Off Air... with Jane and Fi - First job as PM? Panic!

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

Penny Mordaunt pulls out of the Conservative leadership race - meaning Rishi Sunak will be our next Prime Minister.Jane Garvey and Fi Glover discuss the significance of the UK's first British-Asian PM with Sunder Katwala and Ayesha Hazarika.And, Sir Anthony Seldon explains what's first on the to do list for Sunak now that he's in charge. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] Producer: Kate LeeTimes Radio Producer: Rosie CutlerPodcast Executive Producer: Ben Mitchell Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to Off Air with me, Jane Garvey, and me, Fee Glover. And we are fresh from our brand new Times Radio show, but we just cannot be contained by two hours of live broadcasting. So we've kept the microphones on, grabbed a cuppa, and are ready to say what we really think. Unencumbered and Off Air. Welcome to Monday's edition of Off Air with me, Jane Garvey. And me, Fee Glover. Yeah, and we have changed the order of names. People keep going on about it.

It wasn't me that insisted on it. It's actually me that normally forgets that we've changed the order of names. Trust me on this. Now, I've had quite a busy couple of days with one thing and another, and I did not enjoy that really weird semi-tropical storm on Sunday afternoon. So it swept

across the south of England. I think it was almost everywhere. I'm sorry if you were untouched by this, because it's very annoying when people start talking about weather that you weren't affected by. No, but this was creepy. It was like a tropical storm. It was extraordinarily powerful. It really was.

It felt like being abroad in another place, and there was an otherworldly look to the sky as well, which I did not appreciate. It all started when I was watching The Embargoed but I have a preview of series five of The Crown and it felt like it was God's judgment on Netflix. I think maybe somebody was sending you a little bit of a sign. Do you think so? Yes I think this has turned into a terribly terribly guilty pleasure for you where actually you feel more guilty than pleasurable because it does crop

up in every single episode the crowd that's how i watch it despite the thrill of watching something that is so far not available to ordinary civilians you see yeah you've got a little bit of the i'm special that's the tiny frisson i get i'm also reading you know sometimes you just read a book that is properly enjoyable and you think i must recommend that i'm reading a book by ruth ware who's a writer i haven't read before um and she writes she writes crime stories but this is called the it girl and it's about the death of slightly going against my don't read too much about the murders of young women but this is about the murder of a young woman at oxford university anyway if you're looking for a page turner that isn't violent actually there's a violent incident at the heart of a young woman at Oxford University. Anyway, if you're looking for a page-turner that isn't violent, actually,

there's a violent incident at the heart of it, it's very, very good. Do you think that you could lobby in your role as one of the country's foremost TV commentators for either a special symbol that can be put on dramas and box sets or maybe just a whole genre thing that is really good thrillers that don't involve mutilated young women who tend to open the whole show lying naked in a forest with some hint of sexual titillation going on in their murder. Well if you actually on a tv note if you want something that's worth watching that isn't at all bloody or in any way unpleasant,

and it's going to sound strange when I say what it is, it's a Channel 5 documentary series. And it's about the work of a coroner and it's called Cause of Death. And you might think, oh, that sounds absolutely dreadful. But the people involved, I've watched the first episode and it's about the death of an elderly chap on a night out and he's found by the side of the road and this is about the very painstaking investigation into how he came to die

and whether it might have been foul play or whether it was something else. It was not murder as it happened, but it's just that everybody involved is so decent and so diligent. It actually almost restores your faith in humanity somehow. It's worth watching.

Well, I'll give it a go. I appreciate it might be a strange way to... I'm trying to avoid everything that's just about death as entertainment at the moment. I'm watching the story of Elon Musk. That's phenomenal. Is he a character? He is quite a character, yes. He is quite a character. The. He is quite a character.

The women in his life are really interesting. But his mum's quite an interesting figure, isn't she? Oh, my word, yes. So she describes a lot his early years genius. Oh, yeah. And I would have struggled were I to have had a genius child. I know that after listening to her stories. Well, hang on.

She spotted his genius before anybody else? She certainly did, yes. And she tells this story of how she used to have to get him dressed whilst he was asleep in the morning because he'd stayed up all night at the age of three or four reading books. And so he was too tired to go to school in the morning, but she packed him off to school anyway. It just sounds absolutely terrible.

You know, sometimes I get a bit queasy when I think back to the early years of childcare. It's half term at the moment in England and the tube is full of people taking their kids to trips half term. Good luck to them. I clutch my

lanyard and I thank the Lord that my kids are teenagers and are amusing themselves at the moment because we've been there and done that. Can I share with you a very funny shop sign that I saw? So it's on a hardware store in my neck of the woods in London and the sign

says, if we don't stock it, you don't need it. Don't you think that's a farcical claim? It's just so tempting to go in with an enormous list of things just to see whether or not they do have it. I'm amazed they're still allowed to display that outside.

Basically a too Ronnie sketch, isn't it? I'm going to live it. Shouldn't we also reference the fact that we have a new Prime Minister? To be honest, I know it's not the big story it might have been once upon a time when such things were really quite unusual. Whereas this is just just another Monday in Britain, isn't it?

But we do have a new prime minister. Yeah, it's another Monday of Conservative Party introspection that has delivered a new leader. That's what it is. So Rishi Sunak is our prime minister after the news that Penny Mordaunt had pulled out of the race. That came in about one o'clock, I think, this afternoon. I don't want to waste my research. I did find out earlier that Penny Mordaunt has a degree in philosophy from the University of Reading.

That's good to know. So she's no doubt philosophical about her defeat. Yes, I'm sure she is. Sorry, was that a joke? No, I just didn't want to waste the... I just had a bit of work earlier. Did we hear from John Pienaar? We did.

John Pienaar spoke to us just after Rishi's very short statement. He'll be the youngest prime minister in 200 years. Just to be clear, that's Rishi, not John. Sorry. And the first British Asian prime minister. So we chatted to Sundar Katwala, who's director of British Future, and Ayesha Hazarika, who's a fellow Times radio presenter, about just how significant, and it is actually, let's just stand back, take a breath, just how significant this is.

It is a huge moment, mainly because those of us who have Indian mums are not going to be absolutely rinsed about how unsuccessful we are. So I think, do spare a thought for the children of Indian immigrants right now, because I'll tell you what, the struggle is real people. It is an extraordinary moment. Look, you know, I and many of your listeners who are of Indian descent may have very different politics, particularly on the economy from Rishi Sunak. But it is extraordinary that he is our first Indian British Prime Minister, particularly today, where many people are celebrating Diwali. And of course, it's not just people here, a lot of our families in India and around the world, the eyes of the world are on the United Kingdom today because of this historical moment. You know, my kind of Indian WhatsApp group

is all the aunties, it's all popping off on the WhatsApp group. And I think, you know my kind of Indian whatsapp group is all the aunties it's all popping off on the whatsapp group and I think you know I'm people will know that I'm a former Labour advisor and I'm much more you know on the left side of politics but what I would say is that it was clear during the leadership contest that he was the more able candidate a lot of people thought it was quite icky the fact that he didn't get the job then. Britain's been made a laughingstock of over the last six weeks. And maybe this will do something to kind of restore a tiny bit of our reputation in a good way. OK. Sundar, we have texts coming in here at Times Radio. Other radio stations have had similar ones from people who say you don't need to talk about his race his culture his religion anything other than his competence would you what would you say to

those people most people think that in britain that we're meant to not notice the ethnicity or faith of the prime minister we we poll people ahead of the jubilee and ask what would you think and six out of ten people said it'd be irrelevant. And a quarter of people said it would be actively good. A surly minority of one in 10 thought that would be bad news. This would be an ethnic minority prime minister of Britain. So it's a good principle. Fair chances, no unfair barriers means we shouldn't notice. But you can take the not noticing too far because we would have noticed. We do notice. And this wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago, certainly. Wouldn't really have been possible 10 years ago. So being able to do this and not notice and say it's not a big deal is a new thing.

So we might notice that there's much more attention to Rishi Sunak being a Hindu prime minister of Britain in India than there is in Britain. It might come across as more surprising on the continent of Europe that post-Brexit Britain has chosen an Asian prime minister. This wouldn't have been possible quite recently. Rishi Sunak was born in Southampton in 1980. There wasn't a single black or Asian member of the House of Commons in the post-war period when he was born. When he left university, there wasn't a single Asian or black Conservative MP when he was interning at Conservative Central Office. So we've all got used to ethnic minority chancellors and home secretaries in the last five years. So I think we should notice that we're saying we shouldn't

notice. Is there something a little bit darker going on as well, though, where people want to deny a conversation about diversity and about race because we are still rather incapable of a nation of accepting everything that has gone very wrong with our race relations? I wouldn't put it like that. I mean, there'll be a challenge. People have different views about this according to their politics, if you're on the left,

and according to their age as well. This is a fantastically big deal to my dad because my dad arrived in 1968. He arrived the week that Enoch Powell was making his rivers of blood speech about how everyone should be sent back and how if the Commonwealth migrants had children here, it would be the very death of

our nation and i don't feel that but i grew up in a in a britain i saw that change i asked my children about it and they said has it never happened before why does it take so long you know what's the big deal surely that isn't a big deal so um i think it's a normalization of diversity of course not everybody has had the opportunities that Rishi Sunak has had in education and so on. It doesn't have the romance, perhaps, of Sajid Javid or Sadiq Khan's son of a bus driver narrative. But it's a chance to not have the conversation about race, how we've changed, and so on. But Rishi Sunak's going to be the prime minister, probably, if they could hold on to this one for a few weeks or months. It'll be the prime minister when the king has his coronation next spring.

And I think if you think across, if you think symbolically across the generations in Britain, you think about 75 years after the Windrush came to this country. You know, it took 50 years before there was an ethnic minority presence, really, in public life. So it's good to say, you know, it's a good thing that we can get beyond race. We actually have to have the conversation about the progress we've made and the progress we've still got to make. Ayesha, do you think that it's quite strange that his wealth is what people focus on ahead of his religion or his race or anything else? Well, I think the wealth thing is very interesting. He's the only British politician, I think, to have been featured in the Sunday Times rich list.

And he is incredibly wealthy because of who he married. And, you know, there is a sort of narrative in the Conservative Party where if you are rich, you can get on. But I do think that his background is still interesting to people I very much agree with what Sundar said and for all the people saying hey don't make a big deal about it there's a lot of racist comments swirling around the cesspit of social media um Charlotte Edwards this afternoon has tweeted a really interesting thread of below

the line comments about um Rishi Sunak. And actually some of the critique and basically the racism against him echoes very much anti-Semitism that Jewish people get, which is, you know, he's part of some global, you know, shady elitist, you know, all of this kind of things. An MEP posted a disgusting picture of him, a meme last night on Twitter, which I think has been deleted. So I think it is a big deal. Now, we will now have to judge him in terms of what he does. His wealth will be an issue in terms of if people are starving and if we've heard reports this week about, you know, making a piece of toast as a luxury, that's when people will rightly so look at his

wealth and see if he can connect with people. There are very wealthy people in politics. Politics is unfortunately dominated by wealthy people. But just because he is wealthy, just because he went to a very good private school, just because he is right wing, it doesn't mean that it's okay to be racist towards him or prejudicial towards him. I might not agree with his particular brand of politics, but just because he's rich, it doesn't mean it's okay to be racist to him. Ayesha, we're told that he is going to speak very, very soon live and you'll hear it on Times Radio, of course. Do you expect him to reference his ethnicity at all to acknowledge it? What do you think he'll do? Do know i i wouldn't be surprised if if he he

didn't he's never been somebody who has you know made a a big deal about it as many people i think um on the right do want to sort of just pretend that you know they're all the same and it you know we don't need to make a big deal about it i mean i hope he does i mean particularly because it is diwali and i think a lot of people of people from Indian communities are looking on this with a lot of interest. But it wouldn't surprise me if he didn't say anything about it. Right. Okay. Sundar, what do you think? Do you think he should reference it? I hope he will. I think he should. I think he should say that, you know, he's humbled to have the role of prime minister, that he wants to serve all the people. The fact that he is a Hindu can be the prime minister of Britain shows a good thing about our society, opportunities for all faiths and non in public life and increasing opportunity. Perhaps also saying that other people don't have those

advantages that he's had. So I hope he makes some reference to, you know, wanting to serve the entire public, but feeling that this says something positive about the Conservative Party and about Britain, that he gets the chance to serve and lead in the highest role. I think it would be a shame if he doesn't. I think the thing that I'm most annoyed about, though, is just the fact how young he is, because it's making me feel incredibly old. He's 42, isn't he? That's the thing that I think people should be railing against.

That, to me, feels manifestly unfair, as somebody who is staring down the well. Aisha, it's a personal question. Is this your first prime minister younger than your good self? I think so. I think Liz Truss and I might have been quite a similar age, but even that was quite a shock. But this just feels like offensive now, to be honest.

OK. Gosh. Ayesha, do you think that the Conservative Party membership needs to look at itself a little bit? I mean, there are quite a few people who've said it was an extraordinary choice that might not have been based entirely on the competent contenders in the room when Rishi Sunak didn't make it through first time around. Well, it's difficult. That question is very difficult because there was so much poison being dripped against the sort of

team Boris Johnson camp because they said that he had sort of stabbed him in the back. But certainly if you look at some comments that are floating around on sort of right wing publications below the line, it definitely does look like that there's quite a nasty undercurrent. But I think what was so weird about the Liz Truss election is anybody who was just a sentient being with half a brain cell looked at both of those contenders. And it was absolutely clear that one person understood the economy and the other person didn't have a scooby. And that the person who didn't get the job, who was clearly way more competent, was a person of colour. was a person of colour. But I do think the sort of very nasty briefing that went around from the Boris Johnson camp

about how he had been this ultimate betrayer was the thing that probably did for him in the end. But what a remarkable reversal of fortune. And it just goes to show that actually, always pick the best person for the job. Put your prejudices aside and pick the best person for the job, put your prejudices aside and pick the best person for the role. Yeah, and that is the terrible thing that prejudice does, isn't it? Exactly that, it disguises it.

I don't agree that race decided the election this summer. I think politics did. I think his resignation decided it. Yeah, but that's the point I'm making. I think it was Boris Johnson. Yeah, sure. And I think the reason we know that, I think, you know, Jeremy I think it was Boris Johnson. I think the reason we know that, I think, you know, Jeremy Hunt would have done a bit worse than Rishi Sunak in that election.

But Rishi Sunak's ethnicity was the same, you know, across the two or three years he was Chancellor. His reputation changed a great deal because he was very popular with COVID. He was very popular. Conservative membership preferred him to Boris Johnson nine months before. He had a terrible time in the spring with his personal tax affairs. His budget didn't go down very well. He had to have tax. So taxes were going up. So while there is a prejudice fringe in the Conservative Party, it's just not the kind of group that's actually going to vote for the David Cameron or the Rishi Sunak candidate. So it's a 1 percent or 2 percent effect. It's not a 15% effect.

In the end, they went with Liz Truss's agenda because she told them they could have fairy tales and here was a guy telling them they couldn't. And rarely in politics, being the man who proved right has actually rewarded him in the end. But I think it was a much more marginal factor, not a major factor, his ethnicity. I think the moderate candidate always struggles in those elections.

Go on, Aisha. But what I would say about diversity, you know, in terms of the party and the... I do think some credit does need to be given to David Cameron for putting in a very controversial time. He did get a lot of pushback. Was this push to get more diverse candidates to become Conservative MPs, more women, more people from ethnic minority backgrounds, people of colour, putting them in winnable seats as well. And I think that has borne

fruit now. And I do think the Labour Party does have to have quite a conversation with itself about why it is that the Labour Party is not kind of promoting and supporting talented people of colour. I mean, it's important to note that Sadiq Khan has been a very successful politician at the ballot box, but definitely the Labour Party does need to think about this. Well, I mean, there's no doubt the Conservatives can celebrate the fact that they've had three female prime ministers, Disraeli, a prime minister of Jewish heritage, and now the first Asian prime minister. So Labour, well, what have they got to shout about in this area, Ayesha? Wearing your Labour Party hat, what would you say?

Well, I would say that the Labour Party, while it hasn't done brilliantly on sort of representation in high positions of office, and I've brought that to the table, if you actually look at the policies that it has enacted, it has done more to help women than the Conservative Party and has done a lot to sort of promote equality. The Conservative government, you know, has been mired in scandals, even recently, the Windrush scandal, for example, which is still ongoing. And Theresa May with the vans about saying go home. And, you know. So I think that there are two aspects here. There is representation, which is very, very important. Whatever political party you are in, there is that phrase, if you can't see it, you can't be it.

And I think that is really important. But then there is also a secondary question, which is what do you do with the power that you are given? Do you use it as a platform to put the ladder down? Do you pull the ladder up? Do you do something to actually help people from minority backgrounds? And I think that is something on which, you know, people will be looking at Rishi Sunak. And I think that's probably, you know, an area where people will be quite disappointed by what he does, because we know he's going to be quite a right wing Thatcherite sort of prime minister.

Sundar, what are you hoping to see from our new prime minister? Well, I hope he'll go with his instincts, actually, which is to be more of a uniter than a divider on cultural identity issues. And while he's got, you know, quite that dry economics, because in these times, we don't really want that, you know, deliberate amplification of cultural and identity issues. Now, he'll be under pressure in his own party to sort of, you know, go for a more right-wing position, be more polarising. It isn't his instinct, I think. I think he wants to try and bring people together. And so I hope he'll try and put a bit of um temperateness in some of those identity clashes and david cameron serves a lot of credit here he was catching up with labor and labor still got

more ethnic minority mps and the conservatives got 40 to 20 but what labor needs to look at is why do the conservatives project their ethnic minority and female candidates to the very top and i think and this came up at the Labour conference and I was chairing meetings about it, the Labour Party too often sees its minority candidates as community representatives for diverse communities. And we heard stories of councillors being told they shouldn't stand for whiter areas and whiter seats. And that's a very narrow pigeonholing approach. So I think Labour did a lot to bring ethnic minorities into Parliament, into public life, and the Conservatives caught up with that. But there is a question now about the Labour Party.

Does it have a narrow archetype of what a leader looks like because it's worried about being the radical party? Why is it letting the Conservatives steal a march at the very, very top? And I hope that will be a wake-up call. Ayesha Hazarika and Sundar Katwala. And actually, when we came to hear from Rishi Sunak he made a very short statement and I'm going to say a somewhat underwhelming one if I'm honest delivered in his usual quite low-key style

and he didn't reference his ethnicity at all did he? He just said all those buzzwords like humility and integrity and compassion and basically I'm here for you. Well, I'll try him. Yeah, will you? Well, I mean, if I need something, I'll give it here for me. That's excellent news.

I shall give him a pass. So we did have another guest on the programme today who was utterly delightful, Sir Anthony Seldon, historian and political biographer. And we wanted to talk to him very specifically about the process of becoming a prime minister in a very kind of physical way. So what happens when you accept the challenge, accept the job, because you've got to move home. You've got to your family have to move home. You've got to accept a huge responsibility to be the person in charge of

the nation. And Sir Anthony is the guy who knows all about these types of things. And he told us the first thing the PM will do. Panic. Second, it is a prolonged panic attack. I mean, nothing prepares you at all. So many people want it, don't they? But when you actually have it and you realise there is no way out, it's really difficult. And the terror of the night certainly afflicts them. But what happens is after they come back from the palace,

they are clapped in by the staff. And that's always acutely ridiculous, because these are the same people who've been in tears while clapping out the outgoing. The political staff have then disappeared. So it's really just a much smaller group of officials clapping them in. And the first two things they have to do is decide on the letter of last resort about nuclear weapons and have a briefing about imminent terrorist threats. So if they don't decide then to say, well, actually, I've thought about it now and I've decided I don't really want to be prime minister. Maybe that's what happened to Liz Truss. You then really are. And it's going to be really difficult. I think it is the most difficult combined political and economic inheritance since the Second World War. And I say

that, you know, advisedly, it's not just a fact plucked out. Yeah. Can you tell us just a little bit more about the letter of last resort that that does exactly what? I tell you, but you'll have to be then marched off by the Secret Intelligence Service. Well, that'll make Ken and Sussex very happy. So let's do it. These are handwritten letters that they write, as I understand it, to the commanders of the four nuclear submarines, individual letters. So it's four times they write it to say in the event of Britain, London no longer existing. And of course, this has actually crept much closer with what's happening in the mind of Vladimir Putin. happening in the mind of Vladimir Putin, if that does happen, do they fire off their own nuclear missiles and destroy Moscow and St. Petersburg and wherever? Or do they just not do that

and come back to harbour, which won't exist. So it's bleak. Yeah, dark stuff, dark stuff. And I suppose the enormous shift is in your head, isn't it, when you accept the role of prime minister. You are never allowed to be off again, are you? Your downtime still belongs to the country. You have to be there. You should be there for 24 hours every day, shouldn't you?

Yeah, and I think that's very difficult. And it's what a lot of them find hard. I mean, you might have been Chancellor of the Exchequer, as Rishi Sunak was, but you're only then looking at a narrow range. And I think his greatest challenge probably will be scaling up to not just thinking about the economy and finance, but about health and education and about trains and strikes and the whole range across 20 government departments rather than just one. And exactly as you say, it is relentless and everything comes back to you. And it's very hard ever to get on top of your job. I don't know what both of you say, it is relentless and everything comes back to you. And it's very hard ever to get on top of your job. I don't know what both of you like, but it's pretty hard, I find, to get on top of my job. And I'm not looking after any department. If you're overseeing all 20 and

you're going to be disturbed at two in the morning or four in the morning if something urgent happens. So you will have broken nights. It's really difficult to keep that perspective, to remember who you are, to have time to see your friends, your family, and just to be a normal human being. And yet, if you lose sight of that, it becomes even harder. Yeah, I don't want this to sound like a facetious question at all, because I'm quite sincere in asking it. But, you know, for us normal people, moving jobs and moving house are regarded as two of the biggest, most stressful things in our lives.

And when you become Prime Minister, you do both at the same time, don't you? Do you think that it's a little bit anachronistic that our Prime Minister does have to move into an official residence and usually, irrespective of the age of their children, take a whole family with them? So I really like these questions because they are dealing with them as human beings. I think a great problem is that we objectifies and dehumanize people. I mean, Rishi Sunak, like Liz Truss, are just a human being with their own life and families. And of

course, it affects them. It is the case that the families of prime ministers fare badly often throughout history. Once they come out, they find it very hard to adjust, as do the prime ministers fare badly often throughout history. Once they come out, they find it very hard to adjust, as do the prime ministers ever to find much contentment again. So and I think that is compounded exactly as you say, I mean, to stressful changing job, particularly to that job and to move particularly into that flat above Downing Street. Look, I think it would be better. I've thought about this a lot over the years. If the whole Downing Street moved into the Foreign Office, the Foreign Office totally dwarfs and overshadows number 10. But now much of the work of the Foreign Office is done, in fact, by the Prime Minister, in terms of one-to-one relations

with world leaders, there's much more space there. It would be much more rational for them. And I don't think it's a good idea for a family to be above it. I mean, I've been a teacher, a head and a vice-chancellor. The mental health of those children will not be helped by hearing. One thinks of the Blair children hearing the constant screams and shouts of people about their father being a liar and against the Iraq war. Whatever one thought of that, it's not helpful for them. So I think, yes, I would move both number 10 as an office and the place where they live to somewhere where they can, as well as their families, have a normal life. I think that's service better if it's not so fraught. This might seem like a daft question in some ways. How clever do you have to be

to be an effective prime minister? You've got to be clever enough to know what you don't know. And sometimes intellectual clevernessness which many of them have isn't enough because you need to be emotionally clever and you need to be able to compensate no prime minister if you know if there are say 10 skills that you need as a prime minister most will only have five or six so you need to know what you can't do well, you need to be able to trust other people to compensate for you to do those. So you need to have emotional intelligence and personal intelligence to be intellectually intelligence of itself is really not enough. Right. And I mean, what is it about the magic source of PPE at Oxford that makes people

become prime minister? I mean, neither of us did it. So we're just interested. What is it about it? I think it is it gives you a range of skills, in particular, understanding economics, which is essential as the the Prime Minister, you are first Lord of the Treasury. You've got to understand the basics about expenditure and about raising money and about interest rates and

inflation, but also understanding politics and philosophy. But I don't think that it is good. I would much sooner have history. History is the great neglected subject. David Canadam, a historian, was arguing yesterday in the papers for a historian in every department. I think we need that, or indeed literature, or indeed science, as Margaret Thatcher herself had with chemistry. I think that, frankly, the days of PPE, I think the days of Eton, I think the days of Oxford and the days of the southeast of England are all gone.

And we need to have a different kind of leader, above all, a leader who is willing to be criticized. And so many of them are so reluctant to bring in people who have divergent views who have the courage to say no i think you're wrong about that um and that's precisely why we have the idiot policies that we had with liz truss or the the idiot presentation of the policies there was sense in them uh but never the way that they were presented and put across. And very few of them have that skill. By the way, you know, I mean, we began this on talking about women. I mean, I think in many ways to have more women right at the heart, including female prime ministers is good and certainly to have that balance. Margaret Thatcher, never a champion of women, when she was asked to have one in number 10 in a senior position,

she really fought it. And when asked about a second one, she did say, don't you think we ought to wait and see how the first one is done? That was 1958. I mean, it's a bit shocking. That was Sir Anthony Selden. And I thought that was really interesting, particularly his observation that actually he doesn't think it's necessary to drag the family into. And I think there is quite a... Well, we know that Rishi Sunak is quite a wealthy guy

and he's got rather a lovely muse house elsewhere in London. I'm not sure that they're going to want to move to number 11, where I think they've already lived, or number 10, to be honest. It does seem very strange to ask that of a family. It seems very old-fashioned to me. And also because you just are connected now in terms of technology and all those other things that we live with. You know, the need to live in a flat above the job, I think, is just gone, isn't it? Nobody has to do that.

No, no. So maybe that will change in our lifetime. And the letter of last resort, which I sort of did know about, but I suppose most of us just try to forget that sort of thing actually has to be done. It must concentrate the mind of the new Prime Minister, doesn't it? Very much so. And also just that first briefing that you have with security services, because everybody speaks of that once they've left office

as being quite a moment when you're told all of the things that you and I will never, ever know about. And even if you're a minister, you might not know about. So that's a big night ahead for Rishi Sunak. You might like to listen to a podcast and just let himself down gently. Here's some nice emails from people like Rod and Philippa. Philippa says, I know from your wiki page

it says you went to Kent University, but I knew a lovely woman at Bristol who read politics with me called Feedlover, who's your age. What are the chances? Here's hoping it's you. I'd really love to pretend that because you're always going on about my university degree in quite a disparaging way, Lady Garf Garf.

So I could just pretend that I read politics at Bristol, but I didn't. I did Boris Johnson's degree, Classics and Philosophy at Kent University. Oh, you did Classics and Philosophy? I don't think I knew that. Come round, I'll speak Greek to you, love. Oh, well, I'm looking after the cat tonight,

otherwise I'd be there like a shot. Rod says, I'm listening this afternoon, hanging on every word, and I just want to know, have we reached a semantic moment in the history of the modern Conservative Party? Could it be time for the new leader to dump the deliver word,

as used no fewer than eight times in Ms Truss's I am not resigning speech of last week and return it with thanks to the van drivers who actually do deliver our stuff and don't get paid generally speaking £161,401 per year for doing it just a thought lots of love keep up the good work Rod yes let's wave goodbye to deliver I think I've heard enough of that actually very much so I would agree with that let's start a campaign intellectual thoughts on semantics or indeed anything else you know what you can do you can contact us because we welcome all comers and our email address is janeannfee at times dot radio that's right we've changed the order of the names

to keep you on your toes and let's face it to to keep me on my toes. So Britain has a new Prime Minister, probably won't be able to say the same thing tomorrow. Oh, I hope not. You don't know. Let's just have a calm, calm week, everybody. Deep breathing all the way. Oh, it's almost Wellness Wednesday, isn't it? Dong.

You have been listening to Off Air with Jane Garvey and Fee Glover. Our Times Radio producer is Rosie Cutler and the podcast executive producer is Ben Mitchell. Now you can listen to us on the free Times Radio app or you can download every episode from wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget that if you like what you heard and thought, hey, I want to listen to this, but live, then you can, Monday to Thursday, 3 till 5 on Times Radio. Embrace the live radio jeopardy. Thank you for listening and hope you can join us off air very soon. Goodbye.