LONDON (AP) — After being elected in a landslide last year, Britain’s Labour Party government delivered a budget it billed as a one-off dose of tax hikes to fix the public finances, get debt down, ease the cost of living and spur economic growth.
A year on, inflation remains stubbornly high, government borrowing is up and the economy is turgid. The annual budget, due on Wednesday, is expected to bring more tax hikes in pursuit of the same elusive economic boom.
Rain Newton-Smith, head of business group the Confederation of British Industry, said Monday that “it feels less like we’re on the move, and more like we’re stuck in ‘Groundhog Day.’”
It’s not just businesses who are concerned. Alarmed by the government’s consistently dire poll ratings, some Labour lawmakers are mulling the once-unthinkable idea of ousting Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who led them to victory less than 18 months ago.
Luke Tryl, director of pollster More in Common, said voters “don’t understand why there has not been positive change.
“This could be a last-chance saloon moment for the government.”
Not much room for maneuver
The government says Treasury chief Rachel Reeves will make “tough but right decisions” in her budget to ease the cost of living, safeguard public services and keep debt under control.
She has limited room for maneuver. Britain’s economy, the world’s sixth-largest, has underperformed its long-run average since the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, and the center-left Labour government elected in July 2024 has struggled to deliver promised economic growth.
Like other Western economies, Britain’s public finances have been squeezed by the costs of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war and U.S. President Donald Trump’s global tariffs. The U.K. bears the extra burden of Brexit, which has knocked billions off the economy since the country left the European Union in 2020.
The government currently spends more than 100 billion pounds ($130 billion) a year servicing the U.K.’s debt, which stands at around 95% of annual national income.
Adding to pressure is the fact that Labour governments historically have had to work harder than Conservative administrations to convince businesses and the financial markets that they are economically sound.
Reeves is mindful of how financial markets can react when the government’s numbers don’t add up. The short-lived premiership of Liz Truss ended in October 2022 after her package of unfunded tax cuts roiled financial markets, drove down the value of the pound and sent borrowing costs soaring.
Luke Hickmore, an investment director at Aberdeen Investments, said the bond market is the “ultimate reality check” for budget policy.
“If investors lose faith, the cost of borrowing rises sharply, and political leaders have little choice but to change course,” he said.
Mixed pre-budget signals
The government has ruled out public spending cuts of the kind seen during 14 years of Conservative government, and its attempts to cut Britain’s huge welfare bill have been stymied by Labour lawmakers.
That leaves tax increases as the government’s main revenue-raising option.
“We’re very much not in the position that Rachel Reeves hoped to be in,” said Jill Rutter, a senior fellow at the Institute for Government think tank.
Instead of an economy that has “sparked into life,” enabling higher spending and lower taxes, Rutter said Reeves must decide whether “to fill a big fiscal black hole with tax increases or spending cuts.”
The budget comes after weeks of messy mixed messaging that saw Reeves signal she would raise income tax rates – breaking a key election promise – before hastily reversing course.
In a Nov. 4 speech, Reeves laid the groundwork for income tax hikes by arguing that the economy is sicker and the global outlook worse than the government knew when it took office.
After an outcry among Labour lawmakers, and a better-than-expected update on the public finances, the government signaled it preferred a smorgasbord of smaller revenue-raising measures such as a “mansion tax” on expensive homes and a pay-per-mile tax for electric vehicle drivers.
The government will try to ease the sting with sweeteners including an above-inflation boost to pension payments for millions of retirees and a freeze on train fares.
Critics say more taxes on employees and businesses, following tax hikes on businesses in last year’s budget, will push the economy further into a low-growth doom loop.
Patrick Diamond, professor in public policy at Queen Mary University of London, said satisfying both markets and voters is difficult.
“You can give markets confidence, but that probably means raising taxes, which is very unpopular with voters,” he said. “On the other hand, you can give voters confidence by trying to minimize the impact of tax rises, but that makes markets nervous because they feel that the government doesn’t have a clear fiscal plan.”
High stakes for Reeves and Starmer
The budget comes as Starmer is facing mounting concern from Labour lawmakers over his dire poll ratings. Opinion polls consistently put Labour well behind the hard-right Reform UK party led by Nigel Farage.
The prime minister’s office sparked a flurry of speculation earlier this month by preemptively telling news outlets that Starmer would fight any challenge to his leadership. What looked like an attempt to strengthen Starmer’s authority backfired. The reports set off jitters verging on panic among Labour lawmakers, who fear the party is heading for a big defeat at the next election.
That election does not have to be held until 2029, and the government continues to hope that its economic measures will spur higher growth and ease financial pressures.
But analysts say a misfiring budget could be another nail in the coffin of Starmer’s government.
“Both Starmer and Reeves are really unpopular,” Rutter said. “They may be hanging on for now, but I don’t think people will be giving you great odds that they’ll necessarily last the course of the Parliament,” which runs until the next election.
BELFAST — First its government collapsed. Then austerity began to bite. Now fresh elections are set to be cancelled, and tens of thousands of workers are going on strike.
This is Northern Ireland in 2024 — a land of political deadlock, public sector cuts and mass labor unrest, with neither British ministers in London nor local powerbrokers the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) willing to do what is needed to restore a coherent government in this ever-divided corner of the United Kingdom.
Nearly two years after the DUP first sabotaged the Northern Ireland Executive — the cross-community government at the heart of the region’s decades-old peace process — its leadership appears no closer to ending its boycott on cooperation with Sinn Féin. The Irish republicans overtook their DUP opponents as the most popular party at the last Stormont election in May 2022, but have been waiting ever since to lead a government under a power-sharing system the DUP refuses to revive.
Similarly unwilling to fill the political vacuum is Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris, who refuses to resume “direct rule” from Westminster. Northern Ireland was governed directly from London through most of its decades of bloodshed during the 20th century, and through a previous collapse of powersharing at Stormont between 2002-07.
At least partly filling the vacuum over the past year have been Northern Ireland’s senior civil servants, abandoned to run their country without the help of elected politicians. They protest they lack both the power and democratic mandate to make essential spending and cost-cutting decisions — a weakness that has left public services to wither from within.
This long-running crisis has triggered months of labor unrest, finally reducing Northern Ireland to a standstill on Thursday as 16 unions staged the region’s first coordinated mass strike in a half-century. It may not be the last.
“This is a campaign we will continue,” said Gerry Murphy of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. “This is a campaign we will win.”
Labor pains
More than 170,000 workers — nearly a fifth of the entire workforce — shut down schools, transport links, non-emergency healthcare and almost all government-funded services on Thursday in a mass demand for long-withheld pay raises.
The promised salary hikes were secured in principle years ago as part of wider U.K. labor agreements, but most of this money has yet to reach paychecks and pensions in Northern Ireland because the relevant Stormont ministers aren’t in office. In their absence, the U.K. Treasury is withholding the required funds.
That was supposed to change as part of a conditional funding package that Heaton-Harris presented to local parties last month in a bid to break the DUP logjam. If Democratic Unionist leader Jeffrey Donaldson agreed to lead his party back to Stormont, Heaton-Harris announced, the U.K. would provide £3.3 billion in exceptional financial supports to make the relaunch of power-sharing a success. Included in the package: £584 million for the outstanding pay claims.
But to the exasperation of other parties, and despite Donaldson’s own efforts to telegraph a coming move, the DUP leader failed to persuade his most powerful deputies to grasp the offer as a moment for compromise.
Donaldson since has insisted that talks with U.K. government officials will drag out indefinitely until the DUP wins further concessions on Northern Ireland’s complex post-Brexit trading arrangements, which unionists fear are pushing the economy toward a united Ireland.
The DUP leader failed to persuade his most powerful deputies to grasp the offer as a moment for compromise | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
Indeed, dangling billions in front of the DUP seems only to have backfired. Heaton-Harris has repeatedly said the £3.3 billion will not be forthcoming until the DUP returns to Stormont — a condition that both British unionists and Irish nationalists have denounced as blackmail.
Mass unrest
Reflecting that anger, tens of thousands of striking workers braved freezing conditions on Thursday to march in central Belfast, Londonderry and Enniskillen, venting their anger and demanding their salaries be boosted to the levels of their professional peers in England, Scotland and Wales.
As one example, they cited how a newly qualified teacher in Northern Ireland earns around £24,000 a year, versus £30,000 elsewhere in the U.K. Official U.K. statistics indicate that public sector workers in Northern Ireland have seen the value of their incomes fall by 11 percent in real terms during the past two years of government collapse.
Heaton-Harris, an arch Brexiteer who was appointed to the post by ex-PM Liz Truss during her brief Downing Street reign, has struggled to find any pressure point that works on Donaldson, whose DUP is frequently cited as the most stubborn political party in Europe.
Heaton-Harris’ most common threat — to call an early election for Stormont — has proved particularly absurd because it would potentially help the DUP. Donaldson would hope to claw back ground lost to politicians representing the moderate middle ground, who did unusually well in the 2022 vote.
Indeed, the prospect of fresh elections is one reason why Donaldson keeps playing for time. Accepting a deal now — and so accepting the current post-Brexit trade arrangements are here to stay — would likely split his party and drive support toward Traditional Unionist Voice, an even harder-line unionist rival that rejects working with Sinn Féin in all circumstances.
Reflecting that anger, tens of thousands of striking workers braved freezing conditions on Thursday to march in central Belfast | Paul Faith/AFP via Getty Images
And so the stasis — and the misery — looks set to continue.
The unions behind Thursday’s mass strike have vowed to conduct a rolling series of similar protests until Heaton-Harris untethers their pay demands from any proposed DUP sweetheart deal.
But Heaton-Harris looks poised to kick the Stormont can down the road yet again, meaning Northern Ireland’s public services keep suffering via piecemeal funding half-measures.
The minister is expected to unveil emergency legislation next week that gives both himself, and Northern Ireland’s permanent secretaries, a new “hybrid” mix of powers and responsibilities over the region.
But a former permanent secretary who oversaw the Brexit process in Northern Ireland, Andrew McCormick, said Heaton-Harris’ mismanagement of the situation to date meant neither the Stormont mandarins nor the secretary of state himself “have a legal basis for the strategic decisions that are needed. The government can and should change course as a matter of urgency. Abdication is not acceptable.”
The legislation also is expected to delay, once again, the legally required date for the next Stormont election to early 2025 — by which time a U.K.-wide general election will likely have ended the Conservative government’s 14-year reign and turned Northern Ireland into a problem for the British Labour Party.
LONDON — She might have crashed Britain. But can she save the world?
Former U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss landed in Washington this week to drum up support for Ukraine among skeptical Republican lawmakers.
On both sides of the Atlantic there are hopes Truss can help steer the debate on the American right away from isolationism and toward the active international role espoused by both U.K. prime minister Rishi Sunak and U.S. President Joe Biden.
Truss — no fan of either man — makes for an unlikely diplomatic superhero.
The trip comes barely a year after her humiliating resignation ended a disastrous tenure as Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister. Since the end of her 49-day stint in Downing Street, Truss has tried to carve out a place for herself as a champion of right-wing policies around the world.
She is in Washington this week as part of a delegation of the Conservative Friends of Ukraine (CFU), alongside fellow former Tory leaders Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard. The group has a packed schedule, with around two dozen meetings planned with conservative U.S. lawmakers and think tanks.
The delegation’s arrival coincides with a stand-off between Biden and Republican lawmakers, who are stalling on a request to send billions more dollars in military aid to Ukraine. Congress has twice passed spending bills this fall that omitted funding for the conflict.
Republicans have sought to tie support for Ukraine with measures to strengthen the U.S–Mexican border.
Former President Donald Trump, who is widely expected to secure the Republican nomination for next year’s general election — and whom polling suggests is ahead of Biden in a series of key battleground states — shares this skeptical view of Ukraine aid. Back in May, Trump refused to say even whether he thought Ukraine or Russia should prevail in the war.
A showdown is expected next week with a potential vote in the Senate on Joe Biden’s $106 billion aid package — $61.4 billion of which is earmarked for Ukraine. Senior diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic hope Truss could help break the impasse.
One U.K. official said of the delegation: “They bring a more authentic voice to those kind of Republicans who like speaking to people from their own party — they’re not encumbered by government policy, they don’t have to sort of say nice things about the [Biden] administration.
“If that resonates with Republican lawmakers in a way that governments don’t, then all to the good.”
“We’ve targeted Trump-leaning or Trump-supporting Republicans to try and get them to think strategically,” Tory MP Jake Lopresti said | Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
Showing the right what’s right
Truss’ full-bodied right-wing agenda might have ended in disaster in Downing Street — but it puts her in a good stead with the Republican right.
Far from being nice about the Biden administration, Truss was quick to explicitly endorse the Republican Party ahead of her trip, writing in the Wall Street Journal that she hoped “a Republican will be returned to the White House in 2024.”
She went on: “There must be conservative leadership in the U.S. that is once again bold enough to call out hostile regimes as evil and a threat.”
The CFU said there is no meeting with Trump himself on its agenda. Instead, Jake Lopresti, a Tory MP who is among the delegation, told POLITICO the group was focusing on lawmakers ahead of the expected Senate vote next week. “We’ve targeted Trump-leaning or Trump-supporting Republicans to try and get them to think strategically,” he said.
Lopresti said the case the delegation was making was simple: “If you want to avoid conflict in the future, you have to have a strong deterrent. There’s trouble bubbling up all over the world. It’s a bit like the 1930s.
“It’s cheaper and cleaner and quicker to actually solve it now, send a message — we won’t allow people to walk into other people’s countries in the 21st century. Ukraine is an independent nation, free, democratic. It’s got a right to run its own affairs.”
High stakes
John E. Herbst, a senior director at the Atlantic Council — and former U.S. Ambassador to Kyiv — said his think tank is supporting the delegation because it agrees Washington has a “vital stake … in making sure Russia loses in Ukraine.”
“When Tory MPs come to the United States to explain to populist Republicans that the policy view of those Republicans on Ukraine is a great mistake, we think they should be supported,” he said.
Notably, the delegation is following in Boris Johnson’s footsteps — another former British PM who has travelled to Washington several times this year to bring the case for supporting Ukraine to wavering Republican lawmakers.
Johnson addressed a lunch organized by a pro-Ukraine think tank deep in the Republican territory of Dallas, Texas, where he told those present that victory for Vladimir Putin would be “terrible in its ramifications.” He evoked China’s claim over Taiwan, a major foreign policy concern for U.S. politicians of all stripes — especially Republicans.
Duncan Smith, who has been sanctioned by China for criticizing its human rights record, similarly warned in a speech to the Heritage Foundation this week that the conflict in Ukraine and China’s threats against Taiwan are “linked inexorably” by a “new axis of totalitarian states.”
“To ignore one is to multiply the danger in the others,” he said. “If Ukraine loses or is forced into some weak settlement with Russia … this in turn will be the strongest signal that the free world will not stand by Taiwan.”
Whether enough Republicans are ready to listen remains to be seen.
One is a king who has spent most of his adult life campaigning for bold action on global warming — but is now bound by ancient convention to stick to his government’s skeptical script.
The second is a prime minister who just scaled back Britain’s net zero ambitions and wants to “max out” fossil fuel production at home — and stands accused by former colleagues of being “uninterested” in environmental policies.
And the third? A former prime minister — now the U.K. foreign secretary — who once pledged to lead the “greenest government ever,” but then grew tired of what he called “the green crap” … and is already showing signs of overshadowing his new boss.
All three — King Charles III, Rishi Sunak, and David Cameron — are due to descend on the United Nations climate conference, COP28, which starts in Dubai next week, rounding off a year set to be the hottest ever recorded. (Sunak and the king are already confirmed to attend, while Cameron is due to do so in the coming days.)
The unlikely trio, each jostling for their place on the world stage, are symbolic of a wider identity crisis for the U.K. heading into the summit.
The country staked a claim as a world leader on climate when it hosted COP26 just two years ago. But it is now viewed with uncertainty by allies pushing for stronger action on global warming, following Sunak’s embrace of North Sea oil and gas and his retreat on some key domestic net zero targets.
“There is a lot of confusion about what the U.K. is going to do this year,” said one European diplomat, granted anonymity to give a candid assessment ahead of the summit.
“It raises the question, which team are they on? I think we’ll need to find out during COP.”
Green king, Blue Prime Minister
One of the key moments for the U.K. will come early in the conference, when Charles delivers an opening speech at the World Climate Action Summit of world leaders, the grand curtain raiser on a fortnight of talks.
Sunak is expected to fly in the same day to deliver his own speech later in the session.
Rishi Sunak speaks at COP26 in Glasgow | Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
At least Charles has been allowed to attend the summit this year. In 2022, then Prime Minister Liz Truss advised the king against travelling to Egypt for COP27.
But anyone looking for signs of friction between Sunak and the climate-conscious king will be unlikely to find them in the text of Charles’ address.
Speeches by the monarch are signed off by No. 10 Downing Street and this one will be no different, said one minister, granted anonymity to discuss interactions between the PM’s office and Buckingham Palace.
That’s not to say tensions don’t exist. Just don’t expect the king to overstep the constitutional ground rules, said Charles’ friend and biographer, the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby.
“I can only imagine that he must be intensely frustrated that the government has granted licenses in the North Sea,” Dimbleby told POLITICO. “Whatever the actual practical implications of the drilling in terms of combating climate change, it will not send a great message to the world from a nation that claims moral leadership on the issue.”
But Charles finds himself in “a unique position,” Dimbleby added.
“He is the only head of state who has a very long track record on insisting that climate change is a threat to the future of humanity … He speaks with great authority — but of course on terms from which the government will not dissent, because he has an overriding commitment, regardless of his own views, to abide by the constitutional obligations of the head of state in this country.”
Others see the speech as a major test for Charles.
“This is one of the most significant speeches he’ll make as king,” said Craig Prescott, a constitutional expert and lecturer in law at the Royal Holloway university.
Prescott noted the speech will be watched closely for clues as to how Charles maintains “political impartiality while pursuing the environmental issue — striking the right balance.”
“There will be some to-ing and fro-ing between Downing Street and the Palace,” he added. “But fundamentally he has to comply with any advice he gets.”
As is the convention, Downing Street declined to comment on any discussions with Buckingham Palace. The Palace did not respond to a request for comment.
Fossil fuel politics
The king is attending the summit at the invitation of its hosts, the United Arab Emirates — a sign of close ties between the British establishment and the Gulf monarchies presiding over some of the world’s biggest oil and gas-producing countries.
It’s a connection some view as a potential asset for British climate diplomacy.
The then Prince Charles addresses the audience at COP26 | Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images
“Trust between these royal families and institutions could provide the chance to have candid conversations” on issues such as fossil fuel reduction and the need to expand renewable energy supply, said Edward Davey, head of the U.K office of the World Resources Institute, where the king is patron.
“One could imagine those issues being discussed in a respectful way, in a way that perhaps other leaders couldn’t achieve.”
“I think it’s perfectly possible for the sovereign and the PM to both attend a COP and for them both to play a complementary role,” Davey added.
Others are much more skeptical. “[The king] has a lot of close friends in the Middle East who are massive producers of oil,” said Graham Smith, boss of the Republic campaign group, which wants to abolish the British monarchy.
“They can use him as a point of access to the British state because he has direct access to the government, and whatever he says to government is entirely secretive.”
Cameron, meanwhile, has his own close ties to the UAE and — before his return to government — took on a teaching post at New York University Abu Dhabi earlier this year.
Negotiation confusion
The U.K.’s big three will be joined in Dubai by Energy Secretary — and Sunak ally — Claire Coutinho. But the head of the British delegation is a junior minister, Graham Stuart, who does not attend Cabinet.
While the country will be officially arguing — alongside the EU — for a “phase-out of unabated fossil fuels,” Stuart sparked confusion earlier this month when he suggested to MPs that he was not troubled by the distinction between a “phase-out” (a total end to production of fossil fuels, where carbon capture is not applied) and a “phase-down,” the softer language preferred by the summit’s president, UAE national oil company boss Sultan Al-Jaber.
Chris Skidmore, an MP and climate activist in Sunak’s Conservative party, and the author of a government-commissioned report on net zero policy, said Stuart was wrong if he thought the distinction was just “semantics.”
“The fate of the world is resting on a distinction between phase-out and phase-down. But the U.K. finds itself now [unable] to argue for phase-out because it’s joined the phase-down club.
“That in itself puts us in an entirely different strategic position to where we were.”
Climate brain drain
London’s climate diplomatic corps are still well-respected around the world, said the same European diplomat quoted above. Even with Sunak’s loosening of net zero policies, the U.K. is seen to be in the group of countries, alongside the EU, leading the push for strong action on cutting emissions.
And there is a chance Cameron’s appointment will see more effort going into the U.K.’s global reputation on climate, according to Skidmore.
Citizen scientist Pat Stirling checks the quality of the River Wye water in Hay-on-Wye | Darren Staples/AFP via Getty Images
“It was under his premiership that the U.K. played a leading role in helping to get the Paris Agreement [to limit global warming] signed through … It will be interesting to see if he comes to COP and wants to play on the opportunities for the U.K. to demonstrate its climate credentials,” he said.
But the team that pulled off a relatively successful COP26 now has significantly less firepower, said one former U.K. climate official, who warned their efforts risk being undermined by No. 10’s approach to fossil fuels.
“There was a brain drain of experts working on climate, [the sort of] officials that could help hold government to account internally and try to maintain the level of ambition that we needed,” the former official said.
This spring, the U.K. scrapped the dedicated role of climate envoy, held by the experienced diplomat Nick Bridge since 2017. The remaining team of climate diplomats have been left frustrated, the former official said, by changes to domestic climate policy driven by a Downing Street operation fixated with next year’s U.K. general election, without consideration for how they might affect Britain’s negotiating position on the world stage.
“When Sunak gave his speech in September [rolling back some interim green targets], his team didn’t even realize that a U.N. climate action summit was happening in New York,” the former official said. “His team aren’t thinking in this way. For them it’s just about votes and the election.”
The risk, said the European diplomat, is that countries at COP28 pushing for softer targets on fossil fuels — likely to include the Gulf states, China and Russia — could point to Sunak’s statements on a “proportionate, pragmatic” approach to net zero as a reason to ignore the U.K. and its allies when they call for higher ambition.
“This will happen,” the European diplomat said. “They can point to the U.K.’s prime minister and say — ‘Look what the U.K. is doing with its own climate ambitions. So why are you being such a hard-ass about ours?’”
As for Cameron’s potential impact at the FCDO, the European diplomat was skeptical.
“It was a big surprise for everybody, but we’re not sure what he can do,” they said. “Maybe he can call a referendum on the climate?”
LONDON — Rishi Sunak appointed David Cameron as Britain’s new foreign secretary — in a shock comeback for the former prime minister.
Cameron, who resigned as PM in 2016 and later quit as a member of parliament after losing the Brexit referendum, will become a life peer in the House of Lords in order to take on the government role.
The move comes as Sunak carries out a major reshuffle of his government ranks, in a bid to arrest his Conservative Party’s large deficit in opinion polling.
He kicked off the reshuffle Monday by firing Home Secretary Suella Braverman, a key figure on the party’s right. James Cleverly, previously foreign sec, takes over from Braverman at the interior ministry.
Cameron’s return on Monday to one of the highest positions in government sent shockwaves through Westminster and the Conservative Party.
It marks the first post-war example of a former prime minister serving in a successor’s Cabinet since the 1970s, when Conservative Alec Douglas-Home was named foreign secretary in Ted Heath’s government.
Although both are seen as Tory centrists, Sunak and Cameron campaigned on opposite sides of the 2016 Brexit referendum. Cameron — who led a coalition government in 2010 and pulled off a dramatic election victory for the Tories in 2015 — has recently been critical of the prime minister over his decision to axe key parts of the HS2 rail link.
The ex-PM’s reputation took a hit amid a lobbying scandal in 2021. His record on foreign policy is controversial among some Conservatives. As prime minister he heralded a so-called “Golden Era” in U.K. relations with China, and hosted President Xi Jinping for a state visit.
Cameron: I want to help Sunak deliver
In a statement following his appointment, Cameron said the U.K. would “stand by our allies, strengthen our partnerships and make sure our voice is heard.”
And he added: “Though I may have disagreed with some individual decisions, it is clear to me that Rishi Sunak is a strong and capable prime minister, who is showing exemplary leadership at a difficult time.
“I want to help him to deliver the security and prosperity our country needs and be part of the strongest possible team that serves the United Kingdom and that can be presented to the country when the general election is held.”
But Pat McFadden of the opposition Labour Party used the new hire to take a dig at Sunak, who has recently attempted to pitch himself against successive governments of all stripes.
“A few weeks ago, Rishi Sunak said David Cameron was part of a failed status quo, now he’s bringing him back as his life raft,” McFadden quipped.
LONDON — Britain’s tech chief is no stranger to dealing with big egos. She used to promote superstar wrestlers.
U.K. Science and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan’s past career as a marketeer for WWE wrestling may stand her in good stead at Bletchley Park on Wednesday, as she hosts representatives from more than 100 tech companies, countries and academic institutions on the first day of a U.K.-hosted summit which aims to grapple with one of the biggest challenges of our time — the rise of artificial intelligence.
Working at the fast-paced WWE was “very much like” being at her busy Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), Donelan tells POLITICO — somewhat improbably — in an eve-of-summit interview at her sparsely-decorated office on Whitehall.
The oddball world of commercial wrestling was also good training for politics.
“It was an eye-opener to different personalities, and how to deal with those different personalities,” she says — ideal for “dealing with big egos, in terms of British politics.”
A low-profile Tory MP who only bagged her first junior ministerial job in 2019, Donelan makes for a surprising compère for the first day of Rishi Sunak’s much-hyped AI summit.
Unlike Sunak, the 39-year-old was no self-professed tech geek when she was entrusted with setting up his new science and technology department in February 2023. By her own admission she doesn’t regularly use generative AI tools like ChatGPT.
But Donelan, who was pregnant with her first child when she was handed the science and tech brief, has been wading through piles of binders detailing technical information as she tries to get to grips with the subject. Colleagues note admiringly (and sometimes despairingly) how she operates on just a few hours sleep.
“I think my journey on this has been a deeper understanding of … just how vital it is that we do lead in this, that we aren’t passive, that we don’t wait for others,” she says.
Summit going on
Since February, Donelan has been laying the groundwork for a summit Sunak hopes will be one of the defining moments of his premiership, with the objective of convincing world leaders to agree on the risks posed by AI.
She, like the PM, is concerned about the potential disruption artificial intelligence could pose. “The risks are very daunting, there’s no denying that,” she says, while acknowledging “there is a debate about whether they will materialize or not.”
Her critics say the summit is wrongly focused on long-term risk, however, and argue not enough is being done to tackle AI’s more immediate threats.
The U.K. is “way behind” in terms of bringing forward actual legislation, said Peter Kyle, Donelan’s opposite number in the Labour Party, who has not been invited to this week’s summit. Donelan’s department has not yet even published a response to its own consultation on an artificial intelligence white paper published way back in March, he pointed out.
Donelan insists the summit is “only part” of the U.K.’s work on artificial intelligence, however and that it plans to say more about the white paper — a first step toward legislation — “by the end of the year.”
“We’re not afraid to legislate. There will have to be legislation in this space eventually,” she says.
But specifics are thin on the ground. She refuses to be drawn on “arbitrary timelines.”
Surviving the hospital pass
It was Donelan’s embrace of the government’s controversial Online Safety Bill, which she inherited in her previous ministerial role during the short-lived premiership of Liz Truss, which attracted the attention of Sunak.
In the hard-fought Tory leadership campaign of July and August 2022, Truss and Sunak both promised to scrap parts of the bill focused on policing “legal but harmful” online content. It was Donelan, appointed as culture secretary by Truss, who was left to unravel those pledges.
Her “no-nonsense” and “methodical” approach to the bill, and her willingness to take the views of her MP colleagues seriously, impressed Sunak when he arrived in No. 10 following Truss’ self-destruction.
For that reason he kept her in post — and then chose her to set up the new department for science and technology earlier this year, according to a No. 10 official closely involved with that decision, granted anonymity to discuss internal government business.
“I think Rishi, like me, can see that she is one of those effective secretaries of state that will deliver outcomes,” said former Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi, whom Donelan worked alongside prior to her promotion to Cabinet.
Finally getting the Online Safety Bill into law was a notable achievement. Donelan’s previous claim to fame had been her unwanted record of being the shortest-serving Cabinet minister in British history. She took the job of education secretary, and then resigned 35 hours later, in the chaotic final days of the Boris Johnson administration.
Child protection
Donelan’s resolve to get the bill through parliament had been hardened by a one-to-one meeting with campaigner Ian Russell last November. His daughter Molly took her own life after viewing suicide content online.
Donelan has kept the dossier of Molly’s posts handed to her by Russell at that private meeting, according to one U.K. government official. “From that [meeting] she was more determined to do something on child protection,” they said.
“It was heart-wrenching to hear his story, and those of other bereaved parents and I felt very passionately that we had an opportunity to really make a difference on this and to and to change the nature in which we regulate the online world,” Donelan says.
Her approach was strikingly different to the long line of Tory ministers who preceded her. Her willingness to simply pick up the phone to relevant business leaders — often bypassing official government channels — has won her admirers in the exasperated U.K. tech industry, which has endured a succession of different ministers overseeing a bill plagued by uncertainty.
“It was a complete breath of fresh air when she came in,” said Dom Hallas, executive director of tech lobbying outfit the Startup Coalition. “At industry roundtables she is to the point and well-briefed, but she is also frank when something is not going to happen.”
“She actually gets things done, which I would contrast with the previous [Boris Johnson-led] regime. She does listen and seems interested in trying to find out what various stakeholders think about things,” Julian David, chief executive of industry body TechUK, added.
Donelan feels she has skin in the game. Her son was born in the spring, and the tech secretary says the new online laws make her “a lot more confident in his use of social media, when he’s old enough.”
Donelan confirms, however, that being handed a new government department, while heavily pregnant, and about to take maternity leave, was no small challenge.
“I’m not going to lie. It’s a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. Before you have a child you don’t appreciate you are going to have things like ‘Mum guilt’,” she says. “It was easier in my head and harder in reality.”
The long game
Donelan’s unshowy style belies a burning ambition, according to multiple MPs and officials who have tracked her career to date.
In 1999, aged just 15, she spoke at the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool. She was just 26 when she first stood for election, as a no-hoper in the safe Labour seat of Wentworth and Dearne in 2010.
Three years later she became the Conservative candidate for the Lib Dem held seat of Chippenham — going on to overturn a 2,470 Lib Dem majority in the 2015 general election.
On arriving in parliament, Donelan’s ambition was obvious to colleagues. One recalls her immediately asking for advice on how to climb the career ladder.
Soon after she took her first step up, as a parliamentary private secretary — a lowly unpaid aide to a minister — the Conservative whips’ office created a leaderboard tallying the workrate of the 40-odd MPs holding similar roles. Donelan led the way, smashing every target by a significant margin, one minister said.
“If she’s given a task she will attack it like nothing else. I’m not so sure about the bigger picture stuff — wider strategizing and setting a direction herself. But give her a direction and she’ll go at it,” the same minister said.
In her private life, Donelan is a committed Christian who shies away from the darker side of politics. She is “extremely respectful of Cabinet colleagues,” another former government official who worked with her said. “She doesn’t seem to be involved in backdoor skulduggery. It is all very earnest, but it is working for her in a way that is quite refreshing.”
Yet she raised eyebrows at the Conservative Party conference in October with a main stage speech clearly designed to please the grassroots and capture a few right-wing headlines. Donelan vowed a crackdown on the “creeping wokeism” she claimed is threatening scientific research — and went viral for all the wrong reasons.
A difficult interview with the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire at the same conference also landed her less-than-positive headlines.
For an ambitious minister looking to wrestle her way onto the world stage this week, these are nothing more than hazards of the job.
LONDON — It was the gleaming smiles and mutual backslapping of two 40-something banker bros which signalled a new era of U.K.-EU relations.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron looked like natural bedfellows as they riffed off one another at a friendly Paris press conference in March, announcing a sizeable £478 million package to deter migrant crossings through the English Channel.
The contrast with the petty name-calling of the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss eras was clear to see.
Sunak’s warm and productive summit with Europe’s most high-profile leader confirmed a more collaborative relationship with the EU and its national capitals after the turmoil of the Brexit era. Less than two weeks earlier, the British PM’s landmark Windsor Framework agreement with Brussels had finally resolved post-Brexit trading issues in Northern Ireland.
“My hope is that [theagreement] opens up other areas of constructive engagement and dialogue and cooperation with the EU,” Sunak told POLITICO en route to the Paris summit.
Six months on, his words have been borne out.
In addition to the Windsor Framework and English Channel agreements, Britain has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Brussels on regulatory cooperation in financial services, and this month rejoined the EU’s massive €96 billion Horizon and Copernicus science research programs — a major result for the U.K.’s research and university sectors after two years of uncertainty.
Next on the agenda is a cooperation deal between the British government and the EU’s border protection agency Frontex — another move that brings Britain closer to the EU in a small but meaningful way.
The deal, confirmed by the Home Secretary Suella Braverman on Tuesday, is expected to be similar to other deals Frontex has with non-EU countries, like Albania, which allow the sharing of data on migration flows.
“We have seen concrete steps created by a new climate of good faith,” said a London-based European diplomat, granted anonymity — like others in this article — to speak candidly about diplomatic relations.
“We missed that before, and so that’s the Sunak effect. I wouldn’t say he’s done an amazing job, but he’s changed the state of mind — and therefore he has changed everything.”
A new hope
In addition to a renewed focus on relations with fellow leaders, Sunak has impressed EU diplomats with his willingness to face down the vocal Brexiteer wing of his own party, which has long seemed — to European eyes — to hold outsized influence over successive Tory prime ministers.
Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak proclaimed a “new chapter” in post-Brexit relations with the European Union after securing a breakthrough deal to regulate trade in Northern Ireland | Pool photo by Dan Kitwood/AFP via Getty Images
Earlier this year Sunak enraged Tory right-wingers by abandoning a controversial pledge to scrap or rewrite thousands of EU-era regulatory laws which remain on the British statute book by the end of this year, to the delight of EU capitals.
“The improving relationship is built on the fact there’s now a willingness to find solutions and engage in a way that wasn’t there in the previous administrations,” a second London-based European diplomat said.
Negotiations continue between Sunak’s government and Brussels over other outstanding areas of dispute — chief among them tough new tariffs due to be imposed in January on electric vehicles (EVs) being shipped in and out of the U.K. which do not conform to strict sourcing requirements for electric batteries.
On Wednesday the U.K.-EU Trade Specialised Committee will meet to discuss the issue, with British ministers increasingly hopeful Brussels will agree to scrap the end-of-year deadline after heavy lobbying from German automakers and its own European Commissioner for trade, Valdis Dombrovskis.
Catherine Barnard, a European law professor at Cambridge University, said overall Sunak had overseen a “much more positive relationship” with Europe, albeit one conducted on a “pay-as-you-go basis.”
“This is looking much more positive and it’s putting some meaning on dealing with our European neighbors as friends, rather than as foes,” she said.
“But equally, we’re not talking about a comprehensive and thorough renegotiation — quite the contrary.”
No. 10 Downing Street agrees the shift is less profound than some media observers — or grumbling Tory MPs — would like to think.
A No. 10 aide said Sunak sees his diplomatic efforts as “normal government,” noting that “we’ve just forgotten what it looks like” after the turmoil of the post-Brexit era.
“I know it’s following Brexit and all that nonsense we’ve seen over the last few years, and it’s nice to see any small win or small argument to bridge that divide, but this is just normal government relations,” the aide said.
But his opponent, U.K. Labour leader Keir Starmer, has made clear he too wants closer cooperation with Europe should he seize power.
A senior moderate Tory MP said that despite the attacks on Starmer, Sunak is “not overly ideological when it comes to the EU” | Kiran Ridley/Getty Images
Starmer said this month a future Labour government would use the upcoming review of the post-Brexit trade deal, expected in 2025 or 2026, as a chance to reduce border checks through the signing of a veterinary agreement and to increase U.K.-EU mobility for some sectors of the economy.
And he told a conference in Montreal last weekend that that “we don’t want to diverge from the EU” in areas such as working conditions or environmental standards.
These comments were seized upon by Tory ministers as evidence that Starmer would bring the U.K. even further into the EU’s orbit than he has publicly admitted — something the Labour leader denies. Tory campaigners hope to use such comments in campaign attacks painting Starmer as an anti-Brexit europhile.
But some observers suggest such political attacks are ironic, given Sunak’s own direction of travel. Barnard, quoted above, says that “what Keir Starmer was saying in Canada last week is pretty much a description of where we’re at at the moment.”
A senior moderate Tory MP said that despite the attacks on Starmer, Sunak is “not overly ideological when it comes to the EU.”
“There’s always been a belief in Brussels that we would inevitably come crawling back to them, and we’re seeing that a bit now,” they said.
Nevertheless, it is unclear how much closer Britain and the EU can get without a fundamental renegotiation of the terms of Brexit — something all sides insist is off the table.
One area for agreement is the need for enhanced security and defence links, with next year’s European Political Community Summit in Britain providing a potential opportunity for further announcements.
Some in Westminster speculate that this could come in the form of Britain joining individual projects of the EU’s Permanent Structured Cooperation — a body which coordinates the bloc’s security and defence policy. The European Council invited Britain to join its “military mobility project” alongside Canada, Norway and the U.S. in November 2022.
Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe think tank , said he’s “not convinced” of the potential benefits for Britain, considering the U.K.’s existing position in NATO and other organizations.
He believes the British government will run out of road in finding mutually beneficial areas of cooperation with Brussels.
“The EU is relatively happy with the status quo,” Menon said. “It’s only in the U.K. where people say we need to move closer … There are so many bigger fish to fry for the EU.”
LONDON — Liz Truss struck firmly to her guns in a defiant speech Monday as Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister defended her chaotic economic legacy.
Addressing the Institute for Government think tank, Truss blamed the media, the opposition Labour Party, and economic orthodoxy for her downfall during her 49 days in office.
And she argued that the “reaction” from the “political and economic establishment” to her policies was the reason they failed.
Pressed in the Q&A on the claim she “crashed the economy,” Truss shot back: “I do want to challenge this phrase ‘crashed the economy.’
“The fact is that since I left office both mortgage rates and gilt rates have gone higher than they were at the time of the mini-budget. So I do think you are repeating a line to take from the Labour Party when you say that.”
Truss’ mini-budget — officially billed as the “Plan for Growth” — aimed to slash taxes and cut regulations. But the debt-funded plan was not scrutinized by Westminster’s independent public spending watchdog, and a market rout followed its unveiling.
Most of its measures were undone weeks later, and Truss argued Monday she was “effectively forced into a policy reversal” before her ideas could work.
‘Fatten the pig on market day’
In the closest Truss came to a concession, the former PM said the mini-budget may have been rolled out too quickly.
“Some people said we were in too much of a rush, and it is certainly true that I didn’t just try to fatten the pig on market day — I tried to rear the pig and slaughter it as well,” she said. “I confess to that.”
However, Truss largely blamed what she has dubbed the “anti-growth coalition” for undermining her plan.
“The anti-growth coalition is now a powerful force, comprising the economic and political elite, corporatist part of the media, and even a section of the Conservative parliamentary party,” she argued, as she said her libertarian economic ideas were “simply … not fashionable on the London dinner party circuit.”
She urged the Tory party, now led by her successor Rishi Sunak, not to be “scared” of climate activists, “anti-capitalists and the … woke diversity brigade.”
Truss blamed the media, the opposition Labour Party, and economic orthodoxy for her downfall during her 49 days in office | Leon Neal/Getty Images
Truss’ political opponents were quick to pounce on her re-emergence, nearly a year on from the mini-budget.
Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper said: “Liz Truss giving a speech on economic growth is like an arsonist giving a talk on fire safety.”
Sunak’s spokesperson was pressed Monday on whether the prime minister had tuned in. “No,” came the reply. “He was being prime minister, having meetings.”
LONDON — A year is a long time in politics — but the reverberations of the surreal fall of 2022 are still being felt across the U.K.
Wednesday marks the first anniversary of Liz Truss’ ill-fated appointment as prime minister — a year on from that rainy day in September when she stood outside No. 10 Downing Street and vowed to “transform Britain” with free market shock therapy.
Truss’ £45 billion package of unfunded tax cuts — with the promise of more to come — instead sunk the pound, sent interest rates soaring, caused chaos on the bond markets and forced the Bank of England to prop up failing pension funds.
Humiliated, Truss had little choice but to junk her entire economic program and less than four weeks later she was gone — the U.K.’s shortest-ever serving prime minister, famously outlasted by a supermarket lettuce.
The legacy of the period still is fiercely debated among Britain’s left and right-wing commentariat. In Westminster, some Tory factions still push for Truss’ successor Rishi Sunak to embrace her brand of free market economics.
But the period sticks in the memory of most ordinary Brits as one of high farce and incompetence and significantly, it’s a view shared in boardrooms across London and beyond.
“It was such a short, sharp, weird time. It had such a febrile sense of impending doom,” said one partner at a Big Four accounting firm who was granted anonymity — like other figures quoted below — to speak candidly about Truss for this article.
The money men
Senior employees of major financial and professional services firms say Truss’ brief period in office still taints Britain’s reputation around the globe.
Annual Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into the U.K., already down significantly since the 2016 Brexit referendum, fell further — behind France — last year, according to an EY survey.
Britain has also been the second-worst performing G7 economy post-COVID, despite an upgrade in GDP growth figures by the Office for National Statistics last week.
The U.K.’s stuttering economic growth since the pandemic always was going to put a dent into Britain’s prospects for international investment. Experts give a myriad of reasons for Britain’s decreasing international competitiveness.
But a director at one U.S. investment bank said: “The No. 1 issue I hear from clients is that the U.K. is still un-investable because of what happened last year in Westminster, particularly with what happened during Liz Truss’ time in office.”
Senior employees of major financial and professional services firms say Truss’ brief period in office still taints Britain’s reputation around the globe | Leon Neal/Getty Images
A managing director at another investment bank agreed. “This stuff matters for clients who are looking at the U.K., seeing three different prime ministers and four different chancellors in a matter of a few months, and saying ‘why on earth would we choose that place to build our new factory?’ The results of that will still be felt today.”
Such views are confirmed in a recent survey by transatlantic lobby group BritishAmericanBusiness and management consulting firm Bain and Co.
The survey found U.S. business confidence in Britain has sunk for the third straight year, with political instability cited as a key factor.
BritishAmericanBusiness’ chief trade and policy officer Emanuel Adam said: “The instability in No. 10 last autumn, coupled with ongoing concerns over Brexit, growth prospects and taxation have led to a drop of confidence in the U.K. for a third year in a row.
“The message from U.S. investors is clear. They are calling for a stable political environment and business friendly policies from the U.K. government.”
But if foreign direct investors have been put off, the pound’s stronger-than-expected performance since Truss left office suggests they may have compensated with other forms of inward flows.
The Big Four partner quoted at the top of the article says Truss’ disastrous premiership was one of several factors making the British economy less competitive on the world stage.
“Trussonomics plus Brexit plus political uncertainty plus a misplaced sense of British exceptionalism are all contributing to making Britain a less attractive place than we ought to be,” they said.
“I’m aware of real-life examples of decisions being made to invest elsewhere, because they couldn’t be confident about the stability of their return on investment.”
Gloom in Westminster
But even more than the U.K. economy, it is Truss’ Conservative Party which is haunted most by the specter of her brief tenure.
Polling from Ipsos shows the British public’s trust in the Conservatives to manage the economy fell off a cliff during Truss’ time as prime minister, and has never recovered.
With an election looming next year, their Labour opponents — now 18 points ahead in the polls — cannot believe their good fortune.
“The two most important things for an opposition are to be able to show people that they can be trusted to protect the economy, and trusted with the defence of the realm,” said one Labour shadow Cabinet minister. “Liz Truss did a lot of the heavy lifting in allowing us to get a hearing on the economy from the public.”
One moderate Tory MP, and Sunak supporter, said “the damage done by the 49 days of Truss could still be the thing that loses us the next general election.”
“At least part of the party’s problem at the moment is that although the economy is starting to improve, no one is going to give us the credit for that because of the seismic events of last year,” they said.
Julian Jessop, an independent economist who acted as an informal adviser to Truss during her leadership campaign, agreed that the public became infuriated once mortgage rates began to surge during last September’s financial meltdown, but said “it is a bit much” to continue to blame the Tories’ poor polling on the former PM.
“If that were the big problem, then confidence should have recovered,” he said. “We have a new prime minister in place.”
A different view
Indeed some economists — and Truss defenders — see the past 12 months in a very different light.
Even more than the U.K. economy, it is Truss’ Conservative Party which is haunted most by the specter of her brief tenure | Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
They point to bond yields which recently have hit similar levels to the worst moments of the Truss era, thanks to successive Bank of England rate rises.
Truss’ prediction that inflation would help the U.K. eat through some of its debt pile — used as justification for funding her tax cuts through borrowing — has also been borne out in reality. And tax receipts have come in higher than expected this year, thanks to larger than expected growth and inflationary pressures.
Truss’ former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, speaking on a forthcoming episode of POLITICO’s Westminster Insider podcast, insisted that while he and Truss admittedly pushed it “too much, too far,” their overall policy direction was sound.
“I think there’s a big lesson in life,” he said. “It’s all very well thinking you’ve got the right answer, but you’ve also go to have a staged, methodical approach to getting to the answer.”
Russell Napier, author of The Solid Ground investment report, added the unexpectedly strong performance of sterling against the U.S. dollar and other major currencies this year indicates capital inflows into Britain must be stronger than expected.
“Is there something that’s unique and dangerous about the U.K.? No there isn’t,” Napier added. “Our bond yields are at a dangerously high level, but so is the bond yield of Sweden and France, and Canada and South Korea and Australia.
Some of Truss’ closest supporters on the Tory backbenches have now set up pressure groups to fight for the type of low-tax policies advocated in her time in office.
Truss, for her part, is writing a book which aides suggest will be “more manifesto than autobiography.” She is also giving a keynote speech on the economy this month — just five days after the anniversary of her ill-fated “mini-budget.”
But for many Tory MPs still feeling the political repercussions of her tenure and fearing a brutal defeat at next year’s election, a period of silence would be welcome.
“It could be worse,” notes one Tory MP, a minister under Sunak. “It could have been a lot worse if she’d stayed.”
LONDON — Liz Truss isn’t laughing at the lettuce that outlasted her premiership.
Asked Monday about the Daily Star’s live stream of a lettuce that eventually outlasted Truss’ chaotic, market-crashing period in Downing Street, the former British prime minister did not see the funny side.
“I don’t think it was particularly funny, I think it’s puerile,” Truss told Irish broadcaster RTÉ — after she snapped at the interviewer for even asking the question.
Truss — who crashed out of office after 44 days while the lettuce was still going strong — was speaking at the European Broadcasting Union’s NewsXchange conference in Dublin on Monday.
Since leaving No. 10, Truss has primarily intervened on foreign affairs and particularly on U.K.-Chinese relations. She became the first former U.K. PM to visit Taiwan in May and has called for “more action” from the West to combat China.
But in her interview with RTÉ’s David McCullagh, Truss was largely questioned about her brief spell in No. 10, where she quickly lost public and party support after announcing large-scale borrowing and unfunded tax cuts — all of which she then reversed in a matter of weeks.
Truss argued that the U.K. was, and still is, in “serious economic trouble” and that she needed to be “bold” to reverse declining economic growth. She admitted she lacked support from Tory MPs and “could have gone a bit slower” with her economic reforms.
The ex-PM also turned her fire on the U.K.’s media, who she attacked for treating politics as a “soap opera.”
“I do think sometimes politics is sort of treated as a branch of the entertainment industry, who’s up, who’s down, who says what about who,” Truss said.
“I think the level of understanding of economic ideas in the media and the ability to explain them is very poor indeed,” she added. A wide spectrum of economists criticized Truss’ economic reforms both before and after she enacted them for a brief period in No. 10.
Rishi Sunak should be celebrating after a week of successes. But despite good economic news, the allies of the British prime minister say they’ve been reminded that his castle is built on sand.
First the good news. The International Monetary Fund said this week that the UK was no longer on track for a recession. Inflation and energy prices are falling, albeit slower than Sunak might like.
Things are still not great, but given the mess Sunak inherited from his predecessor Liz Truss – whose big economic gamble caused the pound to sink to its lowest against the dollar in decades – Sunak can credibly say he has steadied the ship to some extent.
Now the bad news: his Conservative party is still rife with division and full of individuals who have scores to settle with one another.
It wasn’t even a year ago that Boris Johnson was still prime minister, doing his best to cling to power despite drowning in scandals of his own making. It was Sunak, then Johnson’s chancellor (finance minister), who dealt the killer blow by resigning from Johnson’s cabinet over the scandals.
Johnson’s fiercest allies have not forgiven Sunak for his betrayal. They all rallied behind Truss when she stood against Sunak to take over from Johnson. Just 49 days later, she was also forced to resign, leaving Sunak essentially unopposed. He became PM on October 25 and immediately set about being the anti-Truss.
He has softened relations with Europe and moved away from the firebrand conservatism that people had come to associate with Johnson and Truss. For some on the conservative right, Sunak is essentially a sellout.
This makes him vulnerable to the well-documented tumultuous internal politics of the Conservative party.
This week, two things happened that reminded some Conservatives of how quickly things can go south.
First, he had to make a decision over what to do with his Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, after it was revealed she had asked civil servants to help her avoid a speeding fine by organising a private driving awareness course.
Sunak decided her actions didn’t breach the Ministerial Code, which would have required her to resign by convention. Sunak was immediately accused of letting her off the hook because he is too weak to have a fight with someone who is a stalwart member of the right of the party, many of whom despise Sunak.
It comes just a week after Braverman gave a speech at a thinly-veiled anti-Sunak conference in London. Not only did Sunak give her the freedom to speak at the conference, but she used to platform to give a speech that was clearly aimed at her own leadership bid at some point in the future.
Second, Johnson is back in the news after being referred to the police over concerns he broke more Covid rules than previously thought. Johnson allies have taken the opportunity to accuse Sunak of being behind all of this – something that Sunak’s spokesperson went on-the-record to deny.
And just like that, two people who could make life very difficult for Sunak are distracting from positive headlines about the economy and reminding everyone how quickly the Conservative party can turn on itself.
Some Sunak allies criticize him for having Braverman in his government at all. She had already had to resign from Truss’s government for breaching the Ministerial Code once. Her ambitions are well known and she is top of the list of cabinet ministers to martyr herself before the next election in order to position herself for any vacant leadership position that might come up if the Conservatives lose power.
“He came into office thinking he was weaker than he actually was and thinking the Boris (Johnson) and Liz (Truss) types were stronger than they were,” a senior Conservative MP told CNN.
“In reality, those people were in a very weak position because their team had done so much damage to the party overall. He could have just formed a government in his own image rather than taking Boris and Liz offcuts. His lack of confidence in himself made them more powerful in the long run,” the MP adds.
A former Conservative advisor says “the risk for Rishi comes if the polls don’t improve. Once the MPs start thinking the next election is lost, some of them will decide to go out in a blaze of glory and act on all the vendettas that have built up over the years.”
A united party is very important for any party seeking to win power. Historically the Conservatives have been much better at this than other British parties. However, a senior Conservative campaign advisor says there is “no hope in hell” of getting to the next election without a big old dust up.
Many Conservatives have already decided the game is over. The list of MPs deciding not to stand at the next election is growing and the people behind the scenes, essential to winning elections, are seeking alternative employment.
“We take our lead from the top and if someone like Braverman is already thinking about the next leadership contest, I think that’s a very bad sign of what happens at the next election,” the campaign advisor says.
Rishi Sunak came to power promising a more professional approach to government than the UK had seen over the previous three years. His slow and steady managerial style has improved the dire polling numbers he inherited. And right now, no one is seriously considering trying to remove him from office.
To be clear: no one thinks things are suddenly going to erupt, or that Boris Johnson is going to make some storming return back to power. Most accept that they are going to have stick with Sunak till the election and hope the economy improves so people feel richer. The fears are that the uglier side of the party will start to emerge, factionalism will return and the result will be a slow limp to an election loss.
What this week has reminded lots of Conservatives of, however, is how precarious all of this is. As one MP put it: “You are only ever about three moves away from total collapse in the modern Conservative party.” Or as a senior campaign figure put it: “It’s just a bit crap and the best possible outcome is it remaining a bit crap rather than getting worse.”
Late last year, after a breakneck ascent of British politics put her in charge of the country’s migration, crime and national security agenda, Suella Braverman revealed her political fantasy.
“I would love to (see) a front page of The Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda,” the home secretary (interior minister) told that newspaper, referring to her controversial efforts to deport asylum-seekers to the central African nation. “That’s my dream. That’s my obsession.”
Braverman is no stranger to the front pages. Her self-proclaimed “obsession” with curbing migration – and the loaded and occasionally inflammatory language she uses to address it – has attracted forceful criticism from international agencies, lawyers, rights groups and many of her own colleagues, making her arguably Britain’s most divisive politician.
But among Conservative Party members and the chief architects of Brexit, she is a star; someone who is prepared to say and do controversial things in pursuit of a singular goal.
“She’s the cutting edge of the populist, radical right-wing strain in the Conservative Party,” Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University in London, and the author of books on the party, told CNN.
“In a way, that allows her to say what some Conservative MPs would think of as the unsayable.”
Braverman has railed against what she calls an “invasion” of migrants, holding “values which are at odds with our country” – and suggested she would break international law to deport them from Britain.
And she is an equally furious culture warrior, borrowing rhetoric from the American right when lambasting “woke” culture, transgender rights and climate protesters.
But Braverman has speedily made herself a central figure in British politics; the assassin of Liz Truss’s premiership and the kingmaker of Rishi Sunak’s, she has made evident her desire to ultimately enter Downing Street as prime minister herself – a prospect that sits uneasily with much of the country’s political establishment.
Braverman, who evangelizes on the benefits of Brexit and has made migration curbs her political mission, has a backstory that seems to teem with contradictions.
She is the daughter of migrants, who wants to cut net migration to Britain to the “tens of thousands.” Her parents, both of Indian origin, arrived in the country from Kenya and Mauritius “with very little” in the 1960s.
She was a practicing lawyer before entering politics, but has displayed an unabashed indifference about whether her flagship migration bill complies with international law.
And she is an avid Francophile, sometimes speaking in French when meeting her counterpart in Paris, who championed the project to leave the European Union. Braverman says she fell in love with France while studying at the renowned Sorbonne university in Paris, taking advantage of the EU’s Erasmus program that encourages students to spend time in other parts of the continent. Brexit shut the program off to British students.
Now, she has staked her political reputation on her ability to “Stop the Boats” – an oft-repeated government pledge, borrowed from Australia’s hardline rhetoric towards asylum-seekers, to reduce the growing number of migrants crossing the English Channel on small vessels.
It is a stance that has drawn sharp criticism – including from within the traditional wing of Braverman’s Conservative Party.
“Braverman has placed far too much emphasis on curbing migration,” said Ben Ramanauskas, an economist and adviser to Truss when the previous prime minister was secretary of state for international trade. “Her priority seems to be attempting to be as cruel as possible.”
The government’s flagship bill, which was approved by MPs last week but faces scrutiny in the House of Lords, essentially hands the government the right to deport anyone arriving illegally in the United Kingdom. “It’s incredibly dangerous, hostile, cruel, and fundamentally unworkable,” migration policy expert and campaigner Zoe Gardner told CNN.
And experts say it deliberately misses the point. “Deterrents don’t work… There is absolutely no correlation whatsoever between how brutally we respond to migration, and the numbers of people forced to move,” Gardner said. “We need a functioning asylum system where we process people’s claims, (and) we need to give people safe routes in order to travel.”
Braverman, however, is steadfast in the face of criticism. The Home Office told CNN in a statement that her bill “will break the business model of the people smuggling gangs and restore fairness to our asylum system. It will ensure anyone arriving via small boat or other dangerous and illegal means will be in scope for detention and swiftly removed.”
Braverman’s plans have won praise from Europe’s leading populist figures, including Italy’s hardline deputy leader Matteo Salvini and French far-right presidential candidate Eric Zemmour.
But that is company many in the Conservatives feel uncomfortable keeping.
“The UK’s ability to play a role internationally is based on our reputation – not because we’re British, but because of what we stand for and what we do,” ex-Prime Minister Theresa May said in a stinging intervention in the House of Commons last month. May added last week that the bill’s removal of modern slavery protections “will consign victims to remaining in slavery.”
And Sayeeda Warsi, the first Asian chair of the Tory party, has attacked what she described as Braverman’s “racist rhetoric,” after Braverman prompted controversy by singling out British Pakistani men when attacking grooming gangs in the country.
“Braverman’s own ethnic origin has shielded her from criticism for too long,” Warsi wrote in The Guardian. “Black and brown people can be racist too.” The Home Office told CNN that Braverman “has been clear that all despicable child abusers must be brought to justice. And she will not shy away from telling hard truths, particularly when it comes to the grooming of young women and girls in Britain’s towns who have been failed by authorities over decades.”
Braverman fronts a newer, more populist streak in the UK’s ruling party – a move that has troubled some of its grandees but has found an audience among voters.
“The voters that she’s appealing to is the majority of the British public,” said James Johnson, who ran polling in May’s Downing Street operation and later founded the JL Partners pollster. “There is a very significant disconnect between what people on Twitter about immigration, and what people actually think about immigration.
“Voters do not react to (Braverman’s) language with the same outrage that some people do,” he told CNN. “(They) want their politicians to at least be trying.”
Polling shows that approval of Braverman’s tough stance on migration significantly outpaces support for the government in general – as well as approval of Braverman herself – with research often indicating that a slim majority of the public supports her plans.
And those who support her – particularly those in Euroskeptic circles, where she is almost revered – say Braverman speaks to the concerns of modern Britain in a way that her more seasoned critics cannot. “When finally even I wobbled about backing Brexit in name only, Suella stood firm,” prominent Brexit backer Steve Baker said when he supported her leadership campaign last year, praising Braverman’s resolve to defeat May’s Brexit deal and push for a harder-line departure from the EU. “It wouldn’t have happened without her.”
But research has also shown that the importance of immigration to British voters has receded since the bitter debates of the mid-2010s.
It appears inevitable that the Tories will seek to make migration a wedge issue at the next election, ensuring Braverman plenty of airtime as the government looks to draw a contrast between itself and the Labour party. But a series of brutal electoral results in local polls on Thursday will further fuel questions about whether that is a winning strategy.
Braverman’s political coming-of-age took place just as the 2016 EU referendum shifted the tectonic plates underneath Westminster, giving younger, Euroskeptic voices like hers an inroad with the public.
It was Braverman’s role fronting an anti-EU backbench committee that “propelled her to her (current) position, and she knows it,” former Conservative MP Antoinette Sandbach told CNN.
Today, she takes the populist mantle further than many of her peers on a range of matters far beyond Brexit. Braverman appears to relish “culture war” confrontations with her political enemies like few other frontline politicians; “you almost feel sometimes that she gets a kick out of ‘owning the libs,’” the politics professor Bale told CNN.
She has taken aim at the “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati” from the despatch box, and insisted she will “not be hectored by out-of-touch lefties.” In 2019, she said she considers herself engaged in a “battle against cultural Marxism.”
Braverman’s Home Office recently reportedly backed two pub landlords who refused to remove their minstrel-style children’s toys that are considered a racist relic of the 1970s. And she has criticized police officers for “virtue signaling,” saying in a speech last week that “they shouldn’t be taking the knee.”
But those battles have left some traditional Tories cold. “The Conservative Party has moved right since I joined, and become much more like the MAGA Republicans” since the dividing line of 2016, said Sandbach, who was expelled from the party by Boris Johnson after trying to avert a no-deal Brexit. She subsequently joined the Liberal Democrats.
Those who worked alongside Braverman describe her as friendly and personable, and few doubt her ambition.
As 23-year-old Suella Fernandes, she nearly ran against her own mother to become the Tory candidate in a 2003 by-election, until the elder Fernandes – a Conservative councilor and NHS nurse – persuaded her to pull out.
Braverman succeeded in becoming an MP in 2015. In a series of tweets that bemoaned her “lamentable hopelessness,” one of her more critical backbenchers, William Wragg, claimed she asked in her first week in Parliament whether she could expense a fine for speeding.
But her determination to drive towards power has served her well. No politician emerged more triumphant from the psychodrama that has transfixed British politics than Braverman, who started 2022 as attorney general and ended it a household name – having served in three different Cabinets, twice as home secretary.
An initial departure from frontline politics theoretically came amid scandal (Braverman resigned for breaching ministerial rules by using a private email address), but her scathing parting letter turned her misconduct into a maneuver, essentially pulling the plug on Truss’s shambolic tenure.
“I have made a mistake; I accept responsibility: I resign,” Braverman wrote, in a thinly veiled attempt to contrast herself with Truss. Six days later she was back in the same post, having aligned herself with Sunak’s successful leadership bid.
Few doubt Braverman’s long-term ambitions. “You have to interpret everything Suella Braverman does and says in the light of the leadership contest that many people assume will take place if… Sunak were to lose the next election,” Bale said.
Crucial to that target is her reputation among party members and its more hardline MPs. It is those groups that pick a party leader, and she is met enthusiastically by grassroots Conservatives who tend to reflect the more right-wing, populist traits of the bloc.
That prospect undoubtedly perturbs some. “There will be many Tory MPs who simply could not stomach her as leader,” Bale added. “I think the lack of support she received in her leadership bid (last year) reflects how she was seen by the party as a whole,” Sandbach said.
Nevertheless, Braverman is storming up the approval rankings among ordinary Conservative members. In its latest monthly league table of Cabinet ministers, the ConservativeHome website – widely regarded as having its finger on the pulse of the grassroots party – puts Braverman fourth from the top with a net approval rating of 47.8. Only last November, she was sixth from bottom in the site’s regular survey of party members. “The panel seems to have decided that if the Government fails to stop the boats it won’t be for want of the Home Secretary trying,” wrote the website’s editors in April.
Should Braverman succeed at her next bid for the party leadership, her critics fear another rightwards shift in British politics.
“Braverman has taken some cues from the US, and also from history,” Gardner said. “She’s recognized that in the current political climate, her way of creating an impact… (is) positioning herself as a Trump tribute act.
“She’s setting herself up to lead a more extreme, right-wing populist version of the Tory party.”
LONDON — In a ceremony of pageantry, quirks and ancient tradition, King Charles III, Britain’s 62nd monarch, was on Saturday officially crowned head of state of the United Kingdom and 14 Commonwealth realms.
The king, who succeeds his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, was coronated at London’s Westminster Abbey alongside his wife Camilla in a two-hour ceremony attended by world leaders, members of the royal family, foreign dignitaries, faith leaders, and heads of state.
The historic event was overseen by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and punctuated with rituals, regalia, and objects dating back centuries.
These included oaths, spurs, a Jewelled Sword of Offering, various sceptres and an orb. The king was anointed with holy oil via a coronation spoon, while the watching public were offered the chance to declare their loyalty by proclaiming: “God save King Charles.”
Among the 2,000 guests were French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte. First Lady Jill Biden, the wife of U.S. President Joe Biden, was also present, accompanied by her granddaughter, Finnegan. They wore blue and gold attire respectively, interpreted as support for Ukraine, whose flags share the same colors.
The U.S. president himself chose not to attend, but wrote on Twitter: “Congratulations to King Charles III and Queen Camilla on their Coronation. The enduring friendship between the U.S. and the U.K. is a source of strength for both our peoples. I am proud the First Lady is representing the United States for this historic occasion.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sat beside President of the European Council Charles Michel, despite long-standing tensions between Brussels’ two most prominent politicians. European Parliament President Roberta Metsola was also in the congregation.
U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry was seen speaking briefly to former U.K. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, now president for global affairs at Meta. King Charles has been a life-long campaigner on the environment.
U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who gave a reading during the service, was joined by senior members of his Cabinet and as well as all his living predecessors, including Tony Blair, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss — the latter having served in Downing Street for just 49 days last year. Commons Leader Penny Mordaunt, a member of Sunak’s Cabinet, took a leading role in the ceremony, carrying the sword of state due to her ceremonial role as lord president of the privy council.
Keir Starmer, leader of the U.K.’s opposition Labour Party, sat next to the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, while leaders of the devolved nations in the U.K. were also in attendance. Prince Harry was seated among members of the U.K. royal family, though his wife, Meghan Markle, remained in California with their children.
Also present were the presidents of Germany and Italy, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Sergio Mattarella, China’s vice-president, Han Zheng, and the prime minister of Pakistan, Shehbaz Sharif. Han’s attendance had been a subject of controversy in the U.K. due to his central role in China’s repression of Hong Kong.
There were also leaders from the 14 Commonwealth nations for whom Charles is head of state, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and New Zealand’s Chris Hipkins, as well as representatives from Grenada, Papa New Guinea, the Bahamas and others.
Celebrities such as singer Katy Perry, chef Jamie Oliver, actor Emma Thompson, and British TV duo Ant and Dec also took seats in the Abbey.
Thousands of flag-carrying members of the public gathered along the procession route | Niklaas Halle’n/AFP via Getty Images
Britain is a constitutional monarchy, and as head of state King Charles has a ceremonial role in opening and dissolving parliament, appointing a government, and approving bills before they become law. He also meets weekly with Sunak, the prime minister.
However, the ability to make and pass legislation rests with politicians in an elected parliament.
Thousands of flag-carrying members of the public enjoyed another British tradition — light summer drizzle — as they gathered in the early hours along the procession route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey. Before the coronation, the head of the U.K.’s leading republican movement, which held a protest in Trafalgar Square, was among those arrested by police.
Members of the royal family were gathered on the Buckingham Palace balcony later Saturday afternoon ahead of a series of celebratory events taking place Sunday, including a pop concert at Windsor Castle. Monday has been designated a public holiday in Britain to mark the occasion.
This article is being updated as the ceremonies continue.
Boris Johnson’s political career ended on Wednesday, with stuttering and fake politesse.
Seated before a U.K. House of Commons committee poised to rule on whether he lied to parliament about Partygate, Johnson was far from his element. Beneath the ghost of his famous bonhomie and the half-conceived rhetoric, I saw anger segueing to bafflement: A man who has been forgiven all his life, now unforgiven. He should rewatch the original “House of Cards”: nothing lasts forever.
If Johnson once coasted on the times, now he is cursed by them. Britain has a new seriousness and a new PM: In politics, a bookie is followed by a bishop, to borrow the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge’s famous phrase. (I’m not including Liz Truss, who is owed a special category of her own.)
Johnson may be suspended from parliament if the committee finds against him, and he may then lose his seat. The classicist in him will understand: He is most in danger from his friends. The committee’s Tory questioners were more savage, but they have been more deeply betrayed. He is an embarrassment now. They will throw him overboard for a percentage point. When the committee paused for a vote, he led a rebellion against the government on the Windsor Framework, Rishi Sunak’s solution to Johnson’s own Brexit deal. Only 22 out of 354 Tory MPs followed him. This is how he departs.
The hearing took place in a dull room with expensive furniture that looked cheap and a mad mural of leaves in his eye line. Johnson isn’t in politics for dull rooms: He’s in it to ride his motorbike around Chequers.
Harriet Harman, the Labour MP and Mother of the House, was in the chair wearing black, as precise as Johnson is chaotic, with a necklace that looked like a chain. Was it metaphor? Harman has spent her career supporting female parliamentarians. Then a man who said voting Tory would give wives bigger breasts won an 80-seat majority in 2019. But that was a whole pandemic ago.
Johnson was there to defend himself against the charge that he repeatedly lied to parliament when he said guidance was followed in No. 10. His strategy was distraction: obscuration, and repetition, and sentences that tripped along ring roads, going nowhere.
He has never been so boring: No one listening ever wants to hear the word “guidance” again. If the ability to inflict boredom was his defense, it was also his destruction. Johnson is supposed to be a seducer with a fascinating narrative arc ― one of his campaign videos aped the film “Love Actually” ― not a bore. But needs must. The fascination was thrown overboard.
He swore to tell the truth on a fawn-colored Bible, but he did not look at it. He rocked on his heels. He has had a haircut: As ever, his hair emotes for him. The mop, so redolent of Samson ― he would muss it before big speeches, to disguise that he cared ― is a sullen bowl now. He looked haunted. Lord Pannick, his lawyer, smiled behind him. His resting face is a smile, and he needed it.
Johnson told Harman there would soon be a Commons vote, as if she, Mother of the House, didn’t know. She said she would suspend proceedings for the vote, and he talked over her with a flurry of thanks. He thanked her four times. He didn’t mean it.
He read a statement: “I’m here to say to you, hand on heart, that I did not lie to the House.” He made a fist, and placed his hand on his chest where his heart isn’t: on the right-hand side. He said there was a near-universal belief in No. 10 that the guidance was followed, and that is why he said so to the House.
He shuffled his papers, as handsome Bernard Jenkin, a Tory, began the questioning with exaggerated gravity, to indicate that the Tories are through with levity. He reminded Johnson that he had regularly said “hands, face, space” while standing behind podiums that said also said, “hands, face, space,” which indicated he understand the guidance.
People sit in the Red Lion pub in London as former Prime Minister Boris Johnson giving evidence on Partygate is shown on the TV | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
They discussed the leaving party of Lee Cain, Johnson’s former director of communications. There were 15-20 people there, Jenkin reminded him, you gave a speech. Johnson said guidance was followed, at least while he was there. Jenkin pressed him. “I don’t accept that people weren’t making an effort to distance themselves socially from each other,” Johnson said, while we gazed at a photograph of people standing next to each other. And this was how it was for 300 minutes: We were invited to ignore the evidence of our own eyes, even asthey chilled with boredom.
Johnson insisted: “It was necessary because two senior members of staff were about to leave the building in pretty acrimonious circumstances. It was important for me to be there and to give reassurance.” This fits the Johnson myth. He was there for morale, while others governed, because that’s boring. I am not sure that the leaving party of a press aide is a matter of state, but Johnson always lived for headlines. Even so, he pleaded: We had sanitizers, we kept windows open, we had Zoom meetings, we had Perspex screens between desks, we had regular testing ― way beyond what the guidance advised!
“If you had said all that at the time to the House of Commons, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here,” said Jenkin mildly, even sympathetically, and that’s when I knew it was over. Tories are awfully like characters from “The Godfather” sometimes: murderers come with smiles. “But you didn’t.”
Jenkin read the guidance to him: “You must maintain social distancing in the workplace wherever possible.” “The business of the government had to be carried on!” Johnson cried. “That is what I had to do!” No one replied: “It was Lee Cain’s leaving do, you maniac.”
On it went, trench warfare. Johnson didn’t seem to understand that he wasn’t describing an absence of law-breaking, but a culture of it. In his wine-filled wood, he couldn’t see a tree. Committee members suggested he breached the guidance. He said he didn’t ― and if it should have been obvious to him that he was breaching it, it should have been obvious to Rishi Sunak too. They asked him why he didn’t take proper advice when talking to the House. (Because he trusted the press office. His people. Lawyers aren’t his people.)
Bernard Jenkin said: “I put it to you, Mr. Johnson, that you did not take proper advice.” Johnson’s thumb stroked his other thumb. He exploded with tangents, and eventually half-shouted: “This is nonsense, I mean complete nonsense!” Lord Pannick’s smile slid down his face. He blinked.
I would like to say this is the last gasp for Johnson’s faux-aristocratic style, with its entitlement and its pseudo-intellectualism, but his danger was ever in his precedent. It is always pleasing when a narcissist is exposed, and by himself, but there will be another one along soon enough. I wonder if its hair will have its own cuttings file.
Amid his word salad, Johnson told Harman she had said things that were “plainly and wrongly prejudicial, or prejudge the very issue you are adjudicating.” She told him the assurances he used to inform parliament had been “flimsy.” Finally, he said he’d much enjoyed the day. (He lied.) The question, as ever with Johnson, is ― does he believe it himself? Truthfully, it doesn’t matter now.
LONDON — Britain was rebuffed by the Biden administration after multiple requests to develop an advanced trade and technology dialogue similar to structures the U.S. set up with the European Union.
On visits to Washington as a Cabinet minister over the past two years, Liz Truss urged U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and senior Biden administration officials to intensify talks with the U.K. to build clean technology supply chains and boost collaboration on artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductors.
After Truss became prime minister in fall 2022, the idea was floated again when Raimondo visited London last October, people familiar with the conversations told POLITICO. But fear of angering the U.S.’s European partners and the U.K.’s diminished status outside the EU post-Brexit have posed barriers to influencing Washington.
Businesses, lawmakers and experts worry the U.K. is being left on the sidelines.
“We tried many times,” said a former senior Downing Street official, of the British government’s efforts to set up a U.K. equivalent to the U.S.-E.U. Trade and Technology Council (TTC), noting Truss’ overtures began as trade chief in July 2021. They requested anonymity to speak on sensitive issues.
“We did speak to Gina Raimondo about that, saying ‘we think it would be a good opportunity,’” said the former official — not necessarily to join the EU-U.S. talks directly, “but to increase trilateral cooperation.”
Set up in June 2021, the TTC forum co-chaired by Raimondo, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. trade chief Katherine Tai gives their EU counterparts, Margrethe Vestager and Valdis Dombrovskis, a direct line to shape tech and trade policy.
The U.S. is pushing forward with export controls on advanced semiconductors to China; forging new secure tech supply chains away from Beijing; and spurring innovation through subsidies for cutting-edge green technology and microprocessors.
The TTC’s 10 working groups with the EU, Raimondo said in an interview late last year, “set the standards,” though Brussels has rebuffed Washington’s efforts to use the transatlantic body to go directly after Beijing.
But the U.K. “is missing the boat on not being completely engaged in that dialogue,” said a U.S.-based representative of a major business group. “There has been some discussion about the U.K. perhaps joining the TTC,” they confirmed, and “it was kind of mooted, at least in private” with Raimondo by the Truss administration on her visit to London last October.
The response from the U.S. had been ‘’let’s work with what we’ve got at the moment,’” said the former Downing Street official.
Even if the U.S. does want to talk, “they don’t want to irritate the Europeans,” the same former official added. Right now the U.K.’s conversations with the U.S. on these issues are “ad hoc” under the new Atlantic Charter Boris Johnson and Joe Biden signed around the G7 summit in 2021, they said, and “nothing institutional.”
Last October, Washington and London held the first meeting of the data and tech forum Johnson and Biden set up | Pool photo by Olivier Matthys/AFP via Getty Images
Securing British access to the U.S.-EU tech forum or an equivalent was also discussed when CBI chief Tony Danker was in Washington last July, said people familiar with conversations during his visit.
The U.K.’s science and tech secretary, Michelle Donelan, confirmed the British government had discussed establishing a more regular channel for tech and trade discussions with the U.S., both last October and more recently. “My officials have just been out [to the U.S.],” she told POLITICO. “They’ve had very productive conversations.”
A U.K. government spokesperson said: “The U.K. remains committed to working closely with the U.S. and EU to further our shared trade and technology objectives, through the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, the U.S.-U.K. Future of Atlantic Trade dialogues, and the U.K.-U.S. technology partnership.
“We will continue to advance U.K. interests in trade and technology and explore further areas of cooperation with partners where it is mutually beneficial.”
Britain the rule-taker?
Last October, Washington and London held the first meeting of the data and tech forum Johnson and Biden set up. Senior officials hoped to get a deal securing the free flow of data between the U.S. and U.K. across the line and addressed similar issues as the TTC.
They couldn’t secure the data deal. The U.K. is expected to join a U.S.-led effort to expand data transfer rules baked into the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation trading agreement as soon as this year, according to a former and a current British official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The next formal meeting between the U.K. and U.S. is penciled in for January 2024.
Ongoing dialogue “is vital to secure an overarching agreement on U.K.-U.S. data flows, without which modern day business cannot function,” said William Bain, head of trade policy at the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC). “It would also provide an opportunity to set the ground rules around a host of other technological developments.”
In contrast, the U.S. and EU are always at work, with TTC officials in constant contact with the operation — though questions have been raised about how long-term the transatlantic cooperation is likely to prove, ahead of next year’s U.S. presidential election.
“Unless you have a structured system or set up, often overseen by ministers, you don’t really get the drive to actually get things done,” said the former Downing Street official.
Right now cooperation with the U.S. on tech issues is not as intense or structured as desired, the same former official said, and is “not really brought together” in one central forum.
Britain has yet to publish a formal semiconductor strategy | Thomas Coex/AFP via Getty Images
“This initiative [the TTC] between the world’s two regulatory powerhouses risks sidelining the U.K.,” warned lawmakers on the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee in a report last October. Britain may become “a rule-taker rather than a rule-maker,” MPs noted, citing the government’s “ambiguous” position on technology standards. Britain has yet to publish a formal semiconductor strategy, and others on critical minerals — like those used in EV batteries — or AI are also missing.
Over the last two years, U.S. trade chief Tai has “spoken regularly to her three successive U.K. counterparts to identify and tackle shared economic and trade priorities,” said a spokesperson for the U.S. Trade Representative, adding “we intend to continue strengthening this partnership in the years to come.”
All eyes on Europe
For its part, the EU has to date shown little interest in closer cooperation with the U.K.
Three European Commission officials disregarded the likelihood of Britain joining the club, though one of those officials said that London may be asked to join — alongside other like-minded countries — for specific discussions related to ongoing export bans against Russia.
Even with last week’s breakthrough over the Northern Ireland protocol calming friction between London and Brussels, the U.K. was not a priority country for involvement in the TTC, added another of the EU officials.
“The U.K. was extremely keen to be part of a dialogue of some sort of equivalent of TTC,” said a senior business representative in London, who requested anonymity to speak about sensitive issues.
U.K. firms see “the Holy Grail” as Britain, the U.S. and EU working together on this, they said. “We’re very keen to see a triangular dialogue at some point.”
The U.K.’s haggling with the EU over the details of the Northern Ireland protocol governing trade in the region has posed “a political obstacle” to realizing that vision, they suggested.
Yet with a solution to the dispute announced in late February, the same business figure said, “there will be a more prominent push to work together with the U.K.”
TTC+
Some trade experts think the UK would increase its chances of accession to the TTC if it submitted a joint request with other nations.
But prior to that happening, “I think the EU-U.S. TTC will need to first deliver bilaterally,” said Sabina Ciofu, an international tech policy expert at the trade body techUK.
Representatives speak to the media following the Trade and Technology Council Meeting in Maryland | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
When there is momentum, Ciofu said, the U.K. should join forces with Japan, South Korea and other advanced economies to ask for a TTC+ that could include the G7 or other partners. At the last TTC meeting in December, U.S. and EU officials said they were open to such an expansion around specific topics that had global significance.
But not all trade experts think this is essential. Andy Burwell, director of international trade at the CBI, said he doesn’t “think it necessarily matters” whether the U.K. has a structured conversation with the U.S. like the TTC forum.
Off the back of a soon-to-be-published refresh of the Integrated Review — the U.K.’s national security and foreign policy strategy — Prime Minister Rishi Sunak should instead seize the opportunity, Burwell said, to pinpoint where Britain is “going to own, collaborate and have access to various aspects of the supply chains.”
The G7, Burwell said, “could be the right platform for having some of those conversations.”
Yet the “danger with the ad hoc approach with lots of different people is incoherence,” said the former Downing Street official quoted above.
Too many countries involved in setting the standards can, the former official said, “create difficulty in leveraging what you want — which is all of the countries agreeing together on a certain way forward … especially when you’re dealing with issues that relate to, for example, China.”
Additional reporting by Mark Scott, Annabelle Dickson and Tom Bristow
LONDON — It was clear when Boris Johnson was forced from Downing Street that British politics had changed forever.
But few could have predicted that less than six months later, all angry talk of a cross-Channel trade war would be a distant memory, with Britain and the EU striking a remarkable compromise deal over post-Brexit trade rules in Northern Ireland.
Private conversations with more than a dozen U.K. and EU officials, politicians and diplomats reveal how the Brexit world changed completely after Johnson’s departure — and how an “unholy trinity” of little-known civil servants, ensconced in a gloomy basement in Brussels, would mastermind a seismic shift in Britain’s relationship with the Continent.
They were aided by an unlikely sequence of political events in Westminster — not least an improbable change of mood under the combative Liz Truss; and then the jaw-dropping rise to power of the ultra-pragmatic Rishi Sunak. Even the amiable figure of U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly would play his part, glad-handing his way around Europe and smoothing over cracks that had grown ever-wider since 2016.
As Sunak’s Conservative MPs pore over the detail of his historic agreement with Brussels — and await the all-important verdict of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland — POLITICO has reconstructed the dramatic six-month shift in Britain’s approach that brought us to the brink of the Brexit deal we see today.
Bye-bye Boris
Johnson’s departure from Downing Street, on September 6, triggered an immediate mood shift in London toward the EU — and some much-needed optimism within the bloc about future cross-Channel relations.
For key figures in EU capitals, Johnson would always be the untrustworthy figure who signed the protocol agreement only to disown it months afterward.
In Paris, relations were especially poisonous, amid reports of Johnson calling the French “turds”; endless spats with the Elysée over post-Brexit fishing rights, sausages and cross-Channel migrants; and Britain’s role in the AUKUS security partnership, which meant the loss of a multi-billion submarine contract for France. Paris’ willingness to engage with Johnson was limited in the extreme.
Truss, despite her own verbal spats with French President Emmanuel Macron — and her famously direct approach to diplomacy — was viewed in a different light. Her success at building close rapport with negotiating partners had worked for her as trade secretary, and once she became prime minister, she wanted to move beyond bilateral squabbles and focus on global challenges, including migration, energy and the war in Ukraine.
“Boris had become ‘Mr. Brexit,’” one former U.K. government adviser said. “He was the one the EU associated with the protocol, and obviously [Truss] didn’t come with the same baggage. She had covered the brief, but she didn’t have the same history. As prime minister, Liz wanted to use her personal relationships to move things on — but that wasn’t the same as a shift in the underlying substance.”
Indeed, Truss was still clear on the need to pass the controversial Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which would have given U.K. ministers powers to overrule part of the protocol unilaterally, in order to ensure leverage in the talks with the European Commission.
Truss also triggered formal dispute proceedings against Brussels for blocking Britain’s access to the EU’s Horizon Europe research program. And her government maintained Johnson’s refusal to implement checks on goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain, causing deep irritation in Brussels.
But despite the noisy backdrop, tentative contact with Brussels quietly resumed in September, with officials on both sides trying to rebuild trust. Truss, however, soon became “very disillusioned by the lack of pragmatism from the EU,” one of her former aides said.
“The negotiations were always about political will, not technical substance — and for whatever reason, the political will to compromise from the Commission was never there when Liz, [ex-negotiator David] Frost, Boris were leading things,” they said.
Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss announces her resignation outside 10 Downing Street in central London on October 20, 2022 | Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images
Truss, of course, would not be leading things for long. An extraordinary meltdown of the financial markets precipitated her own resignation in late October, after just six weeks in office. Political instability in Westminster once again threatened to derail progress.
But Sunak’s arrival in No. 10 Downing Street — amid warnings of a looming U.K. recession — gave new impetus to the talks. An EU official said the mood music improved further, and that discussions with London became “much more constructive” as a result.
David Lidington, a former deputy to ex-PM Theresa May who played a key role in previous Brexit negotiations, describes Sunak as a “globalist” rather than an “ultra-nationalist,” who believes Britain ought to have “a sensible, friendly and grown-up relationship” with Brussels outside the EU.
During his time as chancellor, Sunak was seen as a moderating influence on his fellow Brexiteer Cabinet colleagues, several of whom seemed happy to rush gung-ho toward a trade war with the EU.
“Rishi has always thought of the protocol row as a nuisance, an issue he wanted to get dealt with,” the former government adviser first quoted said.
One British officialsuggested the new prime minister’s reputation for pragmatism gave the U.K. negotiating team “an opportunity to start again.”
Sunak’s slow decision-making and painstaking attention to detail — the subject of much criticism in Whitehall — proved useful in calming EU jitters about the new regime, they added.
“When he came in, it wasn’t just the calming down of the markets. It was everyone across Europe and in the U.S. thinking ‘OK, they’re done going through their crazy stage,’” the same officialsaid. “It’s the time he takes with everything, the general steadiness.”
EU leaders “have watched him closely, they listened to what he said, and they have been prepared to trust him and see how things go,” Lidington noted.
Global backdrop
As months of chaos gave way to calm in London, the West was undergoing a seismic reorganization.
Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered a flurry of coordinated work for EU and U.K. diplomats — including sanctions, military aid, reconstruction talks and anti-inflation packages. A sense began to emerge that it was in both sides’ common interest to get the Northern Ireland protocol row out of the way.
“The war in Ukraine has completely changed the context over the last year,” an EU diplomat said.
A second U.K. official agreed. “Suddenly we realized that the 2 percent of the EU border we’d been arguing about was nothing compared to the massive border on the other side of the EU, which Putin was threatening,” they said. “And suddenly there wasn’t any electoral benefit to keeping this row over Brexit going — either for us or for governments across the EU.”
A quick glance at the electoral calendar made it clear 2023 offered the last opportunity to reach a deal in the near future, with elections looming for both the U.K. and EU parliaments the following year — effectively putting any talks on ice.
“Rishi Sunak would have certainly been advised by his officials that come 2024, the EU is not going to be wanting to take any new significant initiatives,” Lidington said. “And we will be in election mode.”
The upcoming 25th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday peace agreement on April 10 heaped further pressure on the U.K. negotiators, amid interest from U.S. President Joe Biden in visiting Europe to mark the occasion.
“The anniversary was definitely playing on people’s minds,” the first U.K. official said.“Does [Sunak] really want to be the prime minister when there’s no government in Northern Ireland on the anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement?”
The pressure was ramped up further when Biden specifically raised the protocol in a meeting with Truss at the U.N. General Assembly in New York in late September, after which British officials said they expected the 25th anniversary to act as a “key decision point” on the dispute.
The King and I
Whitehall faced further pressure from another unlikely source — King Charles III, who was immediately planning a state visit to Paris within weeks of ascending the throne in September 2022. Truss had suggested delaying the visit until the protocol row was resolved, according to two European diplomats.
The monarch is now expected to visit Paris and Berlin at the end of March — and although his role is strictly apolitical, few doubt he is taking a keen interest in proceedings. He has raised the protocol in recent conversations with European diplomats, showing a close engagement with the detail.
One former senior diplomat involved in several of the king’s visits said that Charles has long held “a private interest in Ireland, and has wanted to see if there was an appropriately helpful role he could play in improving relations [with the U.K].”
By calling the deal the Windsor framework and presenting it at a press conference in front of Windsor Castle, one of the king’s residences, No. 10 lent Monday’s proceedings an unmistakable royal flavor.
The king also welcomed von der Leyen for tea at the castle following the signing of the deal. A Commission spokesperson insisted their meeting was “separate” from the protocol discussion talks. Tory MPs were skeptical.
Cleverly does it
The British politician tasked with improving relations with Brussels was Foreign Secretary Cleverly, appointed by Truss last September. He immediately began exploring ways to rebuild trust with Commission Vice-President and Brexit point-man Maroš Šefčovič, the second U.K. official cited said.
His first hurdle was a perception in Brussels that the British team had sabotaged previous talks by leaking key details to U.K. newspapers and hardline Tory Brexiteers for domestic political gain. As a result, U.K. officials made a conscious effort to keep negotiations tightly sealed, a No. 10 official said.
“The relationship with Maroš improved massively when we agreed not to carry out a running commentary” on the content of the discussions, the second U.K. official added.
This meant keeping key government ministers out of the loop, including Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker, an arch-Brexiteer who had been brought back onto the frontbench by Truss.
British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly is welcomed by European Commission Vice-President Maroš Šefčovič ahead of a meeting at the EU headquarters in Brussels on February 17, 2023 | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
The first U.K. official said Baker would have “felt the pain,” as he had little to offer his erstwhile backbench colleagues looking for guidance while negotiations progressed, “and that was a choice by No. 10.”
Cleverly and Šefčovič “spent longer than people think just trying to build rapport,” the second U.K. officialsaid, with Cleverly explaining the difficulties the protocol was raising in Northern Ireland and Šefčovič insistent that key economic sectors were in fact benefiting from the arrangement.
Cleverly also worked at the bilateral relationship with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, while Sunak made efforts to improve ties with French President Emmanuel Macron, Lidington noted.
A British diplomat based in Washington said Cleverly had provided “a breath of fresh air” after the “somewhat stiff” manner of his predecessors, Truss and the abrasive Dominic Raab.
By the Conservative party conference in early October, the general mood among EU diplomats in attendance was one of expectation. And the Birmingham jamboree did not disappoint.
Sorry is the hardest word
Baker, who had once described himself as a “Brexit hard man,” stunned Dublin by formally apologizing to the people of Ireland for his past comments, just days before technical talks between the Commission and the U.K. government were due to resume.
“I caused a great deal of inconvenience and pain and difficulty,” he said. “Some of our actions were not very respectful of Ireland’s legitimate interests. I want to put that right.”
The apology was keenly welcomed in Dublin, where Micheál Martin, the Irish prime minister at the time, called it “honest and very, very helpful.”
Irish diplomats based in the U.K. met Baker and other prominent figures from the European Research Group of Tory Euroskeptics at the party conference, where Baker spoke privately of his “humility” and his “resolve” to address the issues, a senior Irish diplomat said.
“Resolve was the keyword,” the envoy said. “If Steve Baker had the resolve to work for a transformation of relationships between Ireland and the U.K., then we thought — there were tough talks to be had — but a sustainable deal was now a possibility.”
There were other signs of rapprochement. Just a few hours after Baker’s earth-shattering apology, Truss confirmed her attendance at the inaugural meeting in Prague of the European Political Community, a new forum proposed by Macron open to both EU and non-EU countries.
Sunak at the wheel
The momentum snowballed under Sunak, who decided within weeks of becoming PM to halt the passage of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill in the House of Lords, reiterating Britain’s preference for a negotiated settlement. In exchange, the Commission froze a host of infringement proceedings taking aim at the way the U.K. was handling the protocol. This created space for talks to proceed in a more cordial environment.
An EU-U.K. agreement in early January allowed Brussels to start using a live information system detailing goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, seen as key to unlocking a wider agreement on physical checks under the protocol.
The U.K. also agreed to conduct winter technical negotiations in Brussels, rather than alternating rounds between the EU capital and London, as was the case when Frost served as Britain’s chief negotiator.
Trust continued to build. Suddenly the Commission was open to U.K. solutions such as the “Stormont brake,” a clause giving the Northern Ireland Assembly power of veto over key protocol machinations, which British officials did not believe Brussels would accept when they first pitched them.
The Stormont brake was discussed “relatively early on,” a third U.K. official said. “Then we spent a huge amount of effort making sure nobody knew about it. It was kept the most secret of secret things.”
Yet a second EU diplomat claimed the ideas in the deal were not groundbreaking and could have been struck “years ago” if Britain had a prime minister with enough political will to solve the dispute. “None of the solutions that have been found now is revolutionary,” they said.
An ally of Johnson described the claim he was a block on progress as “total nonsense.”
The ‘unholy trinity’
Away from the media focus, a group of seasoned U.K. officials began to engage with their EU counterparts in earnest. But there was one (not so) new player in town.
Tim Barrow, a former U.K. permanent representative to the EU armed with a peerless contact book, had been an active figure in rebuilding relations with the bloc since Truss appointed him national security adviser. He acquired a more prominent role in the protocol talks after Sunak dispatched him to Brussels in January 2023, hoping EU figures would see him as “almost one of them,” another adviser to Sunak said.
Ensconced in the EU capital, Barrow and his U.K. team of negotiators took over several meeting rooms in the basement of the U.K. embassy, while staffers were ordered to keep quiet about their presence.
Besides his work on Northern Ireland trade, Barrow began to appear in meetings with EU representatives about other key issues creating friction in the EU-U.K. relationship, including discussions on migration alongside U.K. Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
Barrow “positioned himself very well,” the first EU diplomat quoted above said. “He’s very close to the prime minister — everybody in Brussels and London knows he’s got his ear. He’s very knowledgeable while very political.”
But other British officials insist Barrow’s presence was not central to driving through the deal. “He has been a figure, but not the only figure,” the U.K. adviser quoted above said. “It’s been a lot of people, actually, over quite a period of time.”
When it came to the tough, detailed technical negotiations, the burden fell on the shoulders of Mark Davies — the head of the U.K. taskforce praised for his mastery of the protocol detail — and senior civil servant and former director of the Northern Ireland Office, Brendan Threlfall.
The three formed an “unholy trinity,” as described by the first U.K. official, with each one bringing something to the table.
Davies was “a classic civil servant, an unsung hero,”the official said, while Threlfall “has good connections, good understanding” and “Tim has met all the EU interlocutors over the years.”
Sitting across the table, the EU team was led by Richard Szostak, a Londoner born to Polish parents and a determined Commission official with a great CV and an affinity for martial arts. His connection to von der Leyen was her deputy head of cabinet until recently, Stéphanie Riso, a former member of Brussels’ Brexit negotiating team who developed a reputation for competence on both sides of the debate.
Other senior figures at the U.K. Cabinet Office played key roles, including Cabinet Secretary Simon Case and senior official Sue Gray.
The latter — a legendary Whitehall enforcer who adjudicated over Johnson’s “Partygate” scandal — has a longstanding connection to Northern Ireland, famously taking a career break in the late 1980s to run a pub in Newry, where she has family links. More recently, she spent two years overseeing the finance ministry.
Gray has been spotted in Stormont at crunch points over the past six months as Northern Ireland grapples with the pain of the continued absence of an executive.
Some predict Gray could yet play a further role, in courting the Democratic Unionist Party as the agreement moves forward in the weeks ahead.
For U.K. and EU officials, the agreement struck with Brussels represented months of hard work — but for Sunak and his Cabinet colleagues, the hardest yards may yet lie ahead.
This story was updated to clarify two parts of the sourcing.
LONDON — Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss argued the U.K. should have “done more earlier” to counter Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric before he invaded Ukraine, and said the West depended on Russian oil for too long.
Truss — the U.K.’s shortest-serving prime minister who resigned amid market turmoil last year — was speaking in a House of Commons debate about Ukraine, her first contribution in the chamber as a backbencher since 2012. She has been increasingly vocal on foreign policy since leaving office.
The former prime minister, who as served foreign secretary for Boris Johnson before succeeding him in the top job, recalled receiving a phone call at 3.30 a.m. on the morning of the invasion, and told MPs: “This was devastating news. But as well as being devastating, it was not unexpected.”
Truss praised the “sheer bravery” of Ukrainians defending their country, as well as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his Cabinet for not fleeing the country in the aftermath. “I remember being on a video conference that evening with the defense secretary and our counterparts, who weren’t in Poland, who weren’t in the United States,” she said of Ukraine’s top team. “They were in Kyiv and they were defending their country,” she added.
But while Truss argued Western sanctions had imposed an economic toll on Putin’s Russia, said urged reflection. “The reason that Putin took the action he took is because he didn’t believe we would follow through,” she argued, and said the West should “hold ourselves to high standards.”
Ukraine, she said, should have been allowed to join NATO.
“We were complacent about freedom and democracy after the Cold War,” she said. “We were told it was the end of history and that freedom and democracy were guaranteed and that we could carry on living our lives not worrying about what else could happen.”
Truss urged the U.K. to do all it could to help Ukraine win the war as soon as possible, including sending fighter jets, an ongoing matter of debate in Western capitals despite Ukrainian pleas.
And the former U.K. prime minister said the West should “never again” be “complacent in the face of Russian money, Russian oil and gas,” tying any future lifting of sanctions “to reform in Russia.”
LONDON — “Back to her old self again” was how one erstwhile colleague described Liz Truss, who made her return to the U.K.’s front pages at the weekend.
That’s exactly what Rishi Sunak and his allies were afraid of.
Truss, who spent 49 turbulent days in No. 10 Downing Street last year, is back. After a respectful period of 13 weeks’ silence, the U.K.’s shortest-serving prime minister exploded back onto the scene with a 4,000-word essay in the Sunday Telegraph complaining that her radical economic agenda was never given a “realistic chance.”
In her first interview since stepping down, broadcast Monday evening, she expanded on this, saying she encountered “system resistance” to her plans as PM and did not get “the level of political support required” to change prevailing attitudes.
While the reception for Truss’s relaunch has not been exactly rapturous — with much of the grumbling coming from within her own party — it still presents a genuine headache for her successor, Sunak, who must now deal with not one but two unruly former prime ministers jostling from the sidelines.
Boris Johnson is also out of a job, but is never far from the headlines. Recent engagements with the U.S. media and high-profile excursions to Kyiv have ensured his strident views on the situation in Ukraine remain well-aired, even as he racks up hundreds of thousands in fees from private speaking engagements around the world.
Wasting no time
Truss and Johnson have, typically, both opted for swifter and more vocal returns to frontline politics than many of their forerunners in the role.
“Most post-war prime ministers have been relatively lucky with their predecessors,” says Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London. “They have tended to follow the lead of [interwar Conservative PM] Stanley Baldwin, who in 1937 promised: ‘Once I leave, I leave. I am not going to speak to the man on the bridge, and I am not going to spit on the deck.’”
Such an approach has never been universal. Ted Heath, PM from 1970-74, made no secret of his disdain for his successor as Tory leader Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher in turn “behaved appallingly” — in Bale’s words — to John Major, who replaced her in Downing Street in 1990 after she was forced from office.
But more recent Tory PMs have kept a respectful distance.
David Cameron quit parliament entirely after losing the EU referendum in 2016, and waited three years before publishing a memoir — reportedly in order to avoid “rocking the boat” during the ongoing Brexit negotiations.
And while Theresa May became an occasional liberal-centrist thorn in Boris Johnson’s side, she did so only after a series of careful, low-profile contributions in the House of Commons on subjects close to her heart, such as domestic abuse and rail services in her hometown of Maidenhead.
“You might expect to see former prime ministers be a tad more circumspect in the way they re-enter the political debate,” says Paul Harrison, former press secretary to May. “But then she [Truss] wasn’t a conventional prime minister in any sense of the word, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that she’s done something very unconventional.”
Truss’s rapid refresh has not met with rave reviews.
Paul Goodman, editor of influential grassroots website ConservativeHome, writes that “rather than concede, move on, and focus on the future, she denies, digs in and reimagines the past,” while Tory MP Richard Graham told Times Radio that Truss’ time in office “was a period that [people] would rather not really remember too clearly.”
One long-serving Conservative MP said “she only had herself to blame for her demise, and we are still clearing up some of the mess.” Another appraised her latest intervention simply with an exploding-head emoji.
Trussites forever
But despite Tory appeals for calm, the refusal of Truss and Johnson to lie low remains a serious worry for the man eventually chosen to lead the party after Truss crashed and burned and Johnson thought better of trying to stage a comeback.
Between them, the two ex-PMs have the ability to highlight two of Sunak’s big weaknesses.
While Truss may never live down the disastrous “mini-budget” of last September which sent the U.K. economy off the rails, her wider policy agenda still has a hold over a number of Conservative MPs who believe they have no hope of winning the election without it.
This was the rationale behind the formation last month of the Conservative Growth Group, a caucus of MPs who will carry the torch for the low-tax, deregulatory approach to government favored by Truss and who continue to complain Sunak has little imagination when it comes to supply-side reforms.
Simon Clarke, who was a Cabinet minister under Truss, insisted “she has thought long and hard” about why her approach failed and “posed important questions” about how the U.K. models economic growth in her Telegraph piece.
Other Conservatives have been advocating a reappraisal of the actions of the Bank of England in the period surrounding the mini-budget, arguing that Truss was unfairly blamed for a collapse in the bond market.
But Harrison doubts whether she may be the best advocate for the causes she represents. “There’s a question about whether it actually best serves her interests in pushing back against a strong prevailing understanding of what happened so soon after leaving office.”
Johnson, meanwhile — to his fans, at least — continues to symbolize the star quality and ballot box appeal which they fear Sunak lacks.
One government aide who has worked with both men said Johnson’s strength lay in his “undeniable charisma” and persuasive power, while Sunak, more prosaically, “was all about hard work.”
These apparent deficiencies feed into a fear among Sunak’s MPs that he is governing too tentatively and, as one ally put it recently, needs to rip off the “cashmere jumper.”
It’s been posited that British prime ministers swing back and forth between “jocks” and “nerds” — and nothing is more likely to underline Sunak’s nerdiness than a pair of recently-deposed jocks refusing to shut up.
Trouble ahead
Unluckily for Sunak, there are at least three big-ticket items coming up which will provide ample ground on which his nemeses can cause trouble.
One is the forthcoming budget — the government’s annual public spending plan, due March 15. Truss and Johnson are unlikely to get personally involved, but Truss loyalists will make a nuisance of themselves if Sunak’s approach is judged to offer the paucity of answers on growth they already fear.
Before that, Truss is expected to make her first public appearance outside the U.K. with a speech on Taiwan which could turn up the heat on Sunak over his approach to relations with China.
One person close to her confirmed China would be “a big thing” for her, and is expected to be a theme of her future parliamentary interventions.
Then there is the small matter of the Northern Ireland protocol, the thorniest unresolved aspect of the Brexit deal with Brussels where tortured negotiations appear to be reaching an endgame.
Sunak has been sitting with a draft version of a technical deal since last week, according to several people with knowledge of the matter, and is now girding his loins for the unenviable task of trying to get a compromise agreement past both his own party and hardline Northern Irish unionists.
A Whitehall official working on the protocol said Johnson “absolutely” had the power to detonate that process, and that “he should never be underestimated as an agent of chaos.”
One option touted by onlookers is for Sunak to attempt to assemble the former prime ministers and ask them to stand behind him on a matter of such huge national and international significance. But as things stand such a get-together is difficult to picture.
At the heart of Johnson and Truss’ actions seems to be an essential disquiet over the explosive manner of their departures.
They appear fated to follow in Thatcher’s footsteps, as Bale puts it — “not caring how much trouble they cause Sunak, because in their view, he should never have taken over from them in the first place.”
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s daughter Anoushka Sunak performed Kuchipudi along with many children at ‘Rang’- International Kuchipudi Dance Festival 2022 in London on Friday.
The dance festival, which was organised to mark India@75, was curated by renowned Kuchipudi dancer Arunima Kumar, where 100 artists, between 4 to 85 years of age, performed to mark the eventful year. Anoushka, 9, after performing at the programme said: “India is the country where I come from. It is a place where family, home, and culture blend together. I love going there every year.”
In an exclusive interview to the India Today TV, Anoushka said: “I love Kuchipudi and dancing, because when you are dancing all your worries and stresses go away and you are in the moment dancing with your all your friends beside you. I love to be on stage.”
Rishi Sunak was elected as the 57th Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in October this year. He is the first Indian-origin person to hold the office. Before that he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He is married to Narayana Murthy, the daughter of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy. They have two daughters – Krishna and Anoushka Sunak.
One month after he was appointed as the PM, a survey found that his popularity remains on stronger ground than that of the governing Conservative Party.
However, Sunak, who took over after Liz Truss, is reportedly facing rebellion by his predecessors Boris Johnson and Liz Truss who have called out Sunak for his government’s controversial tax raises and refusal to allow new onshore wind projects in England.
After six years of chaos and recrimination since Britons voted to leave the European Union, there are signs the country is showing an unexpected outbreak of common sense in its approach to the bloc.
In his first weeks in office, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak — a Brexiteer himself — has sent clear signals that he wants a more constructive relationship with Brussels and Paris, and to avoid a trade war with Britain’s biggest economic partner.
Gone are the nationalist bombast of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the sheer havoc wrought by his successor Liz Truss crashing the economy in pursuit of a Brexit dividend. Instead, they have both given way to a sudden burst of pragmatism, as Sunak is seeking practical solutions to festering problems.
This change in outlook may be partly due to the realization that Europe needs to stand united in the face of a threat to its common security from Russian President Vladimir Putin — although that hadn’t stopped Johnson from bragging about how leaving the EU had supposedly freed the United Kingdom to be more supportive of Ukraine than France or Germany.
It may also be due to the dire economic straits Britain is in after the collapse of Truss’ short-lived experiment for a deregulated, low-tax Singapore-on-the-Thames. Or, perhaps, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s hard line on any EU deal with the U.K. has had a sobering effect. As may have the shift in British public opinion, which now thinks leaving the bloc was a mistake by a margin of 56 percent to 32 percent.
For whatever reason, it is a welcome start.
In just three weeks, Sunak has signed up to an EU defense initiative to make it easier to move armed forces around the Continent, he’s acted to improve Britain’s relations with Ireland, and he’s created political space for a possible compromise on the vexed issue of trade with Northern Ireland, which has bedeviled relations with Brussels since the U.K.’s exit from the EU.
At their first meeting, Sunak told United States President Joe Biden that he wants to have a negotiated settlement on the Northern Ireland Protocol in place by next April — the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday peace agreement. So, sustained pressure from Washington is starting to pay off as well.
The prime minister has also sought to thaw frosty relations with France, clinching an agreement with Paris to clamp down on migrants crossing the Channel from northern France in small boats. Europe’s only two nuclear powers have now agreed to hold their first bilateral summit since 2018 early next year, focusing on strengthening defense cooperation.
To be fair, after saying “the jury is still out” on whether Macron was a friend or foe of the U.K., Truss had already taken a symbolic first step toward reconciliation by agreeing to attend the first meeting of the European Political Community last month. The geopolitical grouping was dreamed up by Macron to bring the entire European family together — except Russia and Belarus.
What’s more, the torrent of Europe-bashing rhetoric from Conservative ministers has almost dried up — at least for now. Suddenly, making nice with the neighbors is back in fashion, if only to ensure they don’t turn the lights off on the U.K. by cutting energy exports when supplies get tight this winter.
The tone of contrition adopted by Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker, once the hardest of Brexit hardliners, was one of the most striking signals of this new humility. “I recognize in my own determination and struggle to get the U.K. out of the European Union that I caused a great deal of inconvenience and pain and difficulty,” he told Ireland’s RTÉ radio recently. “Some of our actions were not very respectful of Ireland’s legitimate interests. And I want to put that right.”
Meanwhile, encouragingly, Sunak is reportedly considering deprioritizing a bill by ousted Brexit ideologue Jacob Rees-Mogg to review, reform or automatically scrap some 2,400 retained EU laws, standards and regulations by the end of 2023 — a massive bureaucratic exercise that has rattled business confidence and angered almost everyone. The prime minister now seems receptive to pleas from business to give the review much more time and avoid a regulatory vacuum.
A bonfire of EU rules would inevitably provoke new trade tensions with Brussels — and at a time when the Office of Budget Responsibility, Britain’s independent fiscal watchdog, has just confirmed the growth-shredding damage inflicted by Brexit.
This isn’t the end of Britain’s traumatic rupture with the bloc. Just how neuralgic the issue remains was highlighted when earlier this week, Sunak had to deny reports that senior government figures were considering a Swiss-style relationship with the EU to ensure frictionless trade. He vowed there would be no alignment with EU rules on his watch.
To paraphrase Churchill, it may not even be the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Puncturing the illusion of a deregulated fiscal paradise fueled by borrowing without new revenue has had a sobering effect on the U.K. — offering Sunak a political window of opportunity to start fixing EU ties. After all, the Conservative Party can’t afford to defenestrate yet another prime minister after Theresa May, Johnson and Truss, can it?
But beyond the conciliatory tone, the real test still lies ahead.
Sunak will have to confront the hard-line Protestant Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to push through any compromise with the EU on the Northern Ireland Protocol.
As the province remains part of the EU single market under the withdrawal treaty, any such deal is bound to involve some customs checks in Northern Ireland on goods arriving from Great Britain — even if they are scaled down from the original plan. It’s also bound to involve a role for the Court of Justice of the European Union as the ultimate arbiter of EU law. Both are anathema to the DUP.
But securing such an agreement would at least open the door to a calmer, more cooperative and sustainable relationship between London and Brussels.
