talk about and then come back later. I think you could toughen that up to such a degree as to perhaps deter some of the worst names.

Lucy Fisher
Well, lots of food for thought there for future governments, perhaps. George Parker, thanks for joining.

George Parker
Thank you.

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Lucy Fisher
Well, to finish up, we’ve just got time for Political Fix’s stock tips. Who are you buying or selling this week, Stephen?

Stephen Bush
So I am selling. God, I’ve really gone for him this week. I’m selling Rishi Sunak. I think they’ve done something very interesting this recess, which is they’ve basically been having a dress rehearsal for an election campaign. You know, he’s been turning up in Scotland doing Energy Week. He’s been doing a phone-in on LBC now, which there is no strategic value in doing a phone-in in August, ’cause if you mess it up, but it’s all we talk about. And as a dress rehearsal for his ability to do this well in the election, I would say he hasn’t done that well. On the other hand, slightly caveating my own buying and selling here. I think the fact that they’ve done it and it hasn’t gone that well will presumably give them some stuff to work on.

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah, actually it’s a very FT position. There’s been a bit of a spike in his share price. So you’re selling. That’s top financial advice.

Lucy Fisher
(Laughs) Robert, who are you buying?

Robert Shrimsley
I’m gonna go for Nick Timothy who people may remember was Theresa May’s chief of staff and who has just been selected as the Tory candidate for Matt Hancock’s seat in West Suffolk, a seat that is so safe you really are talking utter wipeout if he isn’t returned to parliament. And he’s been a very interesting figure since he left government. Quite an important figure on the Tory right. He’s got his own substack called the Conservative Reader pushing particular policies. He’s clearly influential with a segment of the party and I think if he wins the seats, I assume he will go on to be quite a force in the next parliament.

Lucy Fisher
Well, I’m slightly inspired by you. I’m gonna buy shares in Rupert Harrison, who’s another former senior adviser to a past administration. He was chief of staff to George Osborne. He’s actually was selected several weeks ago for Bicester and Woodstock. But I think we’ve all slightly sort of woken up to it after Nick Timothy was selected. And similarly, although a new seat, I think it’s gonna be a safe one. And I am struck by the sort of irony, I guess, that Nick Timothy, as the architect of May’s famous “citizens of nowhere” speech, is a scourge of the international elite, the very category absolutely personified by Rupert Harrison, who’s gone on from his treasury job to be an adviser to Jeremy Hunt and an asset manager at BlackRock.

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah, people are already talking about them both as a Tory leadership contest in 10 or 15 years, which presumably means we’ll never, ever gonna hear from either of them again.

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Lucy Fisher
(Laughs) Robert, Stephen, thanks for joining.

And that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. If you like the podcast, do subscribe. You can find us through all the usual channels to receive episodes as soon as they’re released. We also appreciate positive reviews and ratings. It really helps spread the word. You can find the FT’s articles linked to today’s podcast topics in our show notes. Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Lulu Smyth and Manuela Saragosa with Andrew Georgiades. Original music 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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