The Rest Is History - 246. The Fall of Liz Truss

Episode Date: October 21, 2022

After just 45 days, Liz Truss has resigned. Join Tom and Dominic for this special episode to discuss her place in history. Is she Britain's worst ever Prime Minister? Is this the worst crisis in post-war British history? How does she compare to Gordian I? Is Tom Holland getting a peerage? All will be answered. Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. Or, if you're listening on the Apple Podcasts app, you can subscribe within the app in just a few clicks. The winter energy crisis won't be as bad as everybody fears. Inflation will start to come down.

By the spring, that enormous Labour poll lead will be a fading memory. And as the next election approaches, ordinary people across the land will throw their caps in the air and cheer the name of good queen liz no no i can't do it tempting as it is to tilt against the conventional wisdom sometimes you just have to face facts the conference was awful the speech was awful this has been the worst start to any premiership i think in recent history, perhaps even in all British history. That, Dominic Sambrook, was a top pundit, a top columnist, a top historian, namely yourself, delivering your verdict on Liz Truss. What was that, about a couple of weeks ago?

Yes, it was. So halfway through her premiership. Yeah. So now it's come to pass. So we're recording this at 1340, so 10 minutes after Liz Truss announced her resignation. And clearly people across the land will not be throwing their caps in the air and cheering the name of good Queen Liz. And would you, I guess nothing has happened since you wrote that to change your opinion that she ranks as perhaps the worst. I mean, seriously, do you think she's the worst prime minister of all time? Well, I'll tell you what I wrote. I wrote later on in the article. I think she's comfortably, putting aside her politics, I said, I think

she's comfortably the least impressive person to become prime minister in my lifetime since the advent of universal suffrage, and perhaps even since the advent of universal suffrage and perhaps even since the creation of the office under george i and actually i think uh as a columnist you spend an awful lot of time making historical parallels and and getting basically getting things wrong making well and engaging in hyperbole as well right yes i mean the worst the best whatever yes but making predictions that turn out to be ludicrously untrue however in this case i think it was pretty obvious to anybody who without a stake in the contest as it were the liz trust was a fantastically underpowered candidate

um uh for the tory leadership she won all the. There was nothing in her premiership that suggested any sort of hitherto concealed qualities. It seems to me to have been one last massive gesture of irresponsibility and spite from the preceding Prime Minister, who politically was much more aligned with Sunak. I mean, Sunak was continuity Boris. But because Johnson resented what Sunak had done to him, he was determined to spike his guns no matter what he could. And so he backed Truss, presumably knowing she'd be terrible. Well, that's what people say, isn't it? Putting his kind of personal resentment above the national good.

Yes. I mean, that's what some people say that uh boris johnson i mean it seems unbelievable to me that if just a few months ago you and i were recording another emergency podcast or he recorded i think two emergency podcasts on the fall of boris johnson once when he had a confidence vote which he narrowly survived and then once when he had that absolutely preposterous series of events in number 10, where everybody resigned, but he refused to leave. Now at that stage, I can remember we did this podcast and we said, and you said to me, is there any precedent for this in British political history? And the answer was no. And I said to you at the time, I don't think, you know, I never

imagined I would see scenes of this sort of utter ridiculousness in number 10 well and yet they have been eclipsed by yesterday's laughable so for our overseas listeners a laughable shambles in westminster when the itv evening news reported on it and the you know the sort of the very neutral sober kind of news presenter, Tom Bradbury, said, it is total and utter abject chaos. And that was his introduction to the main news bulletin. That gave you some sense of the flavour. You had government whips effing and blinding, storming out. Truss apparently pursuing her chief whip around the Palace of Westminster, begging her to stay.

Home secretary forced to resign all kinds of stuff anyway but dominic we're not a politics podcast because i gather that there is another politics i'm not aware of another podcast in the goldhanger stable yeah that that may well be handling this um so i thought that since we are uh history focused um there might be two areas to focus on. One is parallels in British history, short-lived prime ministers, short term. Are there other parallels in other periods, other countries that we could compare this to? And then the other question that I would like to ask you is that you are a historian of modern Britain. You've written this series of

brilliant analyses of British political, but also social and cultural life from what, 1955, is it? Yeah, 1956, up to 1982. And one of the running themes in your books is that most people do not pay much attention to what is going on in Downing Street. So they're busy whipping up Angel Delight or playing on Space Hoppers or watching football or whatever. So I would like to ask you, does all this matter or is it just surface froth? But first of all, short-lived prime ministers. So Liz Truss, by the conventional reckoning, has now beaten George Canning. Yes, yes, she has beaten George Canning. George Canning, who we last mentioned accompanying Horatio Nelson.

Oh God, yes. To HMS Victory in Portsmouth in 1805, shortly before he sails off to go and die at the Battle of Trafalgar. So that's the measure of just what a long running record that's been. There is some controversy, isn't there, about whether the Earl of Bath should actually hold the honour. So he was asked in 1746 to form a ministry and he went away and two days later came back and said he couldn't. So by that reckoning, he would still hold the record. Yes. Most sources don't rank him as a prime minister. He's not in any of the official lists.

I think asking somebody to be a prime minister and then them coming back two days later and saying i can't be doesn't that seems to me a far frankly a far more dignified way of proceeding than somebody becoming prime minister and then 45 days later saying i can't i'm everybody hates me and i'm terrible i have to go i mean don't just on the human level it's kind kind of, it's the worst nightmare, isn't it? Applying for the job for which you're not, not ultimately qualified. You get it. And then your, your inability to, to hold this job that you've wanted all your life is on the most humiliating public stage. Tom, I, I wrote a column about this earlier this week in relation to Kwasi Kwarteng, Truss's short-lived chancellor, about nightmares. And I said, because I wrote about how I'd had a nightmare about being pursued by Kwasi Kwarteng and then about having to enter a poetry competition against him.

So I had two successive nightmares about Kwasi. This is when you had flu, wasn't it? I had flu. Yeah, we should explain. You don't normally have that such weird nightmares yeah um so i had two i and i and i i wrote the piece and it was all about politicians uh and the sort of the nightmare that we all have of being found out sort of imposter syndrome and i i do think that would trust that actually never before in british history has there been such a spectacular case of somebody getting a job for which they are utterly unqualified and then imploding so dramatically in front of the cameras. moment when she was you know she she was completely humiliated uh kwateng her chancellor and sort of

partner in crime had to go she got rid of him in came jeremy hunt sort of mr sensible to be her chancellor and to rip up her policy in front of her and i remember seeing her sitting on the front bench of the house in the house of commons alongside hunt and she looked like i mean people sort of said she's on 20 minute day release from madam to swords you know she looked like, I mean, people sort of said, she's on 20-minute day release from Madam to Swords. You know, she looked like somebody in shock, the colour drained from her cheeks. And there is, at a human level, I mean, personally, I don't have a tremendous amount of sympathy with Liz Truss.

No one forced her to go for the premiership. But you're right. It must be, I mean, it's a bit like the podcast we did about Nixon and Watergate. To see your career unravel in such a humiliating way in public, your inadequacies, we all fear we've got them and we all know our own limitations. But to have them laid bare so extensively in front of an audience of tens of millions, that must be awful. Also, I mean, the thing with Kuateng is that they're very good friends. I mean, whether they still are, I don't know.

But they were absolutely, you know, they wrote the budget, which helped precipitate this meltdown together. And the figure of a supposedly powerful officeholder obliged to defenestrate a favourite. I mean, it's kind of redolent of medieval or early modern history. I mean, the king's favourites being – so it's a bit like – I mean, faint echoes perhaps of Charles I being – And the Earl of Stratford. So quasi-quasi-ing is the Earl of Stratford.

Yes, or Edward II. Edward II being forced to getl of strafford so quasi-quarting is the earl of strafford yes or um edward ii edward ii being forced to get rid of um you know his favorites or whatever henry viii when after he got rid of thomas cromwell years afterwards he would basically sort of say if only cromwell was here he would know how to handle this yes but henry viii i mean nobody ever forced henry viii to do anything i mean No, that's right. Whereas the thing about Charles I and Edward II are humiliated, and they're broken reeds after that. I mean, it's one of the things that actually leads Charles to fight the Civil War. But someone like Edward II, after he is forced to get rid of his favourites,

his authority gets shredded and shredded and shredded. Yeah, and that's certainly the case for truss i mean and and and if this truss is feeling bad i mean she can always reflect on the fate of edward ii and think that it that it might be worse yes i suppose i suppose so well anyway tom to return to your question you asked me which is about um precedence so we were talking about george canning uh canning's excuse for being a very short-lived prime minister is that he was 119 days, is that he had TB. Yeah, that's fair enough, isn't it? You know, most very, very short-lived prime ministers, I'm looking at the list here.

So Bonalor, for example, who was the 20th century's shortest-lived prime minister, Andrew Bonalor, so that's the 1920s. He came and went in 1922, but he had throat cancer. And he had a fairly distinguished record as the leader of the Tory party for many years before that. And he'd been involved in the coalition government in the Great War and so on. So Truss is really out on her own. Since the dawn of universal suffrage there has never been the case a case where somebody has become prime minister through an internal kind of party leadership election and then disappeared within such a short period of time and it's been accelerating hasn't it the pace at which prime ministers come and go yeah um but somebody had tweeted that they have a four-month

year old baby who has witnessed two, now three prime ministers probably, two monarchs, about 20 chancellors of the Exchequer, about 50 Home Secretaries. I mean, the churn and the pace is something that we, as a nation, are not used to. No, and a good example of that, Tom, is our producer was just saying that Tony, that until the age of 38, I think he'd only ever seen three prime ministers. And in my case, from the moment I, let me get this right, from the autumn after I entered school until I think my 16th birthday, just after my 16th birthday, I'd only ever known one prime minister, and that was Margaret Thatcher.

I mean, she was there so long. And then, of course, John Major was there for seven years. Tony Blair was then in for another, what was that, a decade or so. So, you know, it's very unusual in British. Yeah, so things are speeding up. And the peril that leaps out at me is the third century in the Roman Empire. It's where you have these long reigns in the second century, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius and so on.

And then it all implodes in the third century. And the obvious comparison to Liz Truss is Gordian I. That's not a comparison I've often heard from the nation's pundits. The obvious comparison to Liz Truss is Gordian I. That's not a comparison I've often heard from the nation's pundits. So there's this terrifying figure up in the Balkans, Maximinus Thrax, Maximinus the Thracian, who's murdered the legitimate emperor, who is kind of related by adoption and so on, to Marcus Aurelius.

So in that sense, a kind of link with the golden age of the Antonines. And Maximilian Serax is about nine foot. He kind of pulls the heads off oxen for fun. He's said to have worn his wife's bangles as rings on his enormous fingers. So he's a kind of terrifying guy. And people back in Rome, they think we don't want this barbarian as our emperor. And so they appeal to a very, very distinguished senator called Gordian, who I think is about 80. And they say, go on.

And he really doesn't want to do it, but he feels it's his duty. He's governing Africa, so he's in Carthage. And he's so old, he's kind of Biden-esque, that he says, I can't manage this without my son. So his son becomes, he was also called Gordian. So Gordian I, Gordian II, they're kind of co-emperors um and they last 22 days and that's it that was someone kill them yeah they uh gordian the second loses a battle outside carthage um he gets killed in the battle his body's never found uh the news is

brought to gordian the first so rather than hold a press conference and announce his resignation um he hangs himself oh my word that's that's a strong reaction so again again i'm just you know it's kind of one of the constellations of history i guess yeah it's that no matter how bad things may seem for you you're not gordon the first there are always people who've had it worse so i i'm just offering that uh supporters of liz trust that you know it could be worse liz trust will not there won't be many candidates tom for liz trust's um resignation honors list so if you get in now with your consolation yes that'd be good i'd say you've got a pretty good chance actually well i'm putting that on

the record uh of course the other parallel is one that we have touched on within our series on Australian prime ministers. And there was a stage where basically prime ministers in Australia were knifing each other kind of every other week, weren't they? Yeah, they were. And yes, and we were talking about that, that culture of leadership spills. I mean, that was really, because there's actually nothing really wrong with Australia, I would say.

I mean, it's not that Australia doesn't have issues and challenges. Of course it does. But I don't think if you were looking for a country where that political culture had gone wrong, Australia would not be high on that list. And there it was really – it became a sort of culture of backstabbing, didn't it, and a sort of ludicrous plotting. Well, because, yes, someone would be stabbed then they come back from the dead and stab the person who stabbed them and so it would go on so it was actually an argument for the return

of death as a as a weapon again that's the lesson of the third century a.d yeah any other parallels that leap to mind i suppose italy there Italy, the cover of The Economist has Britannia holding her trident and it's got spaghetti wrapped around it. Italian readers must find that very flattering. But there you had prime ministers, I mean, Italy or in sort of France between the wars, you would have prime ministers rising and falling and disappearing within weeks or days. The difference there, I think, is that first of all, prime ministers would fall because the nature of that political system meant that politics was a constantly shifting exercise in coalition building. So as different factions fell from office.

And so that has always been the people in favour of the first-past-the-post system that we have in Britain. It's always that you don't need these kind of messy compromises with the risks of coalitions fragmenting, that you get in systems under proportional representation. But I suppose the comeback to that is that even in the parliamentary system like we have, both parties are coalitions. They are. But the reason we've had so much turmoil is not just that the Conservative Party is a very large coalition. It's that, I mean, I think it's conservative party is a very large coalition. It's that,

I mean, I think it's the result of a couple of things. Okay. Okay. Hold on, Dominic. Hold on. Hold on.

Hold on. Oh, cliffhanger. So just a very kind of short guerrilla episode. And I think we've done enough for the first half. When we come back though, I want to return to that question I said to you, which was,

does any of this matter? Is it just surface for off or is it expressive of some deeper underlying structural constitutional economic malaise? We will find out. I'm just going to say this to you, that after the break will be your only opportunity in the history of this podcast to do an impersonation of Liz Truss. So whether or not Tom Holland takes that opportunity, we will discover in just a our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest of History, a special episode that we're putting out following the defenestration of yet another British Prime Minister, in this case, Liz Truss. And before the break, Dominic, you issued a challenge that I should do an impression of Liz Truss, which I'm going to turn down for the reason, basically for the reason that

I've been away so much over the past few weeks. You have never heard her speak. So all summer, I was flat out with my book, which I may have mentioned. Then I went away on holiday to decompress. And as part of that decompression, I was not listening to the news and I was not keeping up with it. And so I kind of came back and I missed all the Liz Truss drama. Then I was away again over the past few days. So basically, I don't really know what she sounds like. So that's the problem. She's got a kind of flat voice, hasn't she?

Very, very flat voice the only thing i can really imagine her saying is is that awful awful speech incomprehensibly bad um next week i'll be in beijing opening up new pork markets yes we import more than half of all of our cheese. That is a disgrace. Well, that's very good. I feel that Liz Truss is at the other end of the Zoom call. That's terrifying. That's a sentence you never want to hear, Tom. But, well, unless she's offering me a peerage. That peerage.

The Gordian-themed consolation. That peerage. That peerage. The Gordian-themed consolation. Yeah, exactly. In which case, I'd love it. But let's get back to the question of, is this – so as a historian of modern Britain, is this a typical crisis? Is this the kind of surface churn? Or is this – you know, you said that she's the worst prime minister that you can think of. Is this the kind of surface churn or is this some you know you said that she's the worst prime minister that you can think of is this the worst crisis no it's not the worst crisis i think it's

bad but it's not the worst crisis so what's the worst crisis well i suppose you would have to i mean it's a boring and cliched answer but um you'd have to say the summer of 1940 is the worst crisis i mean that's an existential crisis post-war so oh post-war it's it's really bad yeah what i mean you know i'm not saying you know 5088 or whatever the period that you know so from from the late 50s through to through through to the present day um it's it's a it's a it's a brilliant question tom because actually it depends what how you well it cuts to the heart of how you think about politics do you think politics is the driver of national life and of historical change and so on um or do you think politics is the reflection of it?

And you're more the latter, aren't you? I'm more the latter, yeah. And the crisis when I think about the 1970s, for example, I mean, there were some horrendous crises in the 1970s. I guess the two really classic ones are the winter of 73, 74 with the three-day week, all these states of emergency and the implosion of Ted Heath's premiership after the oil crisis. Then I suppose the winter of discontent in 78, 79, when James Callaghan's prime ministership pretty much collapsed because of the colossal breakdown of the relationship between the government and the trade unions and massive strikes. And then you've got the various sort of, there was a generalized sense of crisis under Margaret Thatcher the first couple of years with unemployment going through the roof and so on. In those cases, what was happening at Westminster was very clearly a reflection of bigger economic issues.

You know, so it wasn't that politics itself was broken. Politics itself, you could argue, was actually fine, but politicians were just struggling to deal with insuperable, appeared insuperable problems, and they were broken by them. In this case, I think there's seems to be something peculiarly rotten with politics part of that by the way is i think they have the opening up um the choice to party activists it's terrible oh it's a terrible terrible mistake basically the jeremy corbyn of the tories exactly exactly right yeah this is exactly what i'd say i would say that um that's the labour party started doing that it was driven by the left of the labor party in the 1980s tony ben it was his great campaign he claimed it would open up party democracy

allow ordinary members to choose the leader instead of a handful of mps um and the tourists felt they had to follow suit in the 1990s william haig changed the rules so since then the activists and and the different and of course what that went hand in hand with is the is the collapse of both parties as as proper mass membership organizations although jeremy corbyn supporters would argue that and correctly that that that he was born to the leadership on a great wave of enthusiasm. And actually the party membership under Labour went up. But that's a different kind of party membership from the days in which Labour was a genuinely, in inverted commas, national party.

That was more like a kind of bubo under the armpit. A sudden swelling well what happened under jeremy corbyn was that basically people who had who had very marked left-wing principles rushed into the labour party to join it and therefore swung the center of gravity massively to the left but the labour party originally when it was a you know in the first years of the 20th century, was actually in some ways not actually an immensely left-wing party. There were tons and tons of working class members who would never have perceived themselves as being left-wing. So they might have used the language of socialism,

but they were still, for example, very patriotic, very small-c conservative in there. That's not the case with the sort of Corbyn membership. Well, so we've we've talked so we've talked about this a lot that i mean it's the labour party is is we all parties are coalitions and the labour party has always been basically a coalition between working class labourers so hence the name yes yes and as all well would put it your favourite quote yes the prune juice drinking sandal wearers yes and corbin was

really corbin's election was the triumph of the the prune juice drinkers of the latter yeah over yeah everywhere but like like similarly the the tories i mean there's an inherent tension within the very name i mean then the conservative party yeah that they don't they're not actually very keen on conserving things so the tension is between do you uphold the kind of the traditional you know i don't know all the traditional stuff that conservatives are into um or do you adopt a kind of radical libertarian process which is what trust wanted to do yes which basically involves kind of you know destroying all environmental controls and um trashing everything you can in the cause of boosting gdp tom that peerage is that peerage is vanishing yeah um i mean in both cases there that there is a kind of

very motivated ideologically coherent minority within both parties. And it does seem that in both cases, if they seize control of the entire party, it always seems to end in tears. Of course it does, because they're by definition, they're not representative, not merely of the mass of the British public, they're not even representative of their own voters, of their own mass of the, let's say, 13 million people who they need to vote for them at the next election. Well, or indeed MPs. Or MPs, or even their MPs. But the Birkin argument for allowing MPs rather than party activists to vote for leaders

is that MPs are the voice of the constituents who elect them. Yeah. Well, this is also, by the way, it was also Michael Foote's argument. So Michael Foote, the left-wing Labour Party leader of the 1980s, loved Michael Foote. He used to sort of say to the Benites, we're not just delegates. We're not just waiting to be told how to, we have come here. I mean, Michael Foote was a great admirer of Edmund Burke. He said, we have come here to use use our judgment and you should trust MPs to choose the leader that they want. Now that's deeply embedded in the British parliamentary system, but the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s handed power to small groups of activists who basically chose leaders that the MPs did not want. And who by definition are unrepresentative of the vast mass of the British people, most of whom do not care particularly about politics. So to come back to that question, is this only of

interest to people who watch Newsnight or does it actually matter and does it impact? Well, it matters, I think, for two reasons. One, it's a reflection of the enormous hole that britain got itself into not so much with brexit i know we will have listeners who are on both sides of the brexit issue so i don't think it's brexit per se but i think it's brexit without a plan i think that was the real turning point so it's not necessarily i think leaving the european union i voted remain by the way in case people are thinking well i'm sure people who with very strong views will think we're terribly biased one way the other anyway but i don't think that was the issue so much as with an absolute absence of strategy or a strategic vision about where exactly britain

would go so you would hear completely different things from different leave campaigners and what that meant is that as soon as the the referendum sort of passed there is a constant uncertainty and a factional civil war about exactly what to do next and and the trust well but but dominic just just yeah slightly played devil's advocate on that haven't there in fact been two plans i mean there have always been two plans about what to do with brexit and one is um a kind of red tory leveling up yes cut immigration um all that kind of stuff and the other one is singapore on the thames yes up the the rule book, pump sewage if it boosts GDP, all that kind of thing. And basically, the first one didn't work with Boris. And so they thought, well, let's try the other one. That might work. And they've tried it with the Liz Trust, and that hasn't worked

either. Well, I think that's effectively what has happened. But that said, Tom, I don't think people thought it through as clearly as actually you've suggested. I don't think people did think, well, that hasn't worked. I think it became all messed up with personality politics and kind of court politics. But also, to be fair to the government, I mean, there's also... Oh, they've got a horrible inheritance. Yeah. COVID and then Ukraine. COVID and Ukraine, of course.

That's torpedoed everything. So it's impossible for any minister to go on the radio and not say wow it's a global crisis i mean actually liz trust when she resigned i mean she got putin i think in after about 10 seconds didn't she she did it was a sentence too i think yeah and and she's not wrong it is a global crisis but we but we've we've handled it worst would you say that's fair? At a purely sort of high political level, we've certainly handled it worse.

I mean, it's easy to forget that, for example, our COVID furlough scheme was probably the most generous in Europe. Our vaccine rollout was very fast. We have actually come up with the weapons and stuff for Ukraine. So there are some things that we've done well, but in terms of the personalities of our politicians, the way they presented themselves, their standards of behavior and decency and so on, pay me to say that because you know, Tom. You are a patriot. That nobody loves to bash our continental neighbours as much as I do and, you know, to big up Britain.

But it's true, you know, last night. But in a way we are bigging up Britain. We're saying our crisis is the worst. If we can't be the best, let's be the worst. I mean, I think we should, we expect, I expect a rambustious democracy. I do not want a sort of European parliament style, people, children are doing interpretive dance in the aisles. Yes, we said this about, in the previous episode we did

on the resignation of Johnson, we did say that. But there's rambustious and then there's ludicrous yeah i mean bloodstained shambles yes and i think the element about shambles so to go back to your point about um does it matter to ordinary people it obviously matters enormously if it's going to put two percentage points on the interest rate that you pay for your mortgage. And this is the real thing with the trust fiasco, is that it's not just that we had an absolutely ludicrously ill-equipped person as prime minister for 45 days or whatever. It's that the implosion of her ridiculous economic plan, ill-conceived economic plan, meant that the bank of england will

probably end up raising interest rates a percentage point or two higher than they might otherwise have done and for some families that will be economically catastrophic and businesses and businesses exactly so that you know it's easy for us to sort of chuckle and just, you know, draw our comparisons. And it's easy for political correspondents, of course, to get very excited about all the hullabaloo and the sort of hurly-burly. But it's important to remember these are real, these economic figures really matter to people. So, yes, I think it does matter. What I really hope it doesn't do is it lead to a sort of long-term 70s style culture of sort of negativity and all that. Not just here, but among people, do they invest in Britain? Is Britain a bit of a dead duck? All that kind of thing.

But reading your books on the 70s, the sense of crisis there seemed to be that the massive indicators in the economy, so inflation, unemployment, growth, were consistently against the government. It didn't matter whether it was Tory or Labour. It was a kind of a disaster. And perhaps in a similar way, was bred of of foreign circumstances and national incompetence yes and do you think that we're back in a kind of similar similar bind to that is this a return to the 70s as people say or or is it worse is it worse or is it better oh it's worse was it better uh because i suppose one of the things in the 70s is that you had North Sea oil starting to come on. You did come in.

So that's a boon. And I guess the demographics were also more positive. Britain was a younger nation then. Yes. But on the counter argument to that, Tom, I suppose would be that the real, stepping right back, the real problem for Britain in the 70s was that it was embark about to embark on a very long delayed and very painful period of economic transition which you could argue in the really long run is the transition from basically the victorian or the immediately post-victorian economy to the economy we have now and that that was going to have to come it was going to be so difficult

it was going to involve a lot of lost jobs, a lot of damage to communities and so on. And that that was the problem that lay under everything else. Failing industries, steel, coal, shipbuilding, all these kinds of things. These things that were clearly just going to go. And so when people looked at britain from outside they kind of said it's an old country and one that is desperately desperately crying out for modernization

um britain undoubtedly has issues and challenges right now as so many countries do but i don't think it's an outlier perhaps in quite the same way i think i suppose what some listeners would probably say wouldn't they is that they think brexit uh represents a different kind of existential challenge yeah maybe but i think looking at it in the the international context and i think back to the episodes on oil that we did with helen thompson yes where she talked about how essentially the moment that the global economy became centered on oil rather than on coal, this was a problem, not just for Britain, but for the whole of Europe, that essentially it is more expensive for Europeans to make things because our energy

is more expensive than it was for Russia or for the United States. And we're definitely back in that situation now. Is there a risk, not just for Britain, but for the whole of Europe, that we're going to go through a process of de-industrialization bred by the brute fact that we have less cheap energy than, say, the Americans do? Crikey, Tom, I thought I'd come here to, you know, exchange a few cheap quips about Liz Truss. Yes, I suppose in the long run that is the fear, isn't it? That there's a further period of, is it de-industrialization? I don't know, a further period of economic transition to come

in which Europe will be even more, Western Europe will be even more, be on the receiving end of globalization, as it were, than it was in the 1970s and 1980s. And that, yes, communities in Britain, which have perhaps become very dependent on foreign investment or on cheap manufacturing abroad or whatever it might be, are going to face some pretty tough winters with energy becoming more expensive and with this sort of period of change. Then are you going to

see prime ministers rising and falling more and more quickly in your third century Rome style? Yes, exactly. And perhaps not just in Britain, that crises may start to manifest themselves in other European countries as well. Well, I mean, the United States might be a good parallel here. You have, you saw... But the United States is in a good position because it's energy rich. It is.

Its energy is cheap. Ours is prohibitively expensive. But the politics of grievance and resentment has become much more marked today in America than it was in, let us say, the 1980s and 1990s. So in other words, there are large communities of people who feel left behind. And that is obviously one of the key drivers of modern politics. People who feel locked out, excluded, they feel they've been cheated of something.

I mean, this might be in a Rust Belt community in the Midwest, or it might be in a town in the so-called Red Wall in Britain, or it might be in, you know, eastern France among Le Pen voters, you know, or, you know, anywhere in Europe, effectively. And that could, there was an excellent chance that that will become a greater and greater part of the political landscape. And that is conventionally how we like to think of it,

that all the West is in it together, that what happens in America is basically reflected in Europe. But isn't there a possibility, which has seemed to me the implication of those episodes we we did with helen and that has kind of basically haunted me ever since and nothing that has happened since we recorded those episodes has persuaded me to change my view on this that america and europe may be going on radically divergent parabolas that that if you have cheap energy in the 20th century and into the 21st century, then your economy

will grow. If you don't, it will decline. And isn't the possibility that what we're going through at the moment with Putin and cutting of the Nord Stream and all that kind of stuff, that actually trust perhaps was justified in mentioning him as early as she did, that Europe stands on the cusp of a process of, of de-industrialization. I mean,

I agree. This was meant to be a cheery and jolly episode with, you know, some light quips about Roman emperors, but I. You decided to go, go in. Isn't that the joy of a podcast that you.

As soon as your peerage, as soon as the peerage went up in smoke, you just became incredibly morbid and gloomy. Well, I don't know the answer to this. I think listeners, if they listen back, will notice that's the moment when their tone changes. Yeah, I'm sure

you're right, Tom. I think you probably are right. I think it is a sort of distressing thought that actually, because Europe doesn't have all these cheap energy sources, that Europe is going to find it increasingly difficult. I mean, whether that means a complete divergence of, you know, strategically from the United States or whatever, I don't know. But you're absolutely right that I don't think if you were, you know,

if you're starting to play a strategy board game set in the year 2022, and then moving onwards, do you choose to play as Western Europe? No, you probably don't, do you? No. Well,

I, and I thought it was kind of symbolic that the parliamentary vote yesterday that I was, I wasn't actually, I was off batting for Alfred the Great in a Greatest British King debate. Yeah, how did you get on? I came second behind Elizabeth I. I was doing that for Dan Snow.

So at least one Liz ends the week triumphant. Yes. But as I gather, this was all about a vote on fracking, which has been banned for environmental reasons and Liz Truss wanted to reintroduce, wants to reintroduce. Yeah. An incredibly toxic policy with much of the Tory party, it has to be said.

Exactly. So symbolic, perhaps, of the struggle to get cheap energy that is kind of, I guess, weighing down. Anyway, I'm sorry. One other thing we haven't mentioned, Tom. No, no, no, it's fine. One other thing we haven't mentioned at all. I, no, no, it's fine. One other thing we haven't mentioned at all, I'll ask you, because otherwise it's just you interrogating me

about increasingly bleak existential questions, is whether the standard of politicians has declined, as people so often argue that it has. Do you think they've declined in our lifetime? I always feel that. So I now look back on the days of good King Boris. What wouldn't we give for his moral probity and the stability that he... Yes, but I wonder whether that isn't just the fact that, to me, the politicians of my childhood seem colossal figures. But I mean that almost literally.

I'm a small child watching them on a television. They seem physically bigger. Whereas now, politicians are now younger than me, so I'm less respectful of them. The politicians of our childhoods often had come to politics later in life. They had, I mean, in our case, a lot of them had served in the Second World War. So someone like Dennis Healy, Labour Chancellor in the 1970s. I mean, a Labour Chancellor who has to go to the International Monetary Fund to beg for a bailout. But he had been a beach master at the land allied landings and anzio

so basically organizing stuff on the beaches i mean an incredibly dangerous and complicated job but that's a different matter isn't it that you know hinterland was dennis healy's great word uh yes and always about himself great deal i mean they uh you know a kind of interesting backstory isn't necessary to be a good policy i I mean, Tony Blair didn't have a particularly interesting backstory, but I think he was a very, very effective prime minister. Everybody knows you love Tony Blair. John Major did have an interesting backstory, which he then tried to make as boring as possible.

Well, actually, John Major wrote, because John Major, his father had sold garden gnomes. That's great, isn't it? He's meant to be the model for major tom isn't he and the bowie song yeah i mean our producer dom is sending us a message the only person to run away from the circus to become an accountant uh so his father who had been a music hall performer um john major later wrote a book about the history of the music hall and which i reviewed it's good wasn't it and the preface yeah there's a wonderful scene in the preface where he says basically he went to visit

his father when he was his father was dying and he was he lived upstairs in some sort of boarding house or something very kind of sort of shabby post-war london kind of scene in brixton john major yeah and john major goes up to visit him and he said a succession of very strange, moth-eaten, decrepit people would come up and down the stairs. And these were other ancient musical performers visiting his father. So anyway, yes, that's a tangent. I think they have declined. But I also think the environment in which we expect them to perform has become degraded by social media by rolling news by all these kinds of

things which mean that they don't it's very hard for them to to be impressive actually you know they're expected to yeah you know that to live in this world of soundbites they're given so little time to write to think to read to take their time to change their minds but one of the things about about Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng was that they kind of did, didn't they? They've written a book. Their book, Britannia Unchained. Well, you said, you wrote a great essay for Unheard,

which UNHCRD, about Kwasi Kwarteng being the wrong kind of intelligent. Well, he's phenomenally clever. Yeah. There is absolutely no doubt about that i mean somebody i i said this in the article and somebody uh tweeted me and they said oh anyone could could have you know he just was lucky he was privileged that's not the case quasi-quartang had an absolutely astounding run of achievements from the clearly from the moment he entered school as a little boy until basically the moment he became an MP. He won endless medals and prizes. He won scholarships. He had a double first from Cambridge. He had a PhD. He wrote books. He was fantastically clever,

but he was also clearly lacking in intellectual humility, because somebody with any intellectual humility would not have embarked on such a ludicrously over-excessively radical package of tax changes, which was clearly going to... Everybody had sort of warned him it would explode in your face, and it did. Capax imperi nisi imperaset. The famous lines written by Tacitus about the emperor galba that everyone would have said he was perfectly suited to be emperor until he actually became emperor and you could perhaps say the same about you could say about quasi-carting you'd never said

you'd never said about this trust no quasi-carting very impressive figure this trust always seemed faintly ludicrous faintly i mean i i i'll be frank tom i will be frank about uh when the when boris fell and there was the talk of it never occurred to me that she would succeed him because i just thought she's so obviously a terrible communicator yeah you know it's so incredibly unimpressive yeah and that is so important, isn't it? I mean, she's a flat, monotone voice. Nothing she ever says is of any interest. Yeah, I think it matters enormously. And it's a funny example.

This thing about we're talking about the activists choosing their leaders. It's a funny example of something that you see again and again in politics, which is that people who are really, really invested in politics are such bad judges of politics. And I often say to people, you know, the less you know about politics, the better able you are to judge it. But the weird thing was that she was elected almost because she lacked... So Rishi Sunak, who fought the leadership campaign with her, it was his smoothness and his plausibility that party members seem not to have liked.

Yeah. His metropolitan-ness, his wealth. But it's his fluency and his smoothness. And so I suppose the implication was that because she had neither fluency nor smoothness therefore she was somehow more authentic even though she had junked all her principles after after leaving university because she'd previously been a republican liberal democrat well she'd been a remainer and then she became, yeah, anyway. Anyway, Dominic, she is gone. She is gone. Yeah, I should give up. I should let her go.

And I feel that we have lingered over the autopsy too long. Do you? Yeah, I do a bit, really. Oh, I think you can just let... Well, this is another peerage attempt, is it? No, I wouldn't want one from her. Yeah, because you'd be known when people would say lord holland and people would be muttering behind you yeah yeah i'm holding out for penny mordant to knight me on the deck of the golden hind or

something like that well she's a naval she she is a naval reservist and of course she competed in splash the with tom tailey so so she would have very much enjoyed our trafalgar podcasts and if she becomes pm let's hope that i hope she listens to them again and does her duty it gives us both appearances okay exactly on that note of uh shameless 18th century would be cronyism, thanks very much for listening. Do not forget, if you are not Restless History members, today is Trafalgar Day, and you can mark this most glorious day in British history, Battle of Trafalgar, and wash the taste of the horrors of contemporary British politics out of your mouth by listening to our episode on the actual Battle of Trafalgar by joining up to the Restless History Club.

If not, you'll have to wait till Monday. Yeah, and it's worth saying, Tom, earlier in the podcast, we may have suggested that giving power to activists and members was a bad idea. No, we're all in favour of Restless History Club. We're all for it. No, we're all in favour of the Rest is History Club. We're all for it. Yeah, we're all for it. All for it. All right.

We'll see you probably next week for the next resignation. Yes. See you then. Bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening,

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