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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/PM.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And as this is the last pod we are doing before Christmas, we're allowed by ancient Hansard Society tradition to bring in games. In this particular instance, we're bringing in Cluedo and we're looking at who killed the careers of the succession of Prime Ministers who've occupied Downing Street since the Brexit referendum. Was it the electorate in the library with unrealistic expectations of what could be delivered? Was it their parliamentary parties in the living room with unrealistic expectations of being re-elected? Was it a lack of economic growth that did for them? Was it perhaps the baleful [00:01:00] effects of social media?

Well, joining Ruth and me to consider all those fascinating questions is Robert Saunders of Queen Mary University of London.

Robert, first of all, there's been quite a procession, David Cameron in 2016, Theresa May a few years later, Boris Johnson after winning quite a decent majority in an election, closely followed by Liz Truss, then Rishi Sunak, and now the wolves are circling Sir Keir Starmer. Is this about more than the individual failings of all these rather different Prime Ministers?

Robert Saunders: I was worried you were gonna hit me over the head with the lead piping. I think being Prime Minister has always been a really difficult job, and I think it's really important to say that at the start. That you could pick almost any Prime Minister and you'll find them dancing on the edge of a volcano.

You know, Ted Heath is dealing with the OPEC crisis. He's dealing with the three day weekend industry, a minor strike that brings down his government. Margaret Thatcher is nearly blown up by the IRA. [00:02:00] She has two recessions, two wars, and a major strike. Even Prime Ministers that we might think of as being rather blessed by fate, like Tony Blair, go through the war on terror.

So it is a really hard job. It's a psychologically destructive job. It's quite hard to keep your sanity, I think, as Prime Minister, and it's genuinely difficult to hold together these very broad portmanteau parties that we've traditionally had in the UK.

So not everything that we're talking about at the moment is new, but I think it's probably also the case there are three things going on at the moment.

First of all, we've had two massive political shocks in that we've had Brexit and COVID, which is a little bit like a bomb going off and a volcano erupting, and there were lots of historical precedents for thinking that when that kind of shock hits, actually parties are destabilised for quite significant periods of time, and I think that's what's happening at the moment.

Secondly, we've also got all sorts of new media and new technology, and that changes the skillset of a Prime Minister. And it does take time for political leaders to work out how [00:03:00] to do that.

And then thirdly, I do think there is something wrong with the pipeline for leadership. Not necessarily in terms of the individuals that it's bringing to power, but in terms of the political training that it's giving them. There is a bit of a sense that we're putting astonishingly inexperienced crew in a leaking boat and sending them out into a storm.

So I think those would be my offerings for the kind of three weapons that are producing our Cluedo murders.

Mark D'Arcy: You, you mentioned Margaret Thatcher there. It seems to me she was pretty much the last Prime Minister whose demise was down to the formal party leadership challenge process.

If you remember, there were all those ballots of Conservative MPs and she failed to get a majority. She went out and out, she fought on, she fought to win, and the next day she announced that she was standing down. And no Prime Minister since then has had that formal internal challenge. What's tended to happen is there's been an erosion of confidence and they lose the ability to lead.

Robert Saunders: Yeah, so we've just gone through the what, the 35th anniversary of her [00:04:00] fall. And I think what's interesting when you look back is just how quick it is. I think it is exactly 14 days between Michael Hesseltine challenging her for the leadership and John Major moving into Number 10. And that's partly because at that period of time, you could change leader very quickly because it's something that happens simply within the House of Commons. You can move at speed and it was a boast of the British constitution for a long time that you could change the pilot very fast. What all the major parties have done since then is to change their leadership roles in a way that bring in the wider party membership. And in some respects, counterintuitive though it may sound, that has actually made it harder to change leader because it means Members of Parliament, if you like, they can pull the trap door, but they can't know what's gonna come through it. They don't get to decide who replaces a leader. You have to at least be ready for a contest in the country.

Which means you're gonna paralyse the Government potentially for several months, and you may not get the leader that the assassins actually want. So, parties try [00:05:00] very hard to circumvent their own leadership rules, not to go through the formal processes, but you know, either through informal votes of confidence or through letters to the Prime Minister to pressure a Prime Minister to leave and then do this in a slightly different way.

Mark D'Arcy: And if you do that, sometimes though, you are weakened straight out of the gate. Rishi Sunak, for example, managed to engineer a situation where he wasn't challenged, for example, by Penny Mordaunt in the election that followed the demise of Liz Truss's short-lived premiership. And the feeling was afterwards that there was a, a tinge of illegitimacy about him because there hadn't been a contest won by the best man or woman.

Robert Saunders: I have to say, I've always found that argument rather curious. I do understand it, but it does seem to me that if what we're thinking about here is where does the democratic mandate for a new Prime Minister come from, it is more obviously legitimate if that mandate comes from people who have been democratically elected by the public at a general election, in other words, Members of Parliament, then 150,000 or so anonymous party members in the country. [00:06:00] It's not clear to me why if the Labour Party held a contest now, the country would accept as legitimate a result that came from people they didn't know and they couldn't hold to account.

Ruth Fox: This is the problem, I suppose, with where we are with the state of political parties as well though, isn't it? Because as, as a party member electing the leader is one of the few things you really get to do. Because I mean, party conferences have been largely eviscerated as policy developing assemblies, meetings, in the way that they used to be, at least certainly in the Labour Party. And as volunteers in the local party, you're effectively a get out the vote machine. You go out on this sort of endless cycle of almost annual elections each May, to go out and and knock on doors, to stuff leaflets through letter boxes. But actually in terms of influencing the direction, that ability to elect the leader is really key. And I think once you've given that power to the membership, it's incredibly difficult to get it back into the parliamentary parties alone.

Robert Saunders: It is. It's very difficult. I think the problem here is that we've taken a core [00:07:00] democratic function, which is deciding who is going to hold the highest office in the Government, and we've turned that potentially into a subscriber benefit for the political parties.

And you're absolutely right, there's a reason why political party members want that because almost everything else that they can usefully do has been vacuumed out. There used to be quite a rich social life around being a party member. There were all sorts of ways in which you might have more control over choosing your own MP. There's much less of that kind of thing now. There was much more political education. There was much more political discussion and debate. And that's fallen away partly for just social reasons around a decline of voluntary society generally, but so parties in order to try to keep their members have been handing them things that they probably shouldn't be doing to make up for the things that they probably should.

Ruth Fox: It's kind of ironic, isn't it, that as a party member in certain constituencies across the country, you might actually have more influence and voice in electing the leadership of the party then you might actually in electing your local MP because that was imposed on you. It's bizarre.

Robert Saunders: Yeah, it's extraordinary.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, I, I'm trying to remember which [00:08:00] American President joked

that in the next life they wanted to come back as a focus group member in Detroit because that was how you had real influence on party policy.

Ruth Fox: I wanted to come back, Robert, on this idea, one of the three reasons you articulated is the two crises, sort of Brexit and the pandemic.

I'd actually add a third, because I think the financial crisis in 2008-09 is where a lot of problems stem from as well. And yes, I mean, Gordon Brown obviously strode the international stage fixing the global economy, resolving the problems, but that crisis had as big an effect on the state of the country in the economy going forward as either Brexit or, or the pandemic have had.

And it eviscerated our economic model, and none of the political parties, it seems to me, have come up with an alternative economic plan for the future. And certainly in terms of the state, the future of representative democracy without economic growth, there are concerns about the way the [00:09:00] political parties campaign elections and sort of divvying up sweeties to hand out to the electorate. How you do that, this idea of an offer that the parties make to the electorate at general elections, how you do that when you really haven't got much that you can divvy up is incredibly difficult. The consequences of the financial crisis, I think are really underplayed.

Robert Saunders: I think that's right, and I think the current political generation are probably particularly poorly fitted to respond to that problem because they largely came to political maturity in the 1990s.

So there's always a tendency to think that the period in which you yourself emerged from the chrysalis is normal. And yet in all sorts of ways, the nineties is a deeply abnormal period of political history, because you have this historically unusual period of unbroken continuous economic growth globally.

You've also got the dividend from the end of the Cold War, which means that defence spending is falling significantly. So actually, a whole item of the government ledger is dropping away, and that's freeing up all sorts of resources [00:10:00] that you can use for other things. It's also a period of relative geopolitical stability, even into the two thousands, even with the War on Terror. This isn't the Cold War, this isn't the world of the 1930s. Britain can play a kind of Atlantic Bridge role in this time. And all of that really has fallen away.

We are not living through a period of global growth. Living in a period in which an American president is sort of rather driving the chainsaw through the world's economy. The Atlantic Bridge is starting to look more like a kind of abandoned oil rig in that, you know, the end that used to connect to the EU has fallen into the sea because of Brexit, and the end that used to connect to the United States is on fire. So a whole geopolitical strategy has broken down.

When I listen to politicians of different parties at the moment speak they all, to some extent, sound like they want to create the world of the 1990s. You want to go back to world of stability.

Mark D'Arcy: It doesn't sound like such a bad place?

Robert Saunders: No, absolutely. But the problem is you have to govern for the times that you live in, not the times that [00:11:00] you grew up in.

Mark D'Arcy: Just to pick up that point about the generation of politicians, I suppose it's always true that all generals are fighting the previous war rather than the next one. And it takes quite a wrench of imagination to look at how the circumstances have changed. But, more widely ,there's this point about is the party conveyor belt in the Conservative Party, in the Labour Party, potentially now in other parties, actually delivering the kind of person who can stride into Number 10, grab Whitehall by the scruff of the neck, seize the moment, and do something effectively. Because my impression is that a succession of our last Prime Ministers have just looked utterly ineffectual and unable to do anything. They often complain about, they pull the lever and nothing happens.

Robert Saunders: Yeah, I think this is a monumental problem, but I don't actually particularly think it's about the calibre of the people who are coming through. I'm not sure that, Sir Alec Douglas Home, for example, was transcendently more talented than somebody like Rishi Sunak.

I think the big problem is the political training that we give them. So if we take somebody like Rishi Sunak, clearly a very intelligent, [00:12:00] hardworking, dedicated person. His entire political career lasted for nine years. He went from brand new back bencher to former Prime Minister in nine years. I know he's still there, but essentially we have that extraordinary period.

Compare that to Margaret Thatcher. By the same stage of her career, I think she was the Shadow Minister for Fuel and Transport. So we've extraordinarily accelerated the conveyor belt that leads to Number 10. In Rishi Sunak's case, you put somebody in Number 10 who has almost zero experience of party management, who has very little experience of policy outside the Treasury, who's never had to front an election campaign. And then we are surprised that they're not good at these things. Or somebody like Keir Starmer, who's had all sorts of distinguished careers outside of politics. It's often said he's not very good at politics. Well, why would he be? He's only been in politics for five minutes.

And I think that is a big problem. We have to think about where are our Prime Ministers going to pick up the skills that they need to govern. [00:13:00] We seem to be assuming at the moment that they'll just have something. That some kind of natural talent will shine through.

Ruth Fox: This is then counterintuitive, isn't it? Because a lot of the debate around this is that, oh if only we brought in, I don't know, business people who'd come into Parliament or into the Cabinet and take everything by the scuff of the neck, things would all be better, be decisive. But actually what we're talking about is that we actually do need career politicians.

This idea that being in politics and making a career out of it over a long period of time is a wrong thing or a bad thing, is actually the wrong way to look at this. That actually, I've always said politics is not a career and it's not a job, it's a vocation. And actually there is a particular skill set for really good politicians that you need to develop, as you're saying. There seems to be a sort of a debate out there that pretends that that's not what matters. That actually you want people coming in from outside. And of course, Keir Starmer has come in from outside, and as has been seen the skills he's got are not actually that well suited for the role.

Robert Saunders: Absolutely. If what you want are people coming [00:14:00] into politics after distinguished careers outside, then actually both the last two Prime Ministers represent that. Rishi Sunak was clearly a very successful investment banker. Keir Starmer had an extraordinarily distinguished career in actually a number of different areas of the law and of public life. It's not going brilliantly in terms of governing, and I think we do actually have to recognise that.

Politics, of course, mustn't become a closed bubble. It's got to find ways of listening to what's happening outside, of receiving different experiences. It's got to be on receive as well as transmit. But actually you do have to learn the skills of the politician, and I think that's particularly important when we're thinking about Prime Ministers because it's such a peculiar job.

I mean, it's not really a job at all. It's a kind of multiple personality crisis in which you are leading a Government, you are also leading a political party. You are fronting your party in an election. You're supposed to be driving its policy. You are its chief communicator. There will occasionally be people who come into politics who just have those skills naturally, but they're going to be very rare, and [00:15:00] it's quite unusual in British politics to keep putting people in the top job who haven't had that kind of training.

Mark D'Arcy: And picking up that point about people coming very rapidly into politics and perhaps leaving it quite rapidly as well, one of the reasons maybe that they depart so rapidly is that they're in a very unforgiving environment these days. The public seems in no mood to have its politicians not deliver or be explaining why they can't deliver what they promised quite yet.

Another example of the kind of politician you were talking about, I think is Nick Clegg, who went from zero to Deputy Prime Minister in five years flat, and about 30 femtoseconds after the signing of the coalition agreement suffered a complete and catastrophic loss of public confidence.

And I wonder if Keir Starmer is kind of now in the Clegg zone where he's been written off, he won't be forgiven, no one's listening anymore. Because that's what that public environment of expectation and disappointment, that cycle, generates.

Robert Saunders: Yes. [00:16:00] I think we spend a lot of time asking what is wrong with our politicians? And that's a perfectly legitimate question and I spend a lot of time criticising our politicians. But the nature of democracy is that to some extent, the bill comes back to us as the demos. And we do also have to ask actually, what are our responsibilities here? What are we getting wrong? And I think we have created an environment in which this is exceptionally difficult to be a politician psychologically, especially if you've got young children or families that you would like to protect from this. The degree of excoriation and contempt is such that it's hard to imagine why you would want to go into it in the first place. We were talking just now about Rishi Sunak. I do salute Rishi Sunak actually, for staying in the House of Commons. That's become very unusual. You could absolutely understand why he might want to get on a plane, go to the United States and have a very nice life there without all of the bother that comes of being a politician here. We're asking a lot of politicians to endure that.

Mark D'Arcy: But also this point about expectation, and certainly the politicians stoke the expectations, that vote for [00:17:00] us this Thursday and we'll have solved all your problems by the following Tuesday kind of vibe, that most political parties exude during a general election campaign, is part of the problem here. But it's also, why don't the voters see through that? Why do they buy the snake oil time after time?

Robert Saunders: Yes. There's a terrible kind of dance of death going on between unrealistic expectations from the public and politicians that are very reluctant to push back against those or to talk honestly to the public. Why wouldn't you have unrealistic expectations if political leaders keep promising you things that are actually not deliverable.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, I suppose you see them not being delivered after a few elections?

Robert Saunders: Yes. The danger is though, that what that does is not to act as a kind of corrective mechanism on politics, but simply to vacuum out trust in politics.

And I think that's probably where we are right now.

Ruth Fox: It struck me earlier this week listening to Keir Starmer at the Liaison Committee, I don't know whether either of you had a chance to see it, but he talked about his frustration as Prime Minister that he reaches for these policy levers on delivery and discovers that at the end of the [00:18:00] lever, are a whole load of regulations and consultations and so on, and was expressing his frustration.

It suddenly sort of struck me that if you're a voter listening to this you might think, well, look, you've been in Parliament for a few years now, perhaps not as long as some of the old timers. But you know how the legislative and legal process works, you're a lawyer, you must know what the legal process around these issues is. Why had it not struck you before you got into Downing Street? And now you are there why don't you do something about it? It seems to me that a Prime Minister sitting there complaining about the process, that he has a majority that he could change. That to me is not going go down well with the electorate. It may be true, it may be how he feels, but from the electorate's perspective, it's not really a terribly helpful discussion.

Mark D'Arcy: Rule one of politics: don't admit impotence.

Robert Saunders: I do think something that's a little bit troubling about Starmer's rhetoric is that he's quite happy to speak a kind of anti-establishment rhetoric. He's quite happy to attack Westminster. He clearly doesn't like the culture of the House of [00:19:00] Commons.

Ruth Fox: Oh, now you're gonna get me on another...

Robert Saunders: right, he attacks Whitehall quite regularly. The problem is that he is that now. And to some extent, to voters, he embodies that. And there is a danger that we had this kind of recurring thing over the last decade in particular, by which politicians are constantly telling the public how awful politicians are and how ineffective government is, and how hopeless politics is. It's not totally surprising if the electorate draw certain conclusions from that, that are not actually favorable to those people.

Ruth Fox: And the conclusion is then, if it's not working with you lot, then we'll go for the more radical option because frankly, what's the risk? But going to your point about Keir Starmer and he clearly doesn't like Westminster.

I I've always had my issues with him when he was asked a question, I think it was one of these Guardian quizzes, choose between X or Y, which would you prefer?

Mark D'Arcy: And he was asked Blur or Oasis?

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And he was asked, you know, Westminster or Davos? And he chose Davos. And I, I just found that absolutely mind blowing. That even if he thought it for a Labour leader to admit it, Davos, the heart [00:20:00] of capitalist elitism versus Westminster where you, you know, that is your place of work.

Mark D'Arcy: I'm more comfortable in a globalist jamboree.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And, and if you, if you are Starmer and you know, he's got a huge majority, if you don't like Westminster, if you don't think it's working, lots of people including us at the HansardSociety would agree with you, then come up with a plan to change it. It's not as if there aren't ideas out there.

Robert Saunders: And to some extent you also have to talk about the successes. The danger is that we only talk about the failures. It's interesting that Labour has just passed its workers' rights bill. You look in vain really for any story about that or any sense that this has happened.

If you wanted to tell a positive story about the current Labour government you could do so, but it's striking how rarely the current Labour government actually does. I do think there is a danger in the way that we talk about "broken Britain". We've normalised the language of saying that our entire system is broken, that our politics is broken. And actually if that's what we believe, then the logical response to that is something like a Farage or a Trump. If our politics is broken, then knock it [00:21:00] down and create something else. If you actually believe in our current political institutions, you have to some extent to preach the faith. You have to actually say what it has done.

Mark D'Arcy: Let me take as my text here, the tweets of "St. Dominic of Cummings", Boris Johnson's former advisor, famously acerbic, and his constant and fairly brutal denunciation of a Whitehall and Westminster run by sort of PPE educated Oxford smoothie chops, who are totally out of touch as he sees it with the real world, and not at all competent and can't deliver, for example, a new armored vehicle for the army or keep an eye on the effectiveness of our nuclear weapons systems, much less run an economy or deliver proper governance during a pandemic.

Robert Saunders: Yes, I mean, there's not much evidence that Dominic Cummings was any good at those things either. And I think there is something rather curious about somebody whose career in government was not crowned with success, so constantly hammering away at other people. I think there [00:22:00] might be a degree of, of looking in the mirror, that would be useful here.

Mark D'Arcy: But if you want someone who's been an insider to reinforce this view that the whole system basically needs to be demolished and rebuilt from the foundations upwards then you don't need to look much further than Dominic Cummings for that point of view. And he, he produces vast footnoted screeds on his blog on a regular basis, explaining those points.

Robert Saunders: But I think there also has to be a willingness to accept that government is hard, and to some extent, you're constantly battling entropy. If we were having this conversation, what, 40 odd years ago? Say 1981. So roughly the same point in Margaret Thatcher's government that Keir Starmer currently is in his, you could make a pretty strong case for "broken Britain".

You'll be talking at that point about a deep industrial depression that had wiped out roughly 25% of Britain's manufacturing capacity in two and a half years. You'll be talking about inflation and interest rates that have recently been at 17, 18%, 3 million people unemployed and climbing, [00:23:00] riots in large numbers of major cities that are much bigger and much more serious than anything that happened last Summer.

We could go back to the 1970s and talk as I did earlier about the extraordinary challenges of that decade, where again you've got inflation at 25%, serious concern about the collapse of trading arrangements with the Commonwealth. You have a sugar shortage in the shops at various points.

Mark D'Arcy: I remember it well.

Robert Saunders: Right. You know, we, we mustn't pretend to ourselves that the normal state of affairs is the nineties. That actually governing is always about confronting really challenging conditions, and it's not about perfection. One thing that's actually gone missing from public life, I think oddly, given that we've just had 14 years of Conservative government, is a kind of set of ideas associated with conservatism. One of them is the idea that we live in an imperfect world. And we seem to be constantly measuring, and governments do this themselves, they promise things that they can't deliver. So you need to be a little bit more willing to say, governing is difficult, but here are the significant and substantial changes that we [00:24:00] have made to workers' rights or to renter's rights, or on green investments. Or over a longer period talking about things like the transformation in gay rights in British politics. There are successes that you can put alongside the doom stories, but we only tell that second half. It's, it's as if we want to be the kind of hero of our own disaster movie all of the time, rather than actually thinking about what is going well and what isn't.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, I must sort of collectively accept some of the blame as a, at least former member of His Majesty's press, but...

Ruth Fox: Well, I was going to come onto that because I do think that is a, is an important part of the jigsaw, isn't it? That actually the coverage of politics has also changed over the years and, and obviously social media and presumably AI in the future is going to change it still further. But it does seem to me that the serious coverage of politics at a policy level has almost disappeared. Coverage of politics these days is almost all the horse race.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, this is one of my regular rants, I'm afraid, that I do feel that you could now cover politics in exactly the [00:25:00] same way as you could cover the Premiership. You are looking at rising stars, beleagured managers, out of form strikers, whatever, rather than looking at, oh, what's happened incrementally about building more housing. If that comes up at all, it's merely as another badge of failure rather than an analysis of why, most of the time. We don't look at politics on a functional policy level. We are purely interested in most of the time, in terms of press coverage, in the soap opera. Who's up? Who's down? Will it be Andy Burnham? Will it be Angela Rayner? Who challenges Sir Keir? How's it going to happen? Who's going to wield the dagger?

Ruth Fox: But who's the "who" there that's interested. That's presumably what the lobby are interested in and are conveying. But I'm not sure that's necessarily what the public want. I would confess as a person who wants to listen to serious political programs, I hardly ever these days watch Newsnight or listen to the Today Program because I want to tear my hair out.

Robert Saunders: Yeah. Even the language of punditry is borrowed from sports. We saw it with the budget coverage recently, that the budget coverage as far [00:26:00] as I could see, was almost all about, you know, what was this going to mean for the polls? Would it save Keir Starmer? What was the kind of choreography of it. Were things leaked that shouldn't have been? It was actually quite difficult to find out what the budget actually did.

There's a sense that a lot of reporting has become entirely detached from policy. It's also, I think, become kind of instinctively oppositional. In that, take a scenario, say that the Labour Party announces that it's not going to carry through reforms to planning. Then the headline on the BBC will almost certainly be something like, "the government has been criticised this evening for slowing its commitments and giving into special interest groups. We are joined by a representative of the British Housing Association that's going to talk about how difficult it will now be to build houses." If the government goes ahead with its planning reforms, the headline would be, "environmental groups have warned today that there is a serious danger of environmental degradation as the government dismantles barriers to house building. We are now joined by somebody from Friends of the Earth." You know, the BBC is...

Mark D'Arcy: Have you ever worked for the Today programme?[00:27:00]

Robert Saunders: You know, and I don't think that's a kind of partisan bias, but there is a sort of structural bias towards bad news and criticism.

Mark D'Arcy: You could turn it around the other way. I think sometimes it's an aversion to being seen to be a cheerleader.

Robert Saunders: Yes. And that's fair enough. You don't want news that is simply saying, you know, "today the government announced that...", but there is a way of interrogating what government is doing, which actually focuses on what government is doing rather than what it is saying or what other people are saying about it.

Ruth Fox: So my question to you then is, would a reform that might actually make a difference is abolish the lobby? Force change on the news outlets.

Mark D'Arcy: I think you get the same people saying the same things without the same level of access, and the same sense of privilege, and they'd just be annoyed about that.

Robert Saunders: Yes, that will...

Mark D'Arcy: Call me cynical!

Robert Saunders: So you know the media world much better than I do, but that, that's sort of what I would assume.

But I also think there have always been problems with the media of different kinds. Labour governments across the 20th century will complain quite legitimately about the way that they are represented in large parts of the media.

Mark D'Arcy: Trace it [00:28:00] back to Stanley Baldwin, you know, what was it? Um, power without responsibility. The prerogative of the harlot through the ages, he said of his press.

Robert Saunders: Absolutely. I think Stanley Baldwin's a really interesting example there in that Stanley Baldwin is somebody who's not naturally charismatic, not naturally a great orator, and who rises to political leadership just at the moment when media technologies are really changing. When things like first radio broadcasting is coming in, and then cine film and television. And he learns how to do that and he works really hard to learn the skills of the new media. I think if he were in Number 10 today, he would be building a podcast studio inside Number 10. He'll be working out how to do this.

Mark D'Arcy: And doing, as Keir Starmer has done, launching a TikTok account.

Robert Saunders: Absolutely. But I think he would work hard on that and he would learn how to do it well.

And it is the nature of these new technologies. They do render some skills redundant, and they require politicians to learn new ones. At the same time that Stanley Baldwin is learning how to do television and radio, Ramsay MacDonald is discovering that [00:29:00] the skill of being a great platform orator, which he was, is becoming redundant. That when he goes on the radio and bellows in front of a crowd, you know, his first BBC broadcast... Yes, he looks ridiculous because he's got his thumbs in his button holes and he's waggling his elbows up and down, but he also sounds ridiculous. So his first party political broadcast is actually a live rally. The idea is the country will hear this man inspiring a room. The problem is he keeps walking away from the microphone, so there are periods when no one can actually hear what he's saying. Then he walks back to it, by which time the sound engineers have turned the volume up to maximum, at which point people's radios explode. So suddenly the skills that he has are redundant and you have to learn new ones.

And I think there's a limit to the extent to which politicians can complain about the media. We can complain about the media and we as a kind of people can try and exert some sort of influence, but politicians actually just have to think, okay, how do we use these things better?

I know, I see Keir Starmer has launched a Substack. It will be interesting to see how that [00:30:00] goes. Who will be the first Labour or Conservative politician who actually is really good at TikTok? Not just to build a personal fan base, but actually to project a political message.

Mark D'Arcy: And the point is that this does work a bit.

I mean Zack Polanski as Leader of the Greens could not have expected a great conventional media profile and vast amounts of attention. You know, he gets elected, there'll be a couple of profiles here and there of him, for example, in some of the broadsheet newspapers. But he went on to social media, he launched a podcast and bada bim the Greens are doing unprecedentedly, fabulously well. In kind of conventional media terms an immaculate conception. They've had very little to do with it until they noticed the attention he was getting without them.

Robert Saunders: I think another interesting example would be Zohran Mamdani in New York. That if you watch his videos, he's a very slick communicator. He's a very good media operator. But actually what he says is often quite complex.

And there is actually a skill at being able to say quite complicated things [00:31:00] in a clear and communicable format. You can do that. It's important to say, I think as well, that long form media isn't dead. President Trump will go on a podcast and talk for free hours.

We might not like what he's saying necessarily, but there is an audience actually for podcasts, for Substacks, for long reads.

Ruth Fox: Thank the Lord.

Robert Saunders: Indeed. Yes. Here we are. And it's, it's surprising to me how unadept the current political generation in the mainstream parties has been at exploiting that.

Mark D'Arcy: I suppose one way of looking at it is to hark back to the 2017 election when essentially Jeremy Corbyn was carpet bombed by almost the entire mainstream press. But somehow managed to do pretty well through a combination of rallies, social media presence and came fairly close to defeating Theresa May in that election, certainly removed her majority. Maybe that's the moment that the traditional media became, if not quite irrelevant then an awful lot less central to modern [00:32:00] campaigning.

Robert Saunders: And some of what Jeremy Corbyn was doing was about using traditional campaigning methods and connecting them to new media. So there was a lot of derision at the start of that campaign about the idea that he was going to go around the country holding rallies. Oh, how very 1950s, was the general response.

And yet what he discovered was, firstly, that did bring in enthusiastic crowds, who would help with things like canvassing and campaigning, but it also produced great footage for local TV stations. He wasn't a natural at Prime Minister's Questions, but there was a clear strategy through that period.

Mark D'Arcy: His sort of "Dave from Dagenham wants to know about this" kind of question was sneered at a lot by the lobby, but it actually worked. I remember you telling me, Ruth, that the, Hansard Society's regular Audit of Political Engagement, suddenly the level of relevance that seemed to be attached to Prime Minister's Question time went up.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I mean, we actually argued in one of our reports on PMQs that actually a way to kind of adapt it and to get, engage more interest, would be to elicit questions occasionally, perhaps not for every question at every PMQs, but to elicit questions from the [00:33:00] public. I was then accused by the Evening Standard of wanting to reduce PMQs to Gardeners Question Time.

Robert Saunders: They might kill for that kind of audience.

Ruth Fox: Let's take a quick break.

Mark D'Arcy: And we're back. When we talk about the kind of leaders our system throws up, there is of course now a new route to executive power. One that's already been taken by a Prime Minister, and that is the big city mayoralties that have been created in recent years where an individual is elected with quite a big personal mandate, and can then go out and govern as they choose to a great degree. So we've seen it with Boris Johnson when he was Mayor of London. Who knows Andy Burnham as Mayor of Manchester may be setting the foundations for his premiership, should it come to that. Does that change things? Does that create a breeding ground for the kind of politician who will perhaps dominate in the coming years?

Robert Saunders: I think it probably does. It's a chance to build up a profile. We've [00:34:00] seen that absolutely with Andy Burnham. It's a chance to build some executive experience. It's also a chance actually to be a little bit free of the constraints of the party system at Westminster. You can speak much more freely. You can position yourself against the national leadership of your party, in a way that's quite useful.

I think the problem is it gives you certain kinds of political experience but not others. It doesn't give you experience of party management or probably coalition building. It doesn't give you experience in foreign policy or macroeconomic policy. There are large areas of political life in which it's not actually going to prepare you for government. Which is why when this used to happen in the 19th century, you would get figures like Joe Chamberlain who built up that kind of profile as Mayor of Birmingham, but you then come into Westminster and pursue a ministerial career upwards to Number 10.

That's unlikely to happen now, but yeah, I think it almost certainly is going to become a route to leadership. Whether it solves all of the problems that we've been talking about, I think is probably more doubtful.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Because an interesting thing about Andy Burnham, of course, having been at Westminster, [00:35:00] he really disliked it. It was one of the reasons he left. He goes into a job that is, you know, he, he has the ability with executive power and the mayoralty to pull levers and make things happen on a smaller scale. When he reflects on life at Westminster, for example, you know the point about party management, he, for example, hates whipping.

One of the things he has said publicly, he'd abolish whipping at Westminster. Now Andy, I'd be interested to know whether that's still your position, if you do indeed come back to Westminster and, and try to get back into government because then you experience a whole new set of problems.

Robert Saunders: It's a completely different level of scrutiny as well. It's striking that whenever the story about Andy Burnham's leadership ambitions reemerges, he does make some kind of gaffe. He says something that then damages his chances, and it does serve as a reminder that there probably are reasons why he's lost two leadership elections in the past. And I don't mean that pejoratively about him, I just mean that the skills that might make him a success as a city mayor are not necessarily the [00:36:00] same as those that will make him a success at national political level

Ruth Fox: As Boris found.

Robert Saunders: Indeed.

Ruth Fox: It strikes me that one of the problems that the conventional mainstream politicians have got is time. Because there's so much coming at them, so quickly, that they need time to be able to develop your skills, do the training In Baldwin's time, in MacMillan's time, in Eden's time, there were a lot of pressures. Perhaps not the immediacy of pressures in living in this 24-7 media age.

Mark D'Arcy: And time for preparation apart from anything else. You do get this horrible sense that the current government came into office without all that many really well-developed plans. There's no sense of people coming into different government departments and slapping draft bills down on the table and setting the civil servants to work on them or anything like that?

Robert Saunders: Yes. I think the lack of time to think and to work out what you believe is a really scarce commodity. And that's particularly important of course, if politicians haven't had that time over many decades beforehand. It's one thing if you're coming into Number 10, after [00:37:00] a 30 year political career in which to some extent you have established your political compass, it's another thing to do it when you are a rising star and suddenly you're plunged into the maelstrom.

We've been talking about the media, and I think that clearly plays into this. Not that long ago there were certain kind of feeding stations in the media day. You had the Nine O'clock News, you had the Today programme, you had the print deadlines for the newspapers. You had a sense of the points in the day in which the media punctuated politics. Whereas now the media saturates politics. You operate in a constant state of flood and it's very difficult not simply to be washed away from that. And I think that is an argument for just having longer political careers again, but also politicians are going to have to establish ways in which they can stand outside some of that flood.

Whether that's ring fencing certain points in the diary, whether it's away days or something that just gets you away from the social media assault for a period of time. And I was struck recently by [00:38:00] something that Keir Starmer said in an interview and something I think in lots of ways is quite admirable about him. Which is that he clearly wants to protect family time. He wants to make sure that he actually has time with his wife and his children, and that that is non-political time and that he leaves politics at the door as he goes into the flat.. That's great. On the human level, that's really admirable. But there needs to be some way of marking out time as well, in which you don't leave politics at the door. You leave social media at the door, you leave the immediate crisis at the door, but you are actually thinking about politics.

That's the kind of world that somebody like Roy Jenkins lived in, where he would lunch regularly with interesting people. So you are talking about ideas and you are thinking, but you are not on the record. You are not making policy. You are not at yet another reception.

Mark D'Arcy: "Strength through Woy" as we used to say in the SDP, a thousand years ago. Short though of politicians being able to go off to some kind of zen monastery in the Himalayas, it's actually incredibly difficult to achieve that.

Robert Saunders: It is very difficult to achieve, and I think that's where it really does matter, that you are not just learning on the job in Number 10.[00:39:00]

I was at an event last week, that was various people who had worked with Margaret Thatcher were reflecting on their experience of working with her. One of the things they said was that whether they agreed with her disagreed with her, she was quite an easy Prime Minister to work with in the sense that you didn't have to keep phoning Number 10 to ask what the line to take was. You knew what the line to take was. You actually knew at any rate the broad direction of the government. You knew the kind of criteria against which a decision would be made. I suspect that not that many ministers today or indeed shadow ministers have that same sense that they know what compass they are steering by.

Mark D'Arcy: Okay. If there's something wrong with our current politicians, what's the skill set you need now? What sort of person should the parties be looking at to put on the conveyor belt potentially to 10 Downing Street.

Robert Saunders: Well, like I said before, it's, it is a multiple personality crisis and you're probably never going to get a politician who's good at everything.

I think something that the current leadership is demonstrating very painfully, is the importance of [00:40:00] communication. That whether you like modern media or not, and I suspect that Keir Starmer doesn't much like modern media, you actually have to learn how to do it. You have to find ways, not necessarily to respond to every story, but to set a narrative direction for the government. To tell a story about what you think's gone wrong, what you're going to do to fix it, and where you might be in five to 10 years time. And that I don't detect particularly in politics at the moment. I think it would be quite difficult to say, what does Keir Starmer want Britain to look like in 15 years time? And if you have that sort of sense of the future, obviously people care about their lives today, but they also need a sense that even if things aren't great right now, they can see the direction that they're moving in. They can see where they're traveling towards. They can see the set of ethical principles for which they might actually be asked to make some kind of sacrifice right now.

Mark D'Arcy: They can see the shining city on a hill that they're supposedly moving towards.

Robert Saunders: Or even they can see the hill, and they can see that there's a road up it.[00:41:00]

And I think actually, you know, if we were looking for positive examples from recent politics, something that's come out of the COVID inquiry, I think is that government, civil servants and experts consistently underestimated the public. They consistently underestimated what the public was actually willing to do.

And it turns out, that if you are honest with the public about how bad things are, the public will do extraordinary things. If you can persuade people, and of course it's a very unusual scenario, but if you could persuade people to stay indoors, not to go to work, to wear a mask, not to go to see sick relatives in hospital, you can probably have a shot at persuading them to put a penny on income tax or to have higher defence spending.

That attempt isn't being made. It seems to me that oddly, politicians have a very low opinion of the electorates. But people deal with complexity in their lives all the time.

Mark D'Arcy: You've got to say though, if politicians have a low opinion of the electorate, that may be because they've met them.

Robert Saunders: Well, it might be. But I'm a Gladstonian, and of course politics has changed a lot [00:42:00] since then. But one of the extraordinary things about Gladstone that makes him a radically new kind of politician in the 19th century, is that every time there's a crisis in the Middle East or a great moral question in government, he heads out into a field and talks to 20,000 agricultural laborers. And he's talking to people who are semi-literate, who probably can't read a newspaper, who have none of the access to information that we have. We have today the best educated electorate we have ever had that has access to information of a kind that earlier generations couldn't dream of. And we seem to trust the electorate less than Gladstone did, and I do find that curious.

Ruth Fox: I've always taken the view that - we talked about this during the last general election campaign - this idea of carrying the economic questions in a general election campaign like the Ming vase to get to the other side without breaking it. That's a sort of a holdover of the, sort of the Blairite approach to campaigning. And they were running the election campaign as if it was then, rather than now. The public knew, knows the country is in a mess. The public knows the [00:43:00] economic model is broken. The public is incredibly frustrated at the state of public services and they know it won't happen and change overnight. And I think there was an opportunity there, whatever you might think, Mark, about the electorate.

Mark D'Arcy: I was being Boswellian, to draw people out.

Ruth Fox: I think a political leader that was prepared to speak the truth with considerable candor and lay it out for them, that the electorate would have listened and would've been prepared to respond. And that you could have put up taxes a little bit, for example.

Robert Saunders: I think a curious change in politics as well, is that for most of the 20th century the major parties regarded themselves, of course, as governing organisations, but they also regarded themselves as educative organisations. The Conservative Party in the 20th century put enormous resources into political education in terms of writing, in terms of summer schools, in terms of activities in local constituencies. The Labour Party also, particularly through the trade union network, regarded itself as persuading the electorate to do [00:44:00] things that they did not already believe in.

They both have a certain missionary element. There's an element of the, kind of the priest and the prophet, about the role of the leading politician. And parties have become very nervous about that. They seem to think now that that's deeply elitist. The idea that you might ever say to the electorate, actually, I think you're wrong about this and I'm going to try and persuade you, has become very unfashionable.

And yet, if the leading parties actually wanted to learn a lesson from the rise of Reform and of Nigel Farage, that might be an area they look at. Nigel Farage, I don't think has ever made policy on the basis of a focus group. Nigel Farage demonstrates you can actually take positions that start out as being quite fringe and unpopular, and you can persuade significant chunks of the electorate to come with you. That this is a politician who has moved the Overton window. You don't have to just move with it.

Mark D'Arcy: We've got a couple of elements of our skillset for the next Prime Minister here. We've got be a better communicator, more attuned to new kinds of media opportunity. You've got trust the [00:45:00] people more, be prepared to engage with the electorate. What about the policy governing side of things? Being able to marshal your colleagues into an effective team? Recently I went to see James Graham's play, "Dear England", about an England football team that was utterly demoralised, its loss of self-confidence, the burdens of expectation upon it. And it kind of struck me that there's a parallel there to be made in politics that you need to be able to galvanise and manage as Gareth Southgate did with that utterly demoralised England side. How about that side of things?

Robert Saunders: Yeah, I think the party management site has become much more difficult. And that's again, partly because political careers have become so short that leaders don't have experience of it, but they also don't necessarily know their parliamentary parties very well.

I think some extraordinary proportion of the House of Commons now has only been in there since 2017. So you don't necessarily have a sense of what are their interests? What are the groups within the parties. This, this has certainly become a great deal more difficult. [00:46:00] I'm not going to pretend as someone who's never run a party that I know how you do that.

I suspect we might end up evolving new methods and perhaps changing some of our practices. I mean, just to take an example of that. A very old constitutional doctrine that I think is starting to become a problem in the way that we activate it now, is collective Cabinet responsibility. So this is something that goes back to the 18th century. The idea that everyone in cabinets shares responsibility for everything that the government does, and that emerges originally to stop Monarchs picking off individual members of the Cabinet. For most of the 20th century what that meant was, if you were the Foreign Secretary and you didn't like what the Home Secretary was doing, you didn't speak or vote against it.

What it means today is that you go on the airwaves and you speak for it. So you have Ed Miliband coming on the Today programme, pretending that he likes what Shabana Mahmood is doing on immigration, which I suspect he doesn't. And I think that contributes to a kind of inauthenticity crisis. And [00:47:00] actually it also makes party management harder because some people will not do that. Some people won't come on. That makes them difficult people to bring into a Cabinet or a government.

Ruth Fox: It also drives this idea that politicians are hypocrites. Because as soon as they lose office they're then admitting that they didn't like what was going on and objected to it privately, but went out and publicly said it. This idea that the politicians say one thing, do another is just so corrosive.

Robert Saunders: Yes. And I, I think it really matters that politicians actually believe in the idea that their parties are broad churches. It's not clear to me that recent leaders actually do. There's a sense that you know, if you are Keir Starmer you want people like Diane Abbott out of the Labour Party. If you are Boris Johnson, you want Tory Remainers out of the Conservative Party. There's a kind of cleansing fire that keeps burning through politics, which is also burning out a lot of experience and a lot of talented people. But you can't expect to hold together a large electoral coalition, if you refuse to try to hold together a large [00:48:00] political coalition.

Even looking back to the New Labour years, it is striking how many quite left wing people there are in Tony Blair's cabinets. And they're not Chancellor of the Exchequer or Home Secretary, but they're in quite interesting roles. There is an attempt, it's perhaps the last time that we really see that actually from a single party government, to say this party is a coalition of different groups and we have to represent all parts of that coalition in government.

Mark D'Arcy: I suppose there's another thought looking at the polls now that maybe the next few Prime Ministers might have to manage a quite different political environment where their majority is made out, not of a broad church party, but of several different parties. In either a coalition or some kind of confidence and supply arrangement to keep them going.

So maybe you need a Prime Minister capable of marshaling on the right, a coalition of the Conservatives and Reform, and maybe some of the unionist parties. On the left, the Greens, the Lib Dems, Labour, possibly the SNP and Plaid Cymru as well in some combination, [00:49:00] which sounds an order of magnitude more difficult than merely managing a broad church party. Recently on the pod, we talked to a guy called George Owers, who's written a fabulous book, the Rage of Party, about politics in the era of Queen Anne. And it struck me at the time that people like Robert Harley, the first Minister then, this was before we had actual Prime Ministers, the first minister then was managing constantly these shifting coalitions, and occasionally he'd shed one faction and recruit another. And maybe 21st century politics is going to look a bit more like that.

Robert Saunders: And that may not be a bad thing in terms of political stability, oddly. I think you can make a case that the most stable government we've had since New Labour was the coalition from 2010 to 2015. In some respects, David Cameron was probably a better coalition manager than he was a manager of the Conservative Party. And looking back, you can see why. It was quite helpful in some ways to that government, that you could have dissent within it. That there was no pretense that all ministers actually believed the same thing. That you could have kind of licensed dissenting voices. And because you had to hold together [00:50:00] two parties, you actually had to distribute government offices in a way that kept both of them happy.

So, it might actually not be a bad thing for political stability if governments are being forced to do things they seem reluctant to do with their own parties.

Ruth Fox: Do you think the political parties, or certainly the mainstream, the two main political parties we've had hitherto for the last century, are alive to that? Are they willing to make the compromises that, that, that would necessitate? Because it seems to me that they still want to play this sort of traditional two party politics.

Robert Saunders: I think they absolutely want to play that, but they're going to have to play the cards that are dealt to them by the electorate. And it's entirely possible that the next election produces a kind of tombola-style result.

You know, first-past-the-post goes entirely haywire once you have multi-parties on a very similar share of the vote. So the next general election could produce almost any result. And it's all very well saying that you don't want to share power, but actually, if you can't form a majority without it, you'll have to.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. Some of the tribes though, in our politics, may find it [00:51:00] incredibly difficult to do that. Certainly the Labour Party has this thing, it's, it's the way the truth and the light. Anybody outside is pretty much beyond the pale. They find it quite difficult at a inter-party level to engage with other parties.

Robert Saunders: They will find that very difficult, but they may not have any choice in the matter.

I mean, I think if we're thinking over longer historical periods, you could look at the period from the 1950s to the present and say, actually what we've had is a kind of 70 year long collapse of the two party system. So you go from 1950 where you've got 97% of the electorate voting Labour or Conservative. And then by 2010, even before the Brexit crisis, I think that's down to 60%. If you actually include non-voters, so you ask, you know what, what share of the electorate is going out and voting on election day for one of the big two, it roughly halves over that period of time.

And there is in some way something quite odd about two party politics. We are an extremely diverse and variated country. It's not obvious [00:52:00] why our politics should orbit around two entities. Now it probably did so for much of the 20th century, partly because the Conservative Party and the Labour Party were both social formations as well as political parties. The Labour Party obviously is embedded in the trade union movement that has tens of millions of members. The Conservative Party is embedded in a whole world of voluntary societies: the Church of England, the women's institutes, the mother's unions. That world has crumbled, so the kind of social roots have died. And I don't think it's entirely surprising that the kind of plants that we see above the surface are also actually looking a little bit peaky.

Ruth Fox: What's the alternative then to that? I mean, what's the equivalent of that sort of social embedding of political parties in a world that essentially is online and where people spend more time on their phones than, you know, going to the Mother's Union or the, the Women's Institute perhaps? You know, that's something that is of a different generation.

Robert Saunders: It is. I don't think you can rebuild that. I think [00:53:00] that's gone. So you've got to find a party politics for a new social formation, which almost certainly is going to be more fractured and more fluid. And it might look more like the 18th century. It might look more like, you know, temporary coalitions, interesting political figures who align for a period and then break apart. We don't know.

I suppose the only cautionary note I would strike there is that I talked earlier about the early 1980s. Again, if we were having this podcast in late 1981, we'd be looking at the polls and we would see that the Labour Party and the Conservative Party were tied on 23%, and that this new insurgent force, the SDP-Liberal Alliance, was on 50%.

Mark D'Arcy: I remember it well. Lasted about 15 minutes as I recall.

Robert Saunders: It did, but it was polling much higher than Reform is today. David Steel famously tells the Liberal conference, go back to your constituencies and prepare for government. And that wasn't a stupid thing to say in that moment necessarily, if you're just reading the polls. [00:54:00]

Now we know how that story ends. We know that actually the two party system does reassert itself, in a way that looks quite unlikely in that moment.

Mark D'Arcy: I also remember the bitter end of the new beginnings.

Robert Saunders: Right. And you know, I'm not suggesting that that is going to happen again now. But I think all of us, and particularly those of us who are historians and so naturally face backwards, have to be a bit modest about our predictive powers. That we're at, in a moment when politics is kind of going round and round in the washing machine, very few of us actually know what's going to come out the other end.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, plenty there to look forward to in the politics of 2026 and the action in Parliament that it will generate. Robert Saunders, thanks so much for joining Ruth and me on the pod today.

Robert Saunders: It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Ruth Fox: Thanks Robert.

Mark D'Arcy: We are taking a festive break, but we've got plenty of podcast presents over the holiday.

Ruth Fox: Royal correspondent Valentine Low talks to us about his new book about the relationship between the Royals, Downing Street and Parliament. And the Chair of the Electoral Commission, John Pullinger, tells us why the electoral system should be treated as critical national infrastructure and what he wants [00:55:00] to see in the long anticipated elections bill.

Mark D'Arcy: And Ellie Chowns, the Westminster Leader of the Greens, talks about life as a new MP, having Zack Polanski as their leader outside Parliament, and what it's like to be soaring high in the opinion polls.

Ruth Fox: And we'll be back to our normal parliamentary podding on Friday the 16th of January. Meanwhile, if you're in the holiday spirit, perhaps you might give us a five star rating on your podcast app to help us grow the Parliament Matters audience. It helps other potential listeners find us. And if it's not a five star rating, well don't bother!

Mark D'Arcy: And goodbye for now.

Ruth Fox: See you soon.

Outro: Parliament Matters is produced by the HansardSociety and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/PM or find us on social media @HansardSociety.

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