Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Britain's Next Prime Minister

Episode Date: July 24, 2022

This next week will be among the most consequential in contemporary British politics. Ballots are sent out to Tory party members on August 1st, and they can begin voting right away. Whoever wins becomes Prime Minister in September, without first going through a General Election. So this next week is crucial for the two leading candidates to form final impressions before voting begins. To help us understand the process, the candidates, and what this all means for the UK at home, the UK’s economy, and the UK in the world, we are joined by James Forsyth, the political editor of The Spectator magazine. He is also a weekly columnist for The Times of London. He previously was a journalist for UK publications The Sun and The Mail.

You're seeing really big ideological divides between the two candidates, right? So you've got Rishi Sunak saying that, you know, it's a fairy tale to think that you can just cut taxes now and everything will be great. And you've got Liz Truss saying taxes are way too high and we're going to have a recession unless we cut taxes. And, you know, there's an old maxim in British politics that oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. And at the moment, the Tories look in danger of going down that path. This next week will be among the most consequential in contemporary British politics. Ballots are sent out to close to a couple hundred thousand Tory party members on August 1st, and then they can begin voting right away. Whoever wins moves into No. 10 Downing Street

and becomes prime minister in September, without first having to go through a general election. So this next week is crucial for the two leading candidates to form final impressions before voting begins, raising the stakes on Monday night's debate televised on BBC One for those of you that want to watch. I'll be tuned in, being the political junkie that I am when it comes to all things UK. But to help us understand the process, the candidates, and what this all means for the UK at home, the UK's economy, and the UK in the world, we are joined by James Forsyth, who is about as dialed in as anyone I know in Westminster. James is the political editor of The Spectator magazine. He's also a weekly columnist for The Times of London. He previously was a journalist for UK publications The Sun and the Mail and is a regular on The Spectator podcasts. Again,

the most consequential week in contemporary British politics coming this week. This is Call Me Back. So whenever I want to get a download on what's actually happening in UK politics, I turn to my longtime friend James Forsyth from The Spectator in the UK, who's based in London. He's also a columnist for The Times of London, and he has been completely crazed covering this crazy leadership race in the Tory party. But I'm grateful he's taken a few minutes to chat with us. James, thanks for joining the conversation. Pleasure to be with you, Dan. Okay, James. So first of all,

this next week is crucial, if not possibly decisive, in determining who the next Prime Minister of the UK will be. I think most listeners of ours, when I just speak to folks, you know, on the fly don't they just think you know there's there's a there's if they put it in u.s terms there's a primary now right there's a the

equivalent of like a primary for the next couple of months and then in a couple months a leader will be chosen a nominee will be chosen and this is different for two reasons one this next week is the ball game pardon the American sports reference. And two, unlike the US process, in this particular case, when the leader is chosen, that leader immediately becomes prime minister, doesn't have to go through a general election. So I just want to set the stage for our listeners on that. I want you to explain why this week is so important. Let's start with that. So because the, although this contest doesn't end until September the 5th, the ballot papers will be posted out at the beginning of August. And Tory members are organised people who respond to mail by return of post. And based on

some historical estimates, as much as half of the membership might essentially vote as soon as they get their ballot paper. And so this coming week is absolutely crucial for the two candidates. Polling Tory members is notoriously difficult, but at the moment it looks like Liz Truss has quite a substantial lead. And so that is this week is vital because what you also see in the polling is that the Tory selectorate is very volatile. If you look at the same polling that gives Liz Truss a big lead, it also suggests that the two candidates they're choosing between are even now their third and fourth choice, respectively. Two candidates who got knocked out in the parliamentary rounds, Kemi Badenoch and Penny Mordaunt are both the first choice of more Tory members

than either of the candidates who've gone to the knockout round. Okay, so hold on. I want to get into the individual candidates in a moment. So just again on the process. So as you say, ballots go out. So actually, let's rewind. Let's talk about how we got here. So Boris announces on July 7th that he's resigning

immediately and he says he'll stay in office he'll stay at number 10 downing street until a new leader is chosen right because the tories have the majority in parliament they have an election mandate so and and and so since the party has the majority it's whoever's leading the party's prime minister they don't have to go to the electorate for a vote. They just have to have the party choose the leader, and that leader becomes the prime minister. So Boris announces on July 7th that he's stepping down, and what happens after that?

Just briefly explain, especially for our U.S. listeners, what happened after Boris on July 7th announced, in terms of the process for choosing a new leader then a whole ton of people said I want to do the job because uh you become prime minister straight away here this is this is the only way in which you can become prime minister about having to win a general election first and there were about 11 or 12 candidates who declared they then had a breakneck parliamentary process to whittle it down to two. And the way that works is,

the way that works is, every day there's a round of voting. And the lowest candidate gets knocked out. And the members of parliament, the Tory members of parliament are voting, and whoever finishes last in each day's voting gets knocked out. So that's how you whittle it down

from 11 or 12 candidates to two candidates it would be the equivalent in the u.s say if the president of the united states was chosen by republican members of congress or democratic members of congress whichever whichever way you're looking at it, voting, the members of Congress, not actual party voters, party primary voters, you know, not activists around the country, but actual sitting members of Congress voting for a candidate to lead the party. That is what those rounds were all about. Yeah. And I suppose it's most like in US terms, picking a new leader of a house of representatives, for example. Right. And so that process is quite brutal because it's very short. The polite way of putting it is that the Conservative Parliamentary Party

is regarded as the most sophisticated electorate in the world, which means that there is an awful lot of horse trading. You never quite know what people are going to do. And what was interesting about this time round was that in previous, when Boris Johnson was elected, right from the off, he had a commanding lead, it was clear that it was him. This time round, Rishi Sunak led all the way through the process. But even at the end of the process, he's someone I've known for years, he only had 38% of the vote. Now, that is still more than anybody else. But, you know, both Theresa May and Boris Johnson had over 50% of the vote by the time it came to the end of the parliamentary phase. Okay.

So you then went to the country. So it goes through that process with the members of parliament, the Tory members of parliament voting, voting, voting, voting every day, whittles down the list to two candidates. And then those two candidates are the only two that go before the Tory members, Tory party members across the country, the grassroots of the party, the equivalent in the US context of a US primary. It's at that point that the actual, it's most comparable to a primary. We're actually going to voters across the country rather than parliament. Although far fewer people vote. I mean, no one quite knows what the precise number of Tory members are, but it's somewhere between 160,000 and 200,000. So 160 to 200,000 now vote on these two candidates. Out of a population of 60 million. So this is not... So this is wild.

So 160 to 200,000 people are choosing for a country of 60 million are going to choose the next prime minister of the UK. Okay. And just precedent for this, because this is a little out of the ordinary, right? So normally the party chooses the leader, and then the leader of the party goes before the general election. Here, we're bypassing that because Boris is resigning in the middle of a term. Precedent for that is Theresa May, Gordon Brown. Remember, Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019, and he chose to go to the country early. But, you know, and because it was a hung parliament, that's why he wanted to go.

But, you know, in Britain, it is now quite free. It now happens more often than not that the governing party will change leader at some point in the parliament. So if you think through recent British prime ministers, Boris Johnson, Theresa May, Gordon Brown, John Major. What about Thatcher to John Major? Was that the same thing? Exactly. And in some ways, that is the nearest precedent, because the Tories were behind in the polls under Margaret Thatcher.

They changed leader. This is what a lot of Tories hope will happen again. They changed leader, and suddenly it felt like a new government. It felt fresh and different. And they then won an unexpected general election victory two years later. So the two candidates are going before the membership broadly, again, the equivalent of a primary electorate in the United States. That process begins effectively now. And on the one hand, it looks like there's seven weeks until that outcome is determined.

But to your point, this is the week that is most important because on August 1st, the ballots go out to the members and the members can vote at any time from when they receive them in early August, the ballots, until September 5th. But you think most of that voting is going to happen early? That is the theory, is that based on previous behaviour, a large amount of the electorate will vote as soon as they get their ballot paper. Now, it might be slightly different this time around because it's August. Lots of people are away on holiday. It also might be different this time around because I think unlike in 2019 when nearly all Tory members knew what they were going to do when they get their

ballot paper, I think people are less certain this time around. So that might not happen but I think it is, I think certainly you will want to be in a strong position on August 1st because every day from August 1st onwards, there will be fewer available voters to reach. There is this quirk where voters can vote early and then change their vote. This is slightly mad, but everyone is allowed to vote. That's unbelievable to me. I mean, it just seems fraught for conspiracy theories and chaos.

This is not as Chicago as it sounds, right? Yeah, so explain. So essentially, you can either vote on a postal ballot or on an online ballot. The theory goes that if you vote both ways, only one of those votes will count for obvious reasons, and it will be the last vote that you cast. Now, I don't think many people are going to go and change their vote in that period unless there is some dramatic revelation about one of the candidates. I think if it's an incremental difference in performance during the process, I think there'll be very few people who bother to go and change their vote. That's not going to be a large number of people. But I think what it does is it means that if some

massive new development takes place during the month of August, people might well do so. So I'm just curious, online voting. I mean, it seems, you know, there are people in the there are groups in the US who are pushing for online voting. And it's met with serious resistance because the potential for hacking and bugs and, and all sorts of mischief making and and uh you know uneven reliability does any of this color how people i mean i i talked to friends of mine in the uk about online voting in these leadership races and they treat it like it's a like it's a i don't know it's just it's not controversial it is remarkably uncontroversial here uh i mean one tory mp was joking for me that when vladimir putin as a writing candidate, we might think that someone has hacked into the process. I think it is surprising how uncontroversial it is. But, you know, I think the theory goes that it's... So there are two reasons I think why there is this online voting element.

One, because it is August and a lot of people, we get longer holidays than you guys do. A lot of people will be away for the majority of August. The second reason is, I think the party officialdom were very worried. There are kind of, in almost every public service in the UK right now, there are arguments about pay. We, like you, have high inflation, the government is trying to keep a lid on public sector pay increases, the public sector pay, the public sector unions are obviously arguing for bigger increases. And one of their worries was that if they didn't have an online voting element, you might end up with a postal strike that would cripple

the whole ballot. And you know, the politics of it would be too delicious, which is, you know, you want to elect a new prime minister, you've got to pay us properly kind of thing. So I think that is why there is this online element. But I agree with you that if there is a contentious result, I think it will obviously become a subject of a much greater argument. So now let's talk about these two candidates, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. Can you just provide our listeners with a little bit of background on each one of them

and how they're positioning themselves in this race? So Liz Truss is the foreign secretary. She was previously the international trade secretary. She is the longest serving minister in the cabinet. And she campaigned for Remain in 2016. So the key point, 2016, the debate over Brexit, Boris Johnson was on the front lines of the pro-leave, the Brexit campaign.

And Liz Truss, who's now one of these two finalists, was on the other side. She was with David Cameron and George Osborne and campaigning for England staying in the EU. The UK staying in the EU, yeah. Yeah, and despite that, though, she has become, in some ways ways the caucus within the party that is the most hard line on the Brexit question is called the European Research Group and by the end of the process they were

backing her that is because I think in large part she takes the toughest line on the Northern Ireland protocol which is the question of how do you solve this question of the fact that Northern Ireland has a border with the Republic, but is also part of the UK, and no one wants to go back to a kind of border where traffic has to stop on the island of Ireland. And so the Northern Ireland Protocol was meant to be affixed to that. But in trying to fix that problem, it's created another problem because it's created a trade barrier within the UK, which obviously unions in Northern Ireland don't

like. And Liz Truss took over that portfolio, I think initially, she made a kind of good faith effort to negotiate with the EU. It got nowhere. She is now taking through parliament legislation that essentially says, if you're not prepared to effort to negotiate with the EU. It got nowhere. She is now taking through parliament legislation that essentially says, if you're not prepared to negotiate with us on this, we will just unilaterally disapply it. And in part because of that, and in part because she is offering massive immediate tax cuts, about 38 billion pounds worth of tax cuts straight up. She has become the candidate of the European Research Group

who are the most hardline on the Brexit question. So they're like, would you say the European Research Group is like the Freedom Caucus in the Republican House Caucus, just a hardline conservative group? Yeah, I mean, obviously UK and US politics are not directly analogous, but they have a kind of internal whip. And by the end of the process, they had all thrown their weight behind, pretty much, not all of them, but the vast majority of them out front with the members. And she is also making much of her loyalty to Boris Johnson. She said in an interview the other day that she wished he was still prime minister. And she is trying to pick up that kind of vote.

You referenced what her fiscal policy is. So taxes in the UK are among the highest they've ever been in history right today so there is there is a debate in conservative circles in the uk about whether or not there needs to be some kind of tax reform tax relief uh but obviously there's another side to that our debate which is that the that kind of fiscal policy will be very inflationary and this is not the time to cut taxes but she is firmly on the side of cutting taxes, right? Yeah. I mean, her approach is much more Reagan 81 than Thatcher 81. In Britain in 1981, Margaret Thatcher actually raised taxes to try and get a grip on inflation. In 1981, Ronald Reagan obviously cut taxes in the US.

I mean, there are two crucial differences, which is the problem with the trust approach. One when Ronald Reagan cut taxes, well, interest rates in the US, the federal fund rate was like 16% or 17%. Right, right. Here we- Paul Volcker there cranking things up. Here we have incredibly low interest rates still, and the Bank of England is raising much, much more slowly than the Fed. Here we have incredibly low interest rates still, and the Bank of England is raising much, much more slowly than the Fed.

They're still going in quarter point increases. And the second difference is we obviously are not as lucky as you guys. You guys are the world's reserve currency, and so therefore have, I think, a lot more latitude in how you do these things than we do. But that is very much her positioning this time around, which is, you know, you can't tax your way to prosperity. So vote for me, and I will cut taxes from on day one. And again, this is significant. I mean, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that she could be prime minister in September. So it's not like a candidate makes these, you know, very ambitious promises to a some could argue pandering promises to to a primary electorate and isn't in the U.S.

and doesn't actually have to serve in office for months and months or a year later, has to go through a general election, then has to go through a transition and has to be sworn in, then has to build an administration, then has to deal with Congress. So many politicians have off-ramps between when they make their pledges and when they actually have to govern. In Liz Truss' case, she's advocating these policies, and she literally could be in number 10 Downing Street as prime minister in a couple of months. Yeah, she is promising an emergency budget within weeks of taking office. And the other thing to bear in mind is, because if she became prime minister, she would become prime minister with the support of less than a third of the parliamentary party, she really would have no choice but to do what she said she was going to do. And so, as you say, right,

I don't think there is any off-ramp for her from what she is committing to in this campaign. And one of the nature of the parliamentary process is, as it went on, she only made it into second place in the final round of the parliamentary process. Previously, she had been back in third place. And so she was promising more and more tax cuts to try and garner support as the process

went on. So the size of a tax cut offer she was offering by the end of the parliamentary stage was larger than what she was offering at the beginning of it. Right. And she would be inheriting a Tory majority majority of what they have like an adc uh they've lost a few in in scandals and by-elections but it's it's a yeah it's a very it's a comfortable enough majority to govern with until 2024 easily so she would have no excuse you know she she there's no she should if she's the leader of the party and the party has this massive majority that she would be inheriting, she would have no excuse for not implementing the agenda she had just campaigned on.

Yeah. And the other point here is that her argument is we need these tax cuts because of this cost of living crisis. We have an energy cap in the UK so that, you know, the price of energy can't rise beyond a certain level for the consumer. It's partly why so many energy companies in Britain have gone bust. That the increase to that from October will be announced in late August. So this cost of living crisis here is going to get is going to feel a lot worse in September than it feels today. Now let's talk about Rishi Sunak, who you've known for some time.

Just talk a little bit about his background and then what he's campaigning on and what kind of prime minister you think he would be. So he was the chancellor of the Exchequer until he resigned. So the equivalent of our treasury secretary yeah basically saying i'm resigning but two reasons one differences over economic policy and two there was a a scandal here about a politician called chris pincher who had a government job and he got um drunk and groped someone and number 10 said that well they didn't know about this behavior it turned out that previously there had been an incident and Downing Street had been warned about

his behavior and various ministers went out and said no no no one knew about this and it turned out they did and after party gate and everything, this was essentially the straw that broke the camel's back. So he resigns over that and differences over economic policy. And that has definitely earned him the ire of those cabinet ministers who are closest to Boris Johnson. You know, the ultra loyalists to Boris Johnson hold him responsible for the fact that, you know, the whole premiership unraveled. Now, I personally think that, you know, the person who undid Boris Johnson's premiership was Boris Johnson. But, you know, lots of people blame him. He also is in a very different position on tax cuts for his trust.

He argues that the first thing you've got to do is grip inflation, that to cut taxes now would make inflation worse and therefore that's a bad thing so he said yeah we've got to get taxes down but we've got to grip inflation first he is essentially a kind of eat your greens message uh and then you know you can have a tax cut but not not yet um and so despite the fact that he was a leaver in 2016 when he was elected. Right, so this is interesting. So Rishi Sunak was, so the way Liz Truss campaigned for remain in the EU, Rishi Sunak was campaigning for Brexit. He was with Boris Johnson and Michael Gove

and arguing that the UK needed to leave the EU. Yeah. So you would think that would put him with the base of the Tory party. Yeah. And, you know, when he was elected, he is a fiscal conservative. And so you would have thought he was on the right.

But because he has raised taxes, there is a kind of, you know, there is a chunk of the right of the party that says, no, no, no, we don't want somebody to raise taxes. So he has a slightly different appeal, I think, than you would have expected him to have within the parliamentary party at the beginning. And his challenge with the grassroots is to get over, I think, both the Boris Johnson factor and the taxes factor. Now, I mean, that is going to be work for him. But I also think that there is a general perception backed up by the polling

that suggests he would be a more formidable opponent for Labour. And I also think that, you know, we've had two debates in this process so far on TV and the kind of the snap polling afterwards had him coming second in the first one when there were how many candidates about five candidates on the stage and top in the second one when there were five candidates on the stage so there's a's a big debate on BBC One in prime time on Monday night, and that is a really big moment for him. He needs in that debate to turn in another good performance and say to Tory members, look, you know, put us side by side, who do you want to pick? And just what can you describe, had his own scandal uh about six

eight months ago regarding the the um domicile status uh of of his wife uh and he weathered that it seems he seems to have weathered that can you just describe what the what the uh accusation was and how he came out of it so his wife is an ind citizen. And so she is non-domiciled in the UK for tax purposes. This came out. There was a mighty row about it. She said, even though I'm non-domiciled, I'll choose to pay UK tax or more of my income than I am legally required to because you know that she got she said that she felt that this her her tax arrangements were offending kind of what she called a kind of British sense of fairness they did that you know and then I think that that storm calmed down and you know he still managed to win the parliamentary round of the process.

But I think it was a difficult period for him because it came straight after a spring economic statement where previously a lot of what he had been doing had been, you know, running the furlough scheme, which essentially was a scheme that paid people's wages when the economy was shut down. That spring statement was the first time he, well, was one of the first times he delivered a lot of bad news. And a lot of people were like, oh, don't like the sound of that. There's not enough help there. There's not enough relief there. We don't like these taxes going up. So he had a difficult few months. I think he then weathered that and is now um but you know i i think if you'd said a year ago you would have thought he was he would have been a very strong favorite in this contest he is now in this members round gonna have to come from behind why is it i'm perplexed by this the so about two-thirds of the tory members of Parliament in their voting are for Sunak and Trust, and yet it's not where the membership, the equivalent of the primary voters are in terms of their first choices.

And Sunak in particular seems to be underperforming so far with, according to the polling, of Tory members relative to Tory members of Parliament, Tory activists versus Tory members of parliament. What's the disconnect between what's happening among the Tory leadership, the Tory parliamentary members versus the base of the party? So I think the base of the party is keen on a fresh start. I mean, the base of the party likes new, fresh faces.

In that poll I was talking about, number one was Kemi Badnok, who is a junior minister. And then another junior minister, Penny Morden, was number two. And I think they feel like after this Boris Johnson era, which has been, I think, exhausting

is probably the best adjective for it. They think, look, why don't we start afresh? I think Tory MPs are like, hang on a second, we're sending someone into Downing Street, they've got to be Prime Minister on day one, they've got to have experience. And so that's why the MPs sent, you know, the Foreign Secretary and the Chancellor,

two of the most senior jobs in government, to the members. The members would, I think, the members, I think, would have liked to have had the chance to choose someone totally fresh. I mean, the MPs out, you know, to use an old Gordon Brown phrase, it's no time for a novice. A few other questions before we let you go. In terms of the Sunak versus trust policy agendas, once their prime minister, if, once they're prime minister, if either of them becomes prime minister, one of them will be prime minister, will UK policy on Ukraine change at all?

Or do you feel that that's pretty locked in? I think UK, Ukraine policy is totally locked in. Trust has been the foreign secretary, Sunak's been the chancellor. I don't think either of them will change that. I think the one thing I would guarantee you is that the first foreign visit that both of them make would be to Ukraine. Second, you mentioned Margaret Thatcher earlier in this podcast, and I've just heard in your commentary on the Coffeehouse podcast and in conversations I've had with other journos in London and Westminster, this sense that Thatcher in some ways hanging over this leadership race more so than in previous Tory leadership races, does that sound right to you?

If so, why? I think the reason why is Boris Johnson was a massively charismatic figure, but he travelled light in ideological terms. And I think what the Tory party would like to do would be to kind of go back to some of its ideological moorings. So that's why there are so many references to Thatcher. I also think that if you look at the age of the two candidates, they're both in their 40s, they're very much kind of Thatcher's children. You know, that they, the kind of the Britain which they live in, they're kind of, you know, the politics that was raging at the time that they were growing up, was all about Margaret Thatcher. And I think that is why there have been so many references to her in this

race. And I also think that there is a Tory sense at the moment that they won this big majority, the biggest majority they've won since Thatcher. And, you know, there are reasons for this, obviously, Covid being one of them. But they haven't made as much use of that majority as the base of the party would have liked to have done. It's hard to say, you know, in some ways the problem was the Tories in 2019 stood on this platform of get Brexit done, keep Jeremy Corbyn out of power. And the problem that they had was that by winning the election, they achieved those two things. They managed to break the Brexit deadlock in Parliament and defeat Jeremy Corbyn. And a bit like the dog that catches the car, they didn't quite know what to do after that. Okay. Boris Johnson. Is it safe to say that he's done,

or are you of the view that you can never count Boris Johnson out? I mean, if you look at his career, you know, as foreign minister in Theresa May's government, resigns as foreign minister in protest of some of the permanent Brexit negotiations with the EU. People think he's done then. Then he comes back. He becomes leader. He doesn't only come back as leader, but he wins this massive mandate in 2019.

I think one of the biggest majorities that the Tories have won in its history. Is it foolish to count them out? I think he certainly wants people to think he might come back. His last words in Parliament were, you know, not classic parliamentary rhetoric, but were like, hasta la vista, baby. Obvious kind of Terminator reference, you know, I'll be back. When one of his closest political allies they had this final cabinet they presented him with various gifts you know he said

um to mark the end of your current stint as prime minister that was the kind of the gag um so i think he certainly wants people to think he might come back i think politically it's quite different difficult as lightning doesn't strike twice. And I also think ultimately what did for him was that he'd lost the confidence of his parliamentary party. And I think he will struggle to get that back. What I think he will be is a hugely influential voice on the right of British politics. You know, he is going to write his, you know, his autobiography will be out in record time. He's going to be writing his newspaper columns.

He's going to be making TV documentaries. You know, he is going to have a big influence. And he is, I think whoever succeeds him, you know, I think they will come, the day on which Boris Johnson's newspaper column appears will be a day when they wake up in the morning thinking, you know, what's coming today. And he is, you know, I don't think he is going to disappear from British public life. I think he is going to be a big figure. And I think that there is undoubtedly a part of a Tory base that is like, why did they get rid of the guy?

The guy won this big majority, like, and, you know, why didn't he earn the right to continue on to the next election? And I mean, there are certainly some of his supporters who think, you know, look, in the same way that Margaret Thatcher became the great of great lost cause of Tory politics. You know, why was she ever removed from office? But that he will become that kind of figure. Although with Thatcher, to your earlier point, there was a real ideological cause at the core of her support and her movement. And that was a connective tissue she had with the base of the party.

And it's not clear that Johnson has that. Yeah. I mean, what he does have i agree with you but he doesn't have that ideological connection he probably in some ways has a greater kind of charisma connection and he will also i think regard himself as the kind of guardian of brexit um okay and that that brexit base doesn't overlap directly with the tory base but there's a lot of similarity and so if he starts saying my successor has gone soft on brexit then you know that will cause trouble for his successor before before we move off of boris just um there's a lot of comparisons made in the punditry class here in the u.S. to the U.S. and under Trump and and a lot of analysts pointing out, well, look at the way these Tory cabinet members brought down the prime minister.

Where was the courage of cabinet members within the U.S. government to bring down Donald Trump. And I think people don't fully understand that if you're a cabinet member and you resign from, submit your letter of resignation to the President of the United States, the President gets to fill your job with, nominate someone else. He still is president. The government keeps functioning. The cabinet keeps functioning. So these cabinet members, Rishi Sunak in particular, resigned to bring down Boris because they could bring down Boris. A cabinet member here can resign but not necessarily bring down the president. Could you just explain how – it's a process point, but I think it's important for listeners to understand the difference in the systems. I mean we could debate about comparisons of courage, but in this particular case, there is a process for a cabinet member resigning and bringing down the government.

Yeah, although I don't think it was obvious that they were going to bring down the government when they first, the first people started resigning. I don't think it was obvious at that point the government was going to fall. What happened was it was then a kind of domino effect that people kept coming. I mean, by the end of it,

there were 50-odd ministers had resigned. And it basically got to the point where it would be impossible, to your point, to staff the government. Because you have to staff the government from within the parliamentary party. And there were just not enough people

to fill all of those slots. And people kept coming. To give you a sense of it, on the day that he resigned, I remember waking up, checking, checking a couple of people who resigned, you know, in this age of 24-7 media. I emailed my colleagues on death say, I'll do the first two resignations. And then basically before I'd filed, it was like, I'll do the first four resignations because they just kept coming and coming and coming and coming and coming. And I think there was a kind of sense by the end that it could not continue. And I think he was quite, he was undoubtedly reluctant to go. And he looked to see, you know, and then ultimately it became clear that he just could not start for government if he stayed.

And that's why he decided to resign. OK, and finally, we haven't talked at all about Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party. Can you just tell us a little bit about Keir Starmer, where he's positioning himself for a for a potential future general election against the Tories? So there are two ways that a leadership contest can work in British politics, I think, for the other party. One is that it gets so much attention, it becomes impossible for the other party to get noticed, and they suffer from it. The other is

that there are sufficient divisions exposed within the governing party that the opposition benefits by default. At the moment it looks like this contest is going to be the latter rather than the former because you're seeing really big ideological divides between the two candidates right. So you've got Rishi Sunak saying that you know it's a fairy tale to think that you can just cut taxes now and everything will be great. And you've got Liz Truss saying taxes are way too high and we're going to have a recession unless we cut taxes.

And there's an old maxim in British politics that oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. And at the moment, the Tories look in danger of going down that path. But the problem for Starmer and the risks for him is that Labour were set up in all their positioning very much in opposition to Boris Johnson on a kind of personal level. And Boris Johnson so dominated UK politics that whoever succeeds him, it will feel like a new government. Like, remember that when John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher, he'd been her chancellor and her foreign secretary, but it still felt like a totally new and different government because Thatcher was this massive personality

and anyone else in charge just felt very different. And so the risk, I think, for Starmer is that, you know, he is not a kind of Tony Blair-style figure. He has not made a massive connection with the public. He has not taken a decisive and overwhelming lead in the polls yet. And so he could be vulnerable if the new leader can sort the Tories out. You know, he could find that the Tories come back. But there is also a danger for the Tories.

But, you know, this is their third change of leader in six years. And, you know, every time you change a leader, you inject a little bit of poison into the party's bloodstream. And the danger is that the Tories are just getting quite close to kind of septic shock. And in terms of how he would govern, where would you put him and his governing agenda, centre left,? What what how the party's transformed since Corbyn, Jeremy Corbyn lost the last election? He is he has moved the party back to the center from the Corbyn era. You know, he, he ran essentially in that leadership

contest saying that he essentially offered kind of Corbynism without Corbyn, right, he was going to keep the policies. But you know, he wouldn't be Jeremy Corbyn. He wouldn't have the baggage and he wouldn't have some of the kind of foreign policy issues on NATO, nuclear weapons, all of that stuff. As leader, he has tried to drag Labour to the centre. I think in ideological terms, Starmer is definitely to the left of Tony Blair. And I think he would govern as a fairly kind of classic social Democrat government.

I think the most likely result of the next election at the moment, depending on what happens in the story leadership race, would probably be that there might be an anti-Tory majority in Parliament. So you might have to govern kind of in conjunction with the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. But I think on Starmer, you know, he has not yet sealed the deal with the public. And he is also trying to keep his powder as dry as possible on policy. He is essentially running a small target strategy, which is, you know, if I don't give the Tories anything to shoot at, they can't shoot at it. Last question. Something that I'm struck that has not gotten much attention, I think, over certainly in the US, and I think as well also in the UK, is that the, if you look at the four finalists for the leadership of the Tory party, one of them was going to be prime minister.

It was an extraordinarily diverse group of candidates that we have not seen in Tory politics for a long time. You can go back, I guess, to Thatcher. You can go back to May, Thatcher, Disraeli, in terms of you think about ethnic diversity. So gender diversity, can you talk a little bit about that? So I think there are two things going on. One is that David Cameron, when he was leader, he kind of changed the way the Tories selected their candidates to put more of an emphasis

on getting more women selected and more ethnic minorities selected. But I mean, the second thing that is happening is that in Britain, lots of recent immigrants have embraced what you could call the kind of vigorous virtues of factorism, you know, hard work, entrepreneurialism, patriotism, public service. So, you know, all of those things have come together. And I think that the Tory party is, you know, now very, very competitive with Labour in terms of a Hindu and Sikh vote and the black African vote.

And, you know, also, you know, for example, if you look at the Jewish vote, historically very Labour, now much, much more split between the main parties. And so I think the Tories are... The Tories are very, very comfortable with diversity. I think there is quite a good argument that Britain is the most successful multiracial democracy in the world right now. And can you just those four finalists just describe, you know, you know, what each who

each one was in terms of that? So Kemi Badnok had been born in Britain, then she'd moved back to Nigeria, where her family were from. And then she returned to the UK at 16 to finish off her education. And she then stayed in the UK. She became a Tory politician. She backed leave in the referendum. And she is the standout star of this contest, in that she essentially made a kind of first principles argument for conservatism during the contest. And the base, which I think has been kind of disconcerted by some of the kind of ideological flexibility and fluidity of recent years, absolutely loved it. She is, you know, she's very straight talking. She's very hot on, you know, she's very opposed to what we, you know, hear what we call kind of wokery. And the members love her. And, you know, the polling during the race showed that from kind of relatively low recognition, she was beating absolutely everyone by a country mile.

The other person who didn't make it from the final four is Penny Mordaunt. And she hit a kind of sweet spot, which is for people who wanted a break from the Johnson cabinet, she'd never served in it. But she had served in Theresa May's cabinet as aid secretary and then briefly as defence secretary. So she was able to say, look, I've got cabinet experience, but not in this cabinet. And that a lot of party members liked. And I think that her appeal was she sits for Portsmouth, which is a naval seat in the south of England, which has seen better days. And she, you know, first in her family to go to university, military background. You know, she appealed to a kind of Tory sense of, you know, this is kind of blue collar conservatism.

Yep. And then Liz Truss we talked about and Rishi Sunak is his family's from India. Yeah, by East Africa. So that's a kind of part of that. Those Indians who went to East Africa, you know, because of British rule in East Africa, and then came to the UK. And again, you know, these are, you know, his dad was a GP doctor here, his mom was a pharmacist, and a kind of classic success story of immigrants. And yet, there were there were, you know, kind of classic success story of immigrants. And yet, there were there were, you know, they weren't, you know, the other people in the race was Sajid Javid, you know, whose family came to UK from Pakistan, you know,

this is the Tories are very have become very successful at creating a kind of diverse leadership group, but which isn't defined by its kind of ethnicity. This is not a kind of quota system. This is very much like just the kind of, the Tories have found a way as a party of a centre right to appeal. And I think they have managed to create a kind of a British patriotism,

which is very much about values and emotional connection rather than any kind of blood and soil connotations. Got it. That is very helpful. I think we're experiencing something similar in U in uk in u.s politics on the right here uh it's a conversation for another day it's not immediate but i think it's um it's very fluid and um so watching what's happening uh on on your side of the pond is very encouraging james as always uh thank you you've been very generous with your time. Pleasure.

You dashed over here. Did you dash over from Parliament? Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I was just over that. I mean, our listeners can't, I can see him. He came like running in from Parliament. And by the way, that's not easy to do these days because unlike usual, unlike usual times where it's raining, it's actually disgustingly hot. And you're running in a suit. We have had our hottest day. We are not used to this level of heat here. It's kind of, you know,

and remember, this is London, so most places don't have air conditioning. Right, right. So anyways, I will actually be suffering the London heat at some point this summer. So I'll be sure to track you down when I do. Until then, James, thanks again, as always, for taking the time.

See you soon, Dan. Thanks so much. That's our show for today. To keep up with James Forsyth, you can follow him on Twitter at JG Forsyth. That's JG F-O-R-S-Y-T-H. You can also find his work and his reporting at The Spectator, spectator.co.uk. Highly recommend you subscribe. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan

Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.