The Daily Signal - Inside 'the Blob': How Bureaucrats Brought Down Britain's Leader

Episode Date: December 14, 2024

A new documentary from Palladium Pictures and The Wall Street Journal examines how Britain's permanent bureaucracy—nicknamed “The Blob”—played a pivotal role in ending Liz Truss' brief tenure in late 2022 as prime minister. Through interviews with Truss and other key players, director Michael Pack, a former CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, reveals how unelected technocrats and civil servants—Britain's equivalent of the American deep state—pushed back against her economic reforms, ultimately leading to her resignation after just 44 days in office. Pack spoke with The Daily Signal about the growing power of Britain's administrative state—and lessons President-elect Donald Trump should glean from the episode as he assumes power in the United States. "The Blob is a lot stronger than you think," Pack told The Daily Signal. "A lot of people on the Republican side seem to be pretty confident that they'll be able to radically reform the departments and organizations that they're nominated to head. But I think the Liz Truss story suggests 'the Blob' has a lot of power to fight back." Watch the full documentary: https://youtu.be/c3q9gGhRrjA This is Pack's second documentary with The Wall Street Journal. His first film of the series, "'Get the Jew': The Crown Heights Riot Revisited," debuted in October. It tells the story of the America's worst antisemitic riot, which took place in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in 1991. "The idea of the series was to cover events or things that happened in the past that were either misreported, ignored, or just sent down the memory hole," Pack explained. Pack's most notable film, "Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words," tells the remarkable story of the legendary U.S. Supreme Court justice. With his latest documentary, Pack hopes to educate Americans about the fights facing the incoming Trump administration as it seeks to reform Washington. From his time at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, Pack has firsthand experience with America's version of "the Blob." "In my own little world, I did see what it was like to face the administrative state," Pack said of his seven months as CEO. "Most of us, myself included, tend to think of the administrative state as an American problem, and the Liz Truss documentary makes clear that it is a problem of the West," he added. "These bureaucrats are the same in London, Paris, New York, D.C. They go to the same colleges, they're taught the same ideas." Watch the full documentary below. Learn more about Palladium Pictures' incubator fellowship for America's future storytellers: https://palladiumpictures.com/incubator/ The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories, like this one, without the support of our viewers: https://www.dailysignal.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast, weekend edition. I'm Rob Blewey, your host today. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll be right back with today's interview. Pro-life, pro-women conservative and feminist? That's right. We're problematic women. The radical left does not know what to do with strong independent women.

women who believe in traditional values and love America. So you might say we're problematic to the left narrative of what a woman should be. Here on problematic women, we sort through the news to find the stories that you care about. Join Problematic Women on the Daily Signals YouTube or Rumble every Wednesday or catch the show wherever you get your podcast on Thursday morning. And be sure to follow Problematic Women on Instagram. Michael Pack is the president and CEO of Pleidium Pictures and he's directed a new documentary called the Prime Minister versus the blob about Liz Truss's

44 days in office in the United Kingdom. Michael, thanks so much for joining the Daily Signal. Thank you for having me on the show, Rob. This is an excellent film. Congratulations on the full production of it. You're doing this in concert with the Wall Street Journal where it's available for our audience to watch. Tell us why you embarked on this particular story, given that Liz Truss did only spend

More than a couple months in office, yet her story is quite remarkable in that short time that she was prime minister. Well, we're doing a series of short documentaries with the Wall Street Journal opinion section, and this is the second of them. They're all going to be free on WSJ.com, you know, outside of their normal paywall. So your viewers and listeners can simply go to WSJ.com and Google the prime minister versus the blob, or the first one, which was a the Crown Heights riot was called Get the Jew, the Crown Heights Riot revisited, and they're there on the site. And the idea of the series was to cover events or things that happened in the past that were either misreported, ignored, or just sent down the memory hole. So the first one, as I say, was about the Crown Heights riot of 1991, which was the worst anti-Semitic race riot

in American history, and it has a lot of lessons about anti-Semitism today. But this one, the second one about Liz Trust, which just launched today, is about, as you say, Liz Trust's very short prime ministership, 44 days or 49, depending on how you count. So it's good for a short film in a sense. But also, it's called the prime minister versus the blob because she feels she was done in by their version of the administrative state, which they call the blob, a much better term for it. Here, it's maybe catching on here. Administrative State, State sounds too friendly to me. The blob is a better description. So it seemed very relevant to what now the new Trump administration is going to face when they come back into office in January. Oh, they most certainly will. Michael, I will let's delve into this particular documentary. But first, I'd be remiss if I didn't give you an opportunity to talk to our audience a little bit about your background and probably the film that they're most familiar with, that you're.

you've been associated with, and that is about Clarence Thomas, a remarkable movie. So before we talk about Liz Truss in those 44 days, give us a little bit of perspective as to how you got into filmmaking and that signature piece that you did that I think in so many ways captured Clarence Thomas's life so perfectly. Well, thank you, Rob. Well, I've been making documentaries for many decades. My previous company, which is still there, is called Manaful Productions, and was under that rubric that we made the Clarence Thomas film, which is called Created Equal, Clarence Thomas in his own words, and is still available for streaming on Amazon and many other places. You can go to the website and find it, either the manifold one or the Palatian Pictures one.

And so I've done many of these documentaries, the last one, maybe the most famous one, is about Clarence Thomas. It's a two-hour documentary. He tells his story, his life story from growing up in the segregated south, the Supreme Court. In his own words, he's the only interview him and his wife, and you hear his side of the story, and he's a very compelling storyteller, and I think he did a beautiful job. But we have 15 other films that we've done. They've all been nationally broadcast on PBS, as was the Clarence Thomas film.

And I recommend them all. I made them. I like them. The one before that was about Admiral Rickover, who created the first nuclear submarine and nuclear power plant and helped win the Cold War and is an unsung hero of that period. also a great film. We have a lot of 30 minutes of dramatic recreations where Tim Blake Nelson plays Admiral Rickover

and does a great job. And that's who is on Amazon. But in part because of the success of the Carnage Thomas film, donors came to us and asked if we could launch a new company to expand the reach that we've had in the past. So we launched Palladium Pictures. So in addition to our traditional long-form documentaries,

like the Clarence Thomas film. We are doing these short films with the Wall Street Journal, and we have an incubator program run by my son Thomas, whom you know, Rob, and it is designed to train the next generation of conservative filmmakers because we believe that, and I think this is really objectively true, that the documentary world, like a lot of the media, is dominated by the left,

and they are telling these long stories about American history and about our recent past. You know, if news is the first draft of history, documentaries are the second or third, and we shouldn't cede this to the left, to have only one way of telling the story. So we want to train the next generation, and the very first class just is finishing, and we brought four incubator fellows, and they've each completed a film, and their films are available on Real ClearPolitics.com,

and we're just bringing in the second class of four to six to train this year, and I think it's an important thing to do. I mean, there are many reasons there's a dearth of conservative documentaries, but one of them is this talent shortage because the left has an entire ecosystem to train these people and nurture them from film school. Where every University of America has a film school, they're like 4,000 universities graduating tens of thousands of wannabe progressive filmmakers every year, and we don't have such a feeder, so we need to come up with other institutions.

I applaud you for doing it. I saw the same thing when I went to journalism school, how you were from the day you set foot in that Journalism 101 class really indoctrinated with a leftist ideology. And you see the consequences of that now in so many of the legacy media organizations. It was hard for me coming to Washington, D.C., after graduation, to even break into an institution like the Washington Post simply because I didn't feel they had any interest in hiring somebody who probably had a conservative opinion on things. And so whether it is in the institution,

the journalism world or it's in the film world as you're working on. It's one of the reasons why at the Daily Signal, we started a journalism fellow program where we give recent graduates an opportunity to learn with hands-on experience. And so thank you for doing it. And we'll be sure to leave a link in the show notes and the story about this interview so people can learn more about the incubator program and the other work that you're doing there at Palladium Pictures. Okay, let's talk about the film. You were kind enough to give me a sneak preview. And also I was treated to a delightful conversation between yourself and Liz Truss on the movie. Now, this is not in any way, as you told Liz Truss, a way to bolster her image or reputation.

In fact, there's some criticism of her, pointed criticism of her in the film. So how did you approach telling this story? Well, our goal with all these films is to tell the story straight, to present the facts. I mean, a lot of these stories are simply ignored or some key facts are skipped. case of Liz Trust. So I now will express to you, Rob, my opinions, but I tried to make it the film itself pretty straight for storytelling. So that's what we said, and we told that to Liz Trust, too, that we were going to be just tell the story with many other points of view, including people from labor and kind of anti-Liz conservatives, wet Tories they used to be called.

So yes, I sat next to Liz during that screening, and she had not actually seen it before I was shocked to hear, and I could see her responding to the criticism, wanting to get up from her seat and respond to the criticism. But she said, I think, in our discussion, that she was going to resist the urge to rebut them from the stage, and I think just as well. But it's really her side of the story that you don't hear much of. In America, no one even knows who she is. I mean, I think the average person, he doesn't even ring a bell.

I mean, you could tell people she was prime minister when the queen died. And it kind of rings a bell. But of course, in the UK, it's a big story. But even in the UK, she doesn't really get, as you would expect, a very fair shake from their legacy media like the BBC. So we wanted to give her a chance to tell her story, but the other points of view as well. And it's a very complicated story. It was very challenging getting it after 30 minutes. Was it difficult to get her to commit to doing the interview?

Or was she receptive to what? wanting to relive this moment of her life? Well, it was something of a challenge. We worked closely with the Wall Street Journal opinion people, and Joe Sternberg, who is the, who we interview in the film and was instrumental in shaping the film. You know, he had a record and she knew the Wall Street Journal opinion section, and she trusted their journalism, and, you know, my own record is obvious, too. So it was a little bit hard, but it was crucial to the film.

otherwise there would be no film. And it was challenging to get the other people to line up. And we have her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Quasi-Cortain, Jacob Reismag, who was in her cabinet. And we have a labor, MP, you're a labor advisor and a former conservative MP now independent. And it was a little bit challenging to get these people together. I have to say, to promote my son again,

who was a associate producer on this film, that he did most of that work. I mean, one of the things about being a producer producer director as you get to take credit for other people's work like Joe Sternberg's and my son Thomas's. So I should just pretend it was all me, but it really wasn't. No, that's, that's fantastic. I mean, you certainly did interview quite a range of individuals there who had central roles in those 44 days. One of the things that stood out to me in the film was these dramatic moments where she was squaring off against the Labor Party and these very heated debates that that were

transpiring as she was putting forward her mini budget and other proposals. What was it like, what did you learn about those 44 days and the tenure that might be relevant, as you said earlier, to Donald Trump and what he might encounter in Washington, D.C.? Well, first of all, I agree with you. It's an extremely dramatic story. I always say the film combines yes, Minister, and House of Cards. You know, it is extremely dramatic. We introduce it by saying, It's its tale of betrayals, backstabbing, and blunders. And it really is. A little, maybe too much alliteration there, but those things are much in evidence.

There were many dramatic high points, and it was very tense. So it's also flat out a good story. But it does have this lesson for people coming in in the Trump administration. They should all watch it, or anyone interested in what's going to happen in Trump number two should watch it. I think the lesson is that the blob is a lot stronger than you think. I mean, now a lot of people on the Republican sides seem to be pretty confident that they'll be able to radically reform the departments and organizations that they're nominated to head. But I think the Liz Trust story suggests the blob has a lot of power to fight back.

And you could see it in those 44 days. I mean, she came to office with a bold agenda too. she's sort of a thatch right. She had a very growth-oriented plan, and the establishment was against it. And as she said, in other areas too, like energy. She was pro-fraking. A lot of people were not.

She was suspicious of their version of the DEI agenda. And, you know, these are unpopular views. And they were not willing to let her get very far, 44 days, you know, before, you know, she was forced out of it. She was forced to resign. more or less. For those who don't know much about how Liz Trust came to power, can you take us back

to that moment? She addressed this in the Q&A with you when she was asked if she would do anything differently or if she had to, you know, obviously go back in time and maybe change a policy proposal. But it was quite interesting how she was put in that position to begin with. Well, this is something where Donald Trump has a, you know, clear advantage over Liz Trust. I mean, he has an electoral mandate and she did not. you know, she was voted in by the party. And so they had a, they had a, you know, people campaigned to party regulars who voted.

And because the Tories were still in power, she could, she, you know, after Boris Johnson left, she, they had, until there was another election, they could vote in the next prime minister. So she had just that group of conservative party members to vote, to, to appeal to. And it was a very tough leadership battle. And she proposed, as she said in our talk, exactly what she was going to do. She was not, you know, deceptive in any way about it. She explained exactly what her economic policy was. And the conservative group really liked it.

And they voted her in. But she had a lot of opposition, even within the conservative party. They sometimes say the parliamentary class, the conservative parliamentary class, is different than the Conservative Party members. You can kind of see that here. It's sort of like maybe a little bit like the Trump first term. You know, rhinos on one hand and, you know, MAGA people on the other. And the conservative people voted in were closer to MAGA people.

And the people who didn't like her were more parallel to rhinos. So she had that battle even before she came to power. And it played out during her 44 days. It sure did. I mean, in one way I'd liken it to how Donald Trump has put forward a, slate of nominees for these cabinet positions, and you have some Republicans who might not be completely comfortable with all of them. Whereas if you look on Joe Biden or Barack Obama before him, whoever they usually put up, the Democrats are in lockstep. So, you know, there's always

the situation where it seems that Republicans, conservatives, UK, U.S., there are those, that infighting and differences that sometimes undermine. Now, Michael, you have some firsthand experience with the with the administrative state, if you want to call it that. And so what lessons do you have from your own time from the first Trump term that you might suggest that they do differently or they at least are aware of as they take these steps to try to give the power back to the people and get things under control? Well, you're right, Rob. I mean, it was my own experience in the first Trump administration.

I ran the U.S. Agency for Global Media that oversees the Voice of America and the other international broadcasters, obviously a way smaller job than Prime Minister of the UK. But in my own little world, I did see what it was like to, you know, face the administrative state. And I think it gave me insight into what Liz Trust faced at a obviously bigger scale. I mean, so I think it's a challenge. In that agency, they have spent four years trump-proofing it. You know, they have created a board that has multi-year terms that can't be replaced, that they've already stacked, that over, whose approval you need to sort of change the heads of the network. They've made the head of the Voice of America, a career SES position and hard to replace. I mean, they've done many,

many things out in the open, and they've probably got other things ready. So my only, I just think it's, you know, I maybe went into that a little bit naive. One good thing I think about the Trump people is, you know, they have the experience of the Trump first term. They have the four years out of office to think about it. But I think you should really, they should really be prepared for a very vicious counterattack. I mean, I've been in government twice. I served in that Trump administration. And then I was in the Georgia H.W. Bush administration, also in international broadcasting. And while, when I speak to people from the Bush and Reagan years, they always say, well, we've dealt with the administrative state, too, but it's really not the same.

the first time, yeah, it's true that the bureaucrats there wouldn't, you know, kind of slow-rolled everything he did and tried to stop it. But under Trump, it was outright warfare in any kind of unhidden way. They didn't disguise it. They went to the press. They went to the hill. They did whatever they could to undermine us in a kind of, in a very overt way. And people have got to be prepared for that, but I also say that dealing with that takes political courage and like all kinds of courage until you encounter the battle, to use that metaphor, you don't know whether you have courage. And whether these people do or don't, we'll find out, you know, pretty soon into the new term.

We certainly will. And Michael, in your case or in the case of Liz Truss or even Clarence Thomas, you were not only countering, you know, not only being attacked by the blob or the administrative state or whatever you call it, but you also had these near constant attacks in the press. I mean, so you had legacy media organizations or in her case, hostile media in the United Kingdom, which she was confronting. How much of a factor is that kind of in your own awareness on a day-to-day basis of what you're trying to accomplish and the shifting public opinion perhaps? Or the stamina of even those who are in the fight with you to continue and make sure that they

have that courage that you speak about. I think it is very, very significant. I really feel that legacy media is just part of the blob. I mean, I wouldn't make that distinction almost. I think it is very significant. I mean, it's very hard to take the relentless criticism and misrepresentation of everything you've done. I mean, I was only in office for eight months since Democrats had stalled my nomination for over three years. And during that eight months, there were 40 pieces about me in the Washington Post, including four editorials and four op-eds and equivalent coverage on NPR, and much less but a lot on Politico in the New York Times.

I mean, it's relentless attacks. My head of communications just begged me to take him out of the job because this constant correcting the media telling the truth, and then they print what they know to be false, is very hard to put up with. And I always say about the media that it is not correct to call it biased. Bias is what it was in the good old days of Walter Cronkite, where they would present two sides and they'd favor one.

Now only one side is there. In those many articles about me, no one ever tried to interview any of my supporters or someone who might agree with me, not at all. And they were willing to print things that are false, knowingly false. And in the worst case, to go in the demoralization of my staff, they printed things about the personal lives of my staff, including kind of battles, you know, in one case, a bankruptcy and another case of divorce proceedings.

And, you know, it was very hard for people to take that. They weren't sure they had signed up for it. So I think it is very demoralizing. It's very hard to get your message out. I mean, Liz Truss, I think, made that point in our conversation that, you know, that it's You could say you've got to get your ideas out there, but it's very hard when the media is actually distorting them every day. I mean, Donald Trump is very skilled getting a message out around the legacy media, but it's still very hard. It's very hard not to deal with the relentless attacks.

And I was actually in my time in office, Rob, inspired by Clarence Thomas. I had just made that film before going in. And if Clarence Thomas could put up with so much more, I felt it would be pathetic for me not to put up with what I had to put up with. Well, thank you for having the courage to do what you did. I know that it was a long wait to get there. And then once you were in the position, you did have to endure the near daily attacks. You know, it's interesting, Michael, that we haven't seen that level of coverage from the Washington Post about the current people running the agency. But, you know, that's maybe for a conversation for another day.

You know, so one of the things that, one of the scenes from the documentary, we're talking to Michael Pack, and he's just created the prime minister versus the blob, is the role of the Bank of England and some of these other key players. And you just realize that, as I think she said, despite the fact that she was the prime minister, the power was really elsewhere. She was not able to control things in the way that she thought she might be able to. What does that tell us about these institutions and maybe the need to rein in their power? Well, you know, that exactly right. I mean, her chief adversary on economic issues was Andrew Bailey, the head of the Bank of England. And, you know, I'm still maybe a little naive about other countries than I on my own.

I kind of also thought, well, the Bank of England, that must be, you know, free of ideology. But, of course, such an assumption is crazy. It is not. And, you know, they, Andrew Bailey felt he couldn't be fired by the prime minister and he could do what he wished and he did not agree with her economic program. And you see the battle between the two of them in the film. I mean, and one of the problems in covering with some of these issues is it is so complicated. One of the main issues between them is this LDI crisis, which Liz felt was the key crisis in her prime ministership was that after she announced her mini budget, the pound crashed.

and it was an economic crisis in Britain and who was responsible. She blames the Bank of England, the Bank of England and many other people blame her. Where is it? And the key argument for looking at the problems of the Bank of England have to do with this LDI issue that they pushed. And so it's very hard to explain. The BBC documentary on Liz Trust, which was also 30 minutes, didn't mention it at all. But it's crucial to her argument, and we did our best to try to explain it in a kind of humorous animation way. But one of the challenges in economic issues is they're complicated.

And so it does allow people to oversimplify and ignore important things. Oh, yeah, certainly. And I did love that animation. It was a great part of the film as well. So you have a situation now where I believe in five years, 2029, the United Kingdom will have its next national election. Did you get the sense from Liz Trust that she felt that over that period of time, there might be an opportunity to make the same types of reforms or appeal to people with the same kind of enthusiasm that Donald Trump has about taking on the deep state in the United Kingdom? Or is that a hopeless cause? Well, I mean, one of the great things I think about the film, an important thing, is that most of us, myself included, tend to think of the administrative state as an American problem.

And the Liz Trust documentary makes clear that it is a problem of the West. That these bureaucrats are the same in London, Paris, New York, D.C. They go to the same colleges. They're taught the same ideas. It's essentially the same. Now, it's true that the actual, you know, the political structure of conservatives in these two countries are very different. Liz Trust herself has a growth commission that she's, she's launching and she is trying to do act politically for her ideas still, from my point

of view, and I'm not an expert in British politics, it seems challenging to pull it all together. I mean, they have a conservative party, they reform, you know, who's going to actually be a leader. It's so hard to tell. I think in some ways we are better off and have a clear political situation than they do than they have in the UK. But I also think our leadership counts for a lot. I think the re-election of Donald Trump sends a signal throughout the West that may embolden

people who share similar views in the UK and elsewhere. It certainly hope so. Well, I hope so as well. And I think your film certainly gives people a preview as to what might be to come in the future. Liz Truss also has a book out. And so she's going to, I think, stay active in politics there. And of course, five years is a long time. So we'll see what Trump is able to accomplish here at the start of 2025 and throughout his term.

Michael, as we wrap up here, remind us again the best way for viewers to see the movie, to see more about what you're doing at Palladium Pictures. And if they want to get involved or apply for the incubator, how they can do that? Well, they can go to PalladiumPictions.com, P-A-L-L-A-D-I-U-M, Pictures.com. All the information about the incubator and our previous films are there. And it even links to the Wall Street Journal films. But if they want to go directly to the Liz Trust films, they can go to film. They can go to WSJ.com and just Google the prime minister versus the blob. Probably the blob alone is sufficient.

How many blob articles are there in the Wall Street Journal? Or the other one, which is get the Jew, the Crown Heights Riot, revisited. So I encourage them to do that. And you can watch our other films. The Clarence Thomas film is on Amazon and some of our others are also readily available. So it should be easy to find. Well, and if you're watching this on YouTube or you're listening to a podcast, we'll be sure to update the description or the show notes with those links

so that we'll make it easy for you to access Michael's great work. And Michael Pack, thanks so much for spending time with The Daily Signal. It's always a joy to talk to you. we look forward to seeing your work in the future. Thank you very much, Rob. It's great talking to you as well as ever. We are going to leave it there for today. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss out on new shows from The Daily Signal. Every weekday, catch top news in 10 right here in this podcast feed. Keep up with the news that you care about in just 10 minutes every weekday at 5 p.m. And go deep with us right here every weekend for the Daily

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