Pod Save the World - Boris Johnson Brexits

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

Ben and Tommy record a bonus episode on British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s resignation with special guest and friend of the pod David Lammy, Labour MP and shadow Foreign Secretary of State.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. And this is a very special edition of the show dedicated to Boris Johnson. Ding-dong, The Witch is Dead, Ben. I mean, you and I both had the exact same reaction, though, as this was, like, clearly collapsing with the House of Cards, which was like, get Lammy on the phone. Yeah. I've been waiting to have this conversation with David Lammy for a while. I truly. Like, I think it's fair to say he's a beloved Pod Save the World guest, the right honorable David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary,

Labor MP from Tottenham. He's been in parliament for I think 22 years, just a fantastic guest on the show and thinker and leader there. But we just wrapped a conversation with him where he kind of walked us through everything. What happened? What's next for later? How he sort of sees the electoral landscape. I think folks will like it a lot.

Yeah, yeah, no. And it is just, it's nice to have this finally break. How many times have you and I had this conversation about like, oh, maybe he'll resign this time. And he always just like hung on. So to see him finally begin to, it's like someone like gripping on to something really tightly and someone, they've finally begun to peel his fingers off what he was trying to hold on to and pull him out of number 10. Yeah, it's funny. You know, we can get it to the backstory in a minute, but it is, it is lucky for all our friends in the UK that they can get rid of a leader a little more easily

without an election. If there had been, some sort of intra-party system in the Republican Party that wasn't the 25th Amendment. I mean, I guess there was impeachment and everyone just decided to be absolute cowards on that front. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. Look, he's not, Boris isn't gone gone yet as of when we started recording this, but we should just be excited by where we are. Ben, it feels weird to throw to some housekeeping right now. Before we get to the back story, just know that for, if Boris Johnson or any friend in your life

needs a new t-shirt now through now through i guess tomorrow like there's 15% off site wide on the cricket dot com website lots of new sale items our last summer sale uh and always the cricket store donates a portion of every order to vote riders which is a nonprofit working towards ending voter suppression so check it out good stuff up there great deals and uh you help a good cause so okay we're recording this uh thursday uh july 7th at around noon uh we just wrapped our conversation with David Lammy, the reason we want to do this special episode, because Boris Johnson resigned. Ben, do we want to just get into the backstory? I mean, like, do you start two years ago, two weeks ago, 48 hours ago? Where do you think we begin here?

Well, I think part of what's interesting, Tommy, in watching this, is that, like, they had the party vote, right, on whether to keep him, and he survived. He barely survived, but he did survive. And so we know how we got there. We got there because of... party gate and Raiders at number 10 and lying about it and inquiries into it that revealed both the parties and the lying. And he still survived that. I think that since then, you've had kind of further cloud of scandal. So one of the precipitating events was this guy that Boris Johnson was going to elevate to a pretty substantial role. It turned out he had sexually assaulted a couple of people. and that was known to Boris Johnson

and he didn't care and still elbowed this guy and then he tried to lie about knowing about it and it came out. This is someone named Chris Pincher who's a conservative MP who Boris I think made or was planning to make him a deputy chief whip sort of like a big deal within the party. Your whipping votes. You're keeping everyone sort of on sides. Yeah, this man got drunk in an exclusive London club,

groped two men. That came out And then it turned out that he had done this in the past. And Boris said, oh, I didn't know about it. That's appalling. And then a bunch of Boris's ministers and colleagues said, no, we told you that these allegations were out there and they existed. And you named this guy to a senior party position anyway, despite serious sexual misconduct allegations. That is outrageous.

Yeah. No, good. Thank you for the much more specific rundown. But like, but I think what it comes down to, there's a couple of things in that. story. Like one is once again, this idea that the rules just don't apply to Boris and like his click, right, you know, so that they can behave. I mean, the fact that it was at like, you're right, some fancy London place, right, is perfect, right? Like, it's as if they believe that their exclusivity, you know, gives them a different set of rules and other people have. But then the lying,

Lammy says something interesting interview, which is that like, even some of these shameless toy politicians that stuck by Boris, like they just got tired of being humiliated because they were constantly being asked to lie for him or to cover for him after he lied. And it just felt like they reached a breaking point where things aren't going well in the country. The trend lines are bad. The recent elections that they've had have gone against the Tories, right? So they're seeing that the political wins are turning against Boris, that he's not somehow defined the laws of political gravity. And he just can't stop lying about basic things, right? Like, what did he know and when did you know it? And so, like, you know, it's interesting, unlike in the Republican Party,

I mean, and I have no love for the Tories, and there are a lot of, you know, right-wing people there, populists there, a lot of people who've lied there. I was saying Brexit was a terrible idea. They did find a bottom, you know, with this slew of resignation letters. They got to the point where, like, the guy literally couldn't stock his cabinet with officials. There weren't enough people that would have his back for that. And that's when it became untenable firm. But, you some of these characters that have broken from him, Michael Grove, Prida Patel, like these are, you know, these aren't people I'm fans of. It just shows that even they had breaking points. Yeah, there's not a lot of honor in a lot of these lay breaking resignations. So just the

quick, the sort of quick backstory, in the last 48 hours or so, the very fast slide to Boris's resignation seemingly was precipitated by two very high-ranking ministers resigning, the chancellor of the exchequer and the health minister on the party. That was followed by just this rolling series of resignations from within Boris's own party. Boris's appearance at prime minister's question time did not go well. I think the BBC maybe had a split screen that included a running tally of resignations as he spoke that kept going up like, you know, like a lottery total you could win. All of a sudden he's losing the Welsh secretary, whatever the hell that person. does, the Attorney General, the Northern Ireland's secretary, security ministers,

Treasury ministers. There were people who were resigning from roles they had been given four to eight hours earlier. Yeah, yeah. The new chancellor, that was the best. Yeah, the new chancellor of the exchequer called for Boris's resignation, like two days after getting the job. Michelle Donnellan, the education minister, resigned, I think two days after she was put

in office, eventually of like 50 plus MPs saying, no, we're out of here. We're not taking a cabinet role. leave in some other government position. And to your point, Ben, Boris literally could not staff the government. The scandal obviously goes back further. I mean, you talked about this no confidence vote. You can call a no confidence vote in the conservative party if 15% of the members send a letter calling for one. Boris survived that vote. But I think all the smart folks out there said, look at Margaret Thatcher, look at Theresa May, look at sort of history in the UK. Once this vote happens, the clock is ticking on your political demise, and it's usually ticking pretty fast.

Clearly, that's what happened here. Yeah, and I think that the thing about Boris is that he, for a time, was like delivering wins, right? So, like, he won Brexit, the Brexit referendum. He basically led that campaign. They won. And then Theresa May was kind of muddled and barely eeked out a win over Jeremy Corbyn. and then Boris led the Tories to a massive majority. I mean, they've got like an 80-seat majority there.

And, you know, this gets into why the Tories are shameless, like, so long as he was winning, you know, and so long as it looked like the political win was at his back, they covered up for him, you know, all of his excesses and his lying and is not having a plan for how to deal with Brexit. it. But clearly those parties, which we covered a lot, like they struck an accord because there was such a flagrant violation of trust that, hey, look, I have a different rule for me and my staff than I'm telling the rest of the country to follow. And he never really recovered his political footing from just the revelation of those parties and the lies about them. And then, like, people just start to cast a net here. And, you know, Lamy makes reference in any of the other. to the fact that it's also come out that he met with like a Russian oligarch, former KGB agent guy by himself. You know, that doesn't look good. You know, he's basically broken the law in terms of

violating his own agreement in Northern Ireland. We've talked about that. And there was no cushion for him in the public, right? So, and we saw that. We saw some elections where the, the Labor Party or the liberal Democrats are making huge gains in areas that the Tories traditionally won. And so, think the political, you know, gravity finally applied to Boris here. It's still muddled now, though, in terms of what happens, who ends up leading the conservative party? How long does Boris get to hang on as prime minister? And can labor, you know, there does not need to be an election there, you know, right away. The calendar, you know, could allow for another, you know, year to go by before we start general election in the UK. The question is whether that's tenable and whether or not the kind of political

crisis in the UK kind of compels them to call an election. Now, if I'm on the Tories, you probably don't want to, right? Because it's not the best environment for you to run. No, it is not. I think this Boris was winning until he was in point is really important. And listen, folks, we're doing this bonus episode really quickly. I don't profess to be an expert in British politics, so please correct us. And we'll talk about this again next week, I'm sure. But I was watching Rory Stewart, who's sort of a candidate, he's worked in government, sort of a writer, talking about how... Tori MP, how there was a local election a couple weeks ago where the Tories got rumped. And I think that might have led some insiders, some folks who had been, you know, pretty staunch defenders of Boris throughout to suddenly realize, okay, the one thing this guy did for us was win.

You know, I mean, like, just for the backstory folks on Brexit is, you know, Boris Johnson famously had two opeds written, one for Brexit, one against. He decided to go against. Hey, guys, Tommy Vitor here. I misspoke in that last sentence. I obviously meant to say that Boris Johnson famously wrote opeds for and against Brexit and then chose to be for Brexit and led the campaign to rip the UK out of the European Union. Sorry for miss speaking.

Back to the show. And then he knifed Theresa May from within her own government, pushed her out. then he delivered this massive win in 2019 under the slogan of get Brexit done with no actual plan to get Brexit done. And to your point earlier, Ben, served up an 80-seat majority for the Tories that made them feel like, okay, well, we have this big mandate. This guy can win. So let's, let's stick with him. That was slowly chipped away to. I mean, I made a list of, I made a list of scandals. I mean, there were the countless COVID lockdown parties. Eventually, an internal inquiry found that 83 people violated COVID rules.

They got drunk. They fought each other. They broke stuff. There were a 126 fines levied by the government, including one for Boris Johnson. He lied about it throughout. Then he finally apologized. The Chris Pinscher sexual misconduct allegations, like to Lambe's point, he lied about that.

There were other sexual misconduct allegations in the Tory party. There was a report that Boris was trying to get a donor to finance refurbishment on his apartment. They did. Yeah. It did. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's a, we joke about Boris, you know, just wanting to stick out and be caretaker prime minister to throw more parties. There was literally a report in one outlet this morning that that's one of the reasons he wants to stick around, throw some sort of

wedding party for himself. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, like, you'll hear in Lammy's interview later, like, he's a very thoughtful, substantive guy. The biggest scandal of all was not having an agenda, like, or, you know, pushing for Brexit without any plan for how to manage it. And now most recently, that's kind of manifested in trying to tear up the Northern Ireland protocol and basically blowing up relations with the EU without any clear way to work through it. Yeah, Brexit is the original sin here. And I think it's important to come back to that, you know, because Brexit is both what propelled Boris Johnson. It tapped into this kind of xenophobic populism there. And it's caused a lot of the bread and butter problems that he faces. So we've talked

about this a bit on the mailbag, but they can now measure that the, you know, you know, UK lost several points of growth off their economy because of Brexit, that inflation is worse in the UK than it is in Europe, in part because of Brexit, that there are these challenges for brids-string businesses. So there are real substantive issues that are in front of them. I think that the couple of things that stand out going forward are, first of all, it is good news. Like we've covered some, you know, as dark as the political news can feel in the U.S. You know, interestingly, we've had elections now in Germany. in Australia, in Canada.

You now have center-left governments in all those places. And that's on top of New Zealand and some interesting center-left politicians and progressive politicians in places like Finland and Sweden and Denmark. So there's something happening out there where the bill is finally coming due

for some of these right-wing populists. And I think the question in the UK will now be, can the Labor Party make this about not just Boris Johnson, but the entire conservative party, right? It's the same thing here that we have with the Republicans. It's not just Trump. It's that this whole party enabled him. This whole party got behind him in his agenda because they believed in it because that's who they actually are. They're populists who think that the rules don't apply to them and they don't have good answers

for these bread and butter issues in people's lives. And so labor has to make sure that all this cloud of ill repute and scandal and mess that is on Boris now sticks to the conservatives and then, you know, run hard on their agenda up and through whenever that election is. So the question of what happens next, you know, there's sort of a narrow, near term and a long term. This question of whether Boris remains as a caretaker, prime minister, remains unresolved, as far as I could tell. Clearly, Boris Johnson wants to stay in that job.

I think, you know, we're happy and laughing about all of this news today because he sucks and it's great to see him go. But there is far more risk to allowing that to happen than I would have, that I would have thought of a year ago. There's something called there's an intra-tory party. There's intra-conservative party group of backbench MPs called the 1922 committee. They figure out the next step of this process. Basically, there will be a series of votes for potential contenders for the prime minister position. They will whittle those down to two. And then all dues paying members of the conservative party get to vote. There will be some sort of a campaign, maybe six weeks, maybe two months, maybe

less to for the final two candidates to campaign for those conservative party member votes. I guess Ben, there's like a 200,000 conservative party members. You pay like 25, 30 bucks to be a part of it. And then I guess this is what you get from it. I'm not entirely sure. But I mean, ultimately, the prime minister of England, the UK, is the leader of the party that can form a majority. And so that's what will happen here. There's a lot of names being floated. It's probably not worth, you know, rattling off too many of them. But, you know, a lot of them, Liz Trust, the foreign secretary, the former chancellor of the exchequer, the former health secretary. There's a lot of names who are very much tainted by Boris Johnson.

You know, then there's Jeremy Hunt, who I believe is the final. When Boris Johnson won in 2019, Jeremy Hunt, he's a former foreign secretary, challenged Johnson and ran against him. I don't know if that will help or hinder him since there's such an intra-party process now. But, you know, there's a lot of steps to go here before this is settled, frankly. Yeah, well, both, you know, as Americans, it's interesting. We have these open primaries, obviously, in which people select the Republican Democratic leader through Democratic elections. There, it's much more a horse trading thing.

I mean, I think this is another point about why did this happen to him now. Clearly, when that confidence vote happened, none of the other people felt like they had a good shot at becoming leader. In other words, it's like the wire, right? If you come at the king, you best not miss. Like, nobody was ready yet with their leadership challenge. And it feels like now some of these people are ready to make their play. And what it's really going to be about is who can horse trade, you know, in the, in the toy party and build the biggest block here. But like you said, all these characters are, you know, far to the right of, say, like, David Cameron. And I'm not like, David Cameron, obviously his legacy,

bit clouded by a lot of things, including Brexit itself. But the point is that all these people would be further to the right, that the Tory party, because of Brexit, because of Boris, is going to leave us, I can't get that enthused about any of the people that might emerge from the horse trading and inter-party fight that's going to play out now going forward. And look, you know, labor, by contrast, is very stabilized. Like, Kirstarmer, whatever you know, you think of him, has got his arms around that party, like he's consolidated his position in that party. He's kind of tacked center left in a way that has some progressive elements that can appeal to some of the Corbyn voters, but has pivoted more to the center and other things. So clearly labor is in a better position

right now in the Liberal Democratic Party as well as another option. But yeah, like the Tories, it's funny how much they're parallels between American and British politics, because Boris isn't a carbon copy of Trump, there is some differences, but the basic idea of a populist who tapped into xenophobia and pulled this party to the right, both leading the party, but also responding to what was happening from the bottom up in the party, like, that's, you know, looks familiar from across the pond here. Yeah. And so there will be a lot of fallout from this decision today for obvious reasons, but also, you know, sort of more parochial reasons. Like, Bitcoin question now in terms of what this means for Northern Ireland and the Northern Ireland

protocol and all the frustration they've dealt with. I think there's a big question for what this means for Scotland and the Scottish independence movement and whether this may or may not accelerate. Lots more we can dig into. I didn't want to end this sort of news segment without mentioning the best thing that happened today, which was Hugh Grant tweeted a request, asking activist to play Yakety Sax, the Benny Hill theme song on loudspeakers outside

Westminster, so that when Tory prime ministers were on TV doing their spin jobs trying to mop up after Boris, yakety Sax was on in the background. And maybe we just, hopefully we can cut it

a clip of that into the podcast right here because it's the funniest goddent thing I've ever heard and it will never get old to me. Yeah, good for Hugh Grant. I mean, like, like, like,

Like the U.S., there's a kind of resistance Twitter in the U.K., and, like, Hugh Grant has definitely emerged as one of the better voices there. Unlike Deborah Messing, Hugh Grant hasn't given up yet. Exactly. And he's bringing some real ideas to the table there. I will say, and he actually had a great tweet today, too, about how, like, now what happens is a bunch of oligarch tabloid owners get together and choose the next Tory prime minister, which we should have met. We actually should have mentioned that in the selection process, like who these right-wing tabloids and right-wing media get behind is going to matter. The one other issue I'd mention is Ukraine just because Boris tried to hang on by claiming

that, like, he's this wartime prime minister, he's poured weapons into Ukraine, he traveled to Kiev before most people. The Ukrainians appreciated that, but he tried to use that as a rationale for why they couldn't get rid of him. And the realities you heard Lammy say is that, like, none of that changes. You know, like, like that's, Boris wasn't unique in the British system and supporting that. as in the U.S., it's kind of bipartisan there too. So that should be consistency and not a deviation, no matter who emerges in the Tory party

or whether the labor ends up taking over at some point after an election. I do have to say, Tommy, like, I'm going to be really glad to see this guy. You know, behind Netanyahu, there are very few foreign leaders that I can say I'd be happier to see Go than Boris. As much as the ragers were entertaining in the, as you pointed out, a couple of podcasts, to go. At least you got that final couple bottles of wine at the G7 in Germany, you know.

Yeah. Yeah, one last chance to get tipsy with the world leaders. I agree. Listen, like, there, yeah, I think what Boris Johnson did for us was make us on occasion feel less bad about our own political system and process and leadership, but that's

not a good reason to keep him around. I do worry about all the damage that these guys can do from whatever their next step is as we've watched Donald Trump to just be just a nightmare. But he does, I don't know, like this is a stupid prediction, so I shouldn't even make it. He seems far more mortally wounded in this moment than Donald Trump ever was because it was his own members of his own party knifing him, something which never fully happened here in the Republican

party. You know, Ben, it was interesting. And the Brits tend to kind of savage their ex-prime ministers, too. Like they tend to kind of send them into isolation, you know, in exile. Yeah, maybe not the worst idea. Just kidding, President Obama. It was very interesting to hear Lammy say, I was going to ask Lammy about Ukraine and what this might mean because he is the shadow of Foreign Secretary. Because you're right, I mean, the classic like Wag the Dog style Boris Johnson has decided to make Ukraine his thing in the last few months.

He's constantly talking about weapons systems and shipment. And you're right, he visited Kiev. Who am I to today, whether that is a sincerely held belief, whether it's him in. implementing party policy or, you know, a crass cynical move to try to distract from a series of scandals, you know. But it was interesting to your land me to be like, there's not going to be a change, you know. And I guess Zelensky, you know, is out the gate tweeting his gratitude to Boris Johnson early this morning. But it does seem like no matter who follows Boris Johnson, there will be considerable support for Ukraine. And yeah, there is in labor too. So I'm not sure that that is

particularly relevant here. Yeah, well, maybe Boris can go, you know, go support the Ukrainians. Who, grab a weapon, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, and his after. I mean, it's just something about a guy that he literally, because what he may do is return to media, right? That's where he came from. So Boris got his start, he kind of cut his teeth as this, you know, columnist who would literally make up stories. He made up lies. Yeah, made up quotes. I made up quotes, literally, to make the EU look bad. He was a Russell's correspondent. And so he's, he's been tied up in this kind of like buffoonish right wing media, xenophobic right wing media in the UK that kind of took over politics there on the conservative side. And I guess he could return to having like a newspaper column, you know,

which is what he did for a long time. But that's a lot less damaging than like a Donald Trump planning a return to power, you know. Yeah. Maybe he wants a podcast. We give him a ring. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder what his version of Mar-a-Lago is. Whether he, I mean, you know, what Trump has done is pretend to fundraise to overturn the results of the election and just use it to throw events at his own clubs. So, I don't know, that's a path that's open to Boris too, I guess. Any final thoughts on Boris Johnson that we should talk through before we get to the interview with David Lamie? I get, my final thought again is just to echo the Brexit point of like, you know, the real, like a real legacy here is that this has done. I mean, I remember Brett,

saying to me after the 2016 election, you guys can at least vote out, you know, Trump, we can't really get back in the EU, you know. And so there's a, there is a kind of blasting damage that has been done underneath the buffoonery and the kind of debasement of the office that is worth noting. But then, again, as we saw, like, we voted Trump out of office and it didn't fix all the problems in our democracy either. So us and the UK, you know, we've got a lot more work to do, but you got to enjoy your wins when you get them. I agree with that. I mean, there might be a lot of continuity in terms of leaders and policy and parties in

charge. I think what Trump has taught me is, and BB Netanyahu has taught me and Boris Johnson has taught me is how much leaders and leadership matters. And when they are, like, as, as Lamie said, Boris Johnson is a pathological liar. Donald Trump is a pathological liar. So it was Bibi Netanyahu. were all corrupt and venal and so utterly selfish that they were willing to rip the UK out of the EU and like blow up the future for millions of Brits for political purposes. There weren't

even like deeply felt feelings, right? So I think Boris being gone will be a good thing. Hopefully they will, the UK voters will figure out a way to put them on ice a little more than we've done with Donald Trump. I do think it's worth celebrating these small victories. It's not every day you see just a schmuck like Boris Johnson toppled. I mean, he was just a racist creep and couldn't be happy of these gone. I just, yeah, that personally, like I remember, and I wrote about this in my first book, like traveling to London with Obama in 2016 to support Cameron in trying to keep the UK in the EU. And Boris Johnson writes this really high profile column saying that Barack Obama, you know, had it in for the UK because his blue,

black Kenyan father, you know, instilled in him like an anti-British ideology. It was like a anti-colonial mindset. Yeah, yeah. It was a Denise DeSouza argument, like, you know, like dark corners of the far right kind of argument. That's, that's who this guy is, right? So, and I have to say, man, when you get in the barrel in British politics, you get just savaged, you know, like watching the British media is just like there's a lot of pent up, I think, accountability coming Boris's way right now. Yeah, that's a, that's a great term for pent-up accountability. That could be a great future podcast about versus next year. Okay, well, I think that that's it for us for today. We'll talk about a whole bunch of more issues next week and probably this more. But now we're going to take a quick break and then you

will hear our interview with David Lammy. So you absolutely do not want to miss this, that interview. Frankly, maybe you should have skipped ahead all the bullshit we just said and gotten right to Lammy because he's better. We are thrilled to welcome back to the show, the shadow foreign secretary and Labor Party MP for Tottenham, David Lamie. David, slow newsday. Great to see you. Thank you for doing this. It's an extraordinary day here in Westminster.

The spectacle of a British Prime Minister determined to cling to power at any costs over a 72-hour period has been extraordinary and deeply unusual in our constitutional arrangement. And, of course, he's now staying on as a care. caretaker when in fact he should just simply leave. And the debate continues and continues. So it's quite, quite an extraordinary moment for us. Yeah, unsolicited advice from your American friends here that, you know, allowing a desperate venal politician to stay in a caretaker role can end badly.

But why don't we start at the beginning here? So, you know, obviously we're here to talk about Boris Johnson's resignation. Clearly he did everything he could to talk his conservative colleagues into letting him stay. Ultimately, he failed in that effort. In Boris's resignation speech, he said, the herd instinct is powerful and when the herd moves, it moves. What do you think finally got the herd to move today? Look, I think the truth is that Boris Johnson is a habitual liar. and the threshold for the constant lies just became too much. His ministers could not go out and defend a line because they found that just hours later

that the line exploded in their faces and the humiliation was becoming bigger and bigger. The hypocrisy was becoming bigger and bigger. And the truth is there was scandal. after scandal. One thing that has not been covered as much today, but it was discussed in the UK parliament, was that Boris Johnson, when he was Foreign Secretary, admitted in the last 48 hours that he had met with a former KGB agent without his security detail, without his civil servants, after going to a NATO summit where Russia was top on the agenda. This kind of behaviour,

So what we knew was there was more to come out. And that is why ultimately I think his own party, his own ministers did that brutal act of saying, look, we cannot serve. And you've got the letters, people after people after people, so that in fact he could not form a government. And he had to frankly be dragged out of office. So now he's a caretaker. There will be leadership challenges from within.

to try to form a government. I want to focus on the role of labor. You know, what is, before we even get to like the next general election, just in the kind of immediate future here. I mean, I just want to say, first of all, David, like you came on after the Boris Johnson landslide win, and we talked about how this could be, you know, a decade in the wilderness. So in part because you guys have done great work, and in part because Boris Johnson has set himself on fire, the timeline has moved faster on the end of the Boris Johnson premiership than. than we might have thought at the time. But what is Labor's role immediately? Are there things that you can do to try to bring a vote of no confidence? Would conservatives join you in that effort?

Do you anticipate an election? Just what is your next move as someone who's kind of part of the Kier-Starmir inner circle with Labor? Well, look, I think there's an overwhelming mood here in Westminster that Boris Johnson needs to go now. And that is not just a Labor point of view, the former Prime Minister, Conservative Prime Minister, John Major, wrote a letter today to the backbench 1922 Committee of the Conservative Party saying, listen, this guy needs to go now. There are many ministers who resign from his government who don't want to be part of this caretaker government. So they've got a real issue. And that is why we've said that we will force a vote of no confidence next week and allow those backbenchers in the Conservative Party.

to join us to see the back of him. Now, we think, frankly, let's call a general election. Let's put this to the country. Let's go on with the business of serious government, and we believe the Labour Party can do that. But in the absence of that, I think the key thing is that we can no longer trust Boris Johnson. He doesn't command the trust of the House. He has to leave. And let me just indicate how serious this is. Very sadly, just around this time last year, last year, summer, the situation in Afghanistan unfolded. It was tremendously serious. Huge decisions had to be made at pace here in the UK and, of course, in the United States. We need someone who has credibility who we can trust in office to make those decisions. And that's why actually, in the end,

this isn't just a partisan issue. It's an issue that's in the national interest of the country. And, you know, you guys have a lot of issues going on over there in addition to, obviously, the war in Ukraine, you have major inflationary pressures like we do. But you also, I mean, the cost of Brexit is clear, like the hit to economic growth in the UK. You have fiscal issues you've got to deal with, a lot of a big mess that Boris Johnson and the conservative party has made, not just Boris Johnson, the Tories have made the last few years. As labor tries to put itself forward, hopefully you get that shot in election sooner rather than later. What do you guys need to do to close the deal? What is the message about how this wasn't just Boris, this is the

Tories, and what is the alternative that you guys are putting forward right now? Well, you're right. The central issue facing the British people is all around the economy. It's all around cost of living. The UK is predicted to have the slowest growth in the G7 and the highest inflation over the course of the next year, as we head into a winter, there are real issues around energy prices, particularly, that can only get worse. Against that backdrop, we have to be in the place of economic credibility. We have to be on the side of ordinary people. And we have to be on the side of public services. One of the problems I think that Boris Johnson encountered is that he said, let's get Brexit done. And then there was no plan. The cupboard was pretty bare in terms of what

what his offer was for the British people. What did he want to do with our national health service? What did he want to do with our schools and our young people who have been caught behind because of a pandemic and the mental health crisis that I think we all see in front of our? We had no idea. What did he want to do around crime? No agenda at all.

So this issue has not just been about his credibility. He lacked an agenda. And that's where there's an opportunity for progressives at a time when people do want government to be on their side, to set out their priorities. Clearly, there's some big security priorities here in Europe because of the war in Ukraine. But actually, the immediate challenge is the usual politics. It's the bread and butter stuff of how do I put food on the table? How do I support my family?

Can my kids get a good education? If I'm ill, will I get health care? And can you please deal with the crime on our doorstep and those young people down the road that seem to have nothing to do that are causing mayhem. Those are the issues that people want to hear us talking about. It's a similar challenge to what we saw with the Democrats facing Trump, get into that territory, be firmly in that territory. And as we've seen in Germany, in Australia recently, progressives can win. That's where we've got to be. Yeah. I mean, in some ways, the greatest scandal of all is pushing to get Brexit done without any plan for what to do after. You look, count me. Count me.

among the many Americans who have been furiously Googling the 1922 committee over the last couple of weeks and trying to figure out what comes next. My understanding of it, and correct me if I'm wrong here, is there's sort of a two-stage process. The sort of Tory insiders whittled down the candidates to two contenders. They want that wrapped up by, you know, in a week or two. And then all dues-paying conservatives vote between the two finalists and you have some defined period of time to campaign. for the 200,000 or so votes. Is that right? In that sort of process,

is there a function to remove Boris Johnson earlier that we're not aware of? Well, they'll have to make a decision in the next 24, 48 hours about whether Boris Johnson can indeed remain as caretaker and indeed the Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab could easily become the tear taker. They have a second decision about how long this race is going to be

and they'll be having a very big debate about whether they, want to run this thing long into the into sort of September or indeed whether this has to be pretty quick. The Conservative Party is a party that can act pretty ruthlessly and pretty quickly if it wants to. But let's get into the substance here and the big dilemmas that face them. Boris Johnson really had a sort of foistian pack with the British people in which you'll remember if you go back to the Brexit period. He absorbed effectively Nigel Farage is Brexit Party.

So something happened to the Conservative Party that's similar to the sort of Tea Party movement that we saw with the Republicans and those that got behind Trump, a sort of infection that affected the Republicans, also has come into the Conservative Party. So they have a base now that is unrecognizable compared to what it was five, 10 years ago,

and it's pretty right wing. And they've got a big dilemma. because some of the seats that they picked up from us, what's the so-called Red Wall, people there are struggling, they want big spending, they want support during a lockdown, beyond the lockdown. And we've seen that Boris Johnson has been prepared to spend, but his old base are fiscally conservative. They want low taxes and no spending. That is a dilemma that will face the next leader of the conservative. It's a circle that's going to be very hard to square and certainly very hard to square without the charisma, if you like, of Boris Johnson.

So that's a big dilemma facing them. Do they have a torturous process that really flushes that out or do they have a quick process that covers it up? Whoever emerges as leader, and I suspect it will be someone that the US public have never heard of. The conservatives are very good at picking leaders you've never heard of. But the truth is that dilemma will face that candidate. And it's likely that the candidate will be a Brexiteer. So we'll see more of the same. Yeah, I mean, it does seem like that you have all those policy problems that you just laid out here. I mean, look, I don't want to compare U.S. and British politics to glibly from afar, but it does seem like you guys have a similar problem or the Tories have a similar

problem the Republican Party has here in that Donald Trump came to power and he didn't just lead the party, but he fundamentally changed it from within. And he also tainted so many of the members within the Republican Party that it's unclear, you know, sort of how you pass the torch, will it be sort of a Trumpian Republican or someone with a fresh outlook? How does that dynamic work with the conservatives? I mean, do you think that people who worked with Boris Johnson or defended him to the very last days are tainted by what's happened to him today? Or I don't know, people kind of priced that into their reputations?

I think two things happen. thing is that these populist characters end up in the end gutting a political party. And when they've left, the cupboard is bare. And the truth is the political party will take many, many years to recover. And I think that the conservatives will take many years to recover from this populist moment. The second thing, I think, is to say that populism ends badly. It always ends badly empirically. You know, what you tend to find is the populist governs in a bubble, and then when time comes to go and they're unpopular, they're found in their bunker.

That is the case, I think, towards the end of the Trump period, and I think we've seen some of that here in the UK over the last 72 hours. But it ends bad empirically because on the real issues of our... our times. The multipolar world in which there are not just the United States is a superpower, how we deal with an aging population and provide pensions and health care, the technological challenges of our time and the challenges of social media, particularly, and regulation. Climate, the biggest issue facing us, on those real issues, they actually have nothing to say. And eventually that catches up with them. So that's the challenge, I think, that faces.

the Conservative Party over here. And it's why we need progressives to win again in the UK. I think it's also right to say that remember that the next general election here in the UK, whenever that comes, will not just be about Boris Johnson. The Conservatives have now been in power for 12 years. That's a 12-year record that we will be running against them. And it's not been a very high-performing economic period here in the UK. There are real challenges in our public services. So that time for a change message, I think, can land if the UK Labour Party holds the course. So just a couple more questions.

One about Boris and then one kind of stepping back. The one about Boris ties in what you were just saying, which is I want to ask about his legacy, because he does seem like he's on the way out, you know, obviously, hopefully sooner rather than later. You know, I just think about David the last six years from when I traveled to the U.K. with President Obama in the summer of 2016. And when we landed, Boris Johnson basically said that Barack Obama didn't like the UK because his family came from Kenya.

And it's like, whoa, this guy's going to pretty dark populist places, right? And had a lot of Trump echoes. And then you have Brexit and you have this kind of shamelessness around, his approach to politics and disregard for norms and this kind of radicalization, like you say, of the Tory party, which we all felt like here's a right-wing populace that is busting through norms, taking the UK out of the European Union without a plan, you know, taking foreign money from the Russians, all this stuff. What's his legacy?

Like, how are people going to look? Because he was incredibly consequential, right? I mean, nobody's more responsible for Brexit than him, among other things. But how do you frame his legacy both in terms of the immediate case to the British people about, you know, why there needs to be changed? But also, like, how do you think this will look to history? I think that the right-up on Boris Johnson will be that he's been one of the worst prime ministers in UK history. It's a bit like that story that we read to our children. The emperor has no clothes.

and for a significant period, the adults in the room can't see that he has no clothes, and it takes a child in the crowd to say, but this guy's naked in the wind, there's nothing there. I'm afraid that his low instincts in relation to race, and that came up when Barack Obama came to town all those years ago, he continued to govern in that vein. and I think we see with this Rwanda policy, this idea that we should house those who are claiming asylum in Rwanda is an example of that. So what we've seen here is wedge issue after wedge issue, deliberately employing these cultural divides.

And of course, the problem with that is it lacks any substance. It doesn't fix the issues that people face in their lives. So I think he will hold up very, very poorly indeed. And if you put against that backdrop, his mandacity, his inability to tell the truth, his rule breaking while hundreds of thousands of people died during the pandemic, the fact that he didn't even believe in leaving the European Union, but he decided by sticking his finger in the air that it was in his best interests

to lead that campaign, led us out of the European Union, and then seemed to have no plan for what came afterwards. Now, I think that he's been one of the shortest-lived UK prime ministers, and when people try to get behind the substance of what he did, not much is there. There have been a lot of boosterism with Ukraine most recently, but the truth is there's been not really a partisan divide in our support of the Ukrainian people and their territorial integrity and their right to fight against this aggression

from Putin. Boris Johnson's made a lot of that, but the truth is there's no difference between us. The pandemic, many, many people died that should not have died because of very poor handling of the pandemic at the beginning of this crisis, particularly. And then we're left with Brexit. So yes, he got Brexit done, but I think people will examine what kind of plan he had afterwards, the consequences of that Brexit, which are now becoming really true. And of course, UK growth is down as a consequence of the decisions he made on his deal? The last question for me is watching this play out, you know, it wasn't nearly as bad in some ways, obviously,

as what happened here. It was interesting watching this play out with the January 6 hearings in the backdrop here. But just as we have kind of structural problems with our democracy tied to the fact that there's now a political party that doesn't follow basic norms, you know, that's strained all the institutions in American democracy, you know,

whether it's the judicial system, whether it's the Supreme Court, whether it's elections themselves, right? The UK, like Tommy, like, you know, everybody's, we're all Googling these arcane rules. Your constitution, you know, is not written down in the same way ours is. It's a mixture of laws and customs and norms, really. And I'm not saying, you know, we've had our own problems with a written constitution, you know, because it can be interpreted, obviously, in crazy ways as our Supreme Court has. But watching this play out and seeing a party break norms and seeing a guy like Boris break norms repeatedly,

did that reveal any weaknesses that need to be patched up? I mean, some people I've heard go as far as saying we now need a written constitution in the UK. But are there democratic, small-y democratic things that have to be done to guard against a populist who doesn't abide by norms? Or did the system as strange as it is kind of work because it became untenable for this guy to stay in power?

Well, I think there is a debate in Britain about a modern constitutional arrangement that might be required following some of the egregious rule breaking that we've seen. Our system relies on good faith. It relies on so-called gentlemanly behavior. It belies on convention

and a small scene, conservatism and an incrementalism in the way that we bring about change. And we have seen a tearing up of that arrangement in recent times for sure. So that debate will continue. It will absolutely continue. But at the moment, it looks like we might be seeing the back end or the dying days of this populist trend. It will depend, of course, on who the Conservatives pick as their next leader. This dilemma is still before them. Do they continue with the culture divides? Do they

continue with waking up with a wedge issue every morning? Do they continue with breaking up the rule of law and the Northern Ireland protocol that they struck with Northern Ireland and the European Union upon the breakup of the decision to leave the EU? We will see, but I suspect because of what I said, that will continue. This Brexit trajectory will continue. It needs a progressive government to calm things down. To set a course that's serious. We're seeing this in Germany. We've recently seen it in Australia.

And what's interesting about Australia is that they were up against Linton, Crosby, and parts of the institutional Murdoch Press, and they still won. So we should have heart. We should lift our shoulders. We should be confident that people are rumbling, the charlatan, what we would call a sheister type of, here. And I think that we should be emboldened and make our case, but make it very much in the center ground on the bread of butter issues that people care about. We have also, of course,

progressives got to lift our game on communications. We have to win the battle, not just of ideas, but on rhetoric and language and be alongside people in their day-to-day struggles. Well, I mean, that feels like a pretty great place to leave it, David. Thank you for thank you for joining us on this momentous day. I hope that you and all our listeners in the UK or everywhere else are taking like 30 minutes to celebrate before you get that. Maybe not like a number 10 style ragers, but you know, like crack a beard. Yeah, right, right, right. Not like Boris style. Yeah, yeah. Believe me, I'm lifting a glass to seeing the back of Boris Johnson. We all are. Wonderful. Thank you again and hope to talk to

you soon. Thank you. Thanks again to David Lamie for joining the show. Thank you again to every Tory party MP who decided to knife Boris Johnson in the past 48 hours to two months. I don't know. Listen, you're all shameless hacks. None of you had any real political courage, but we appreciate you nonetheless. Thank you to whoever's playing the music on Hugh Grant's command to humiliate British conservative MPs, you know. Yeah, thank you to Yakkney Sachs and Benny Hill as well. See you guys next week.

See you. World is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse. Saul Rubin is our associate producer. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim, and Amelia Montuth upload our episodes and videos at YouTube.com slash crooked media.