The podcast episode explores the potential implications of a recent meeting between Elon Musk and prominent figures in British politics. The hosts discuss whether this meeting indicates a significant shift in the funding of British political parties, particularly considering Musk's history of political donations. The potential impact of such funding on the current political climate is also evaluated, with a focus on figures like Nigel Farage and their influence.

The hosts delve into the technical and legal aspects of foreign donations in UK politics, as well as the broader concerns about the influence of wealthy individuals in political processes. They also compare this situation to similar events in other countries and consider how public perception and party dynamics might be affected by such developments. Discussions extend to debates within the British government about foreign donations and their legality.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. herald [ˈhɛrəld] - (verb) - To signal or announce a future event. - Synonyms: (announce, proclaim, indicate)

What is more important is what is going on in that meeting and does it herald a massive change in the funding of British politics?

2. intrigue [ɪnˈtriːɡ] - (noun) - The secret planning of something illicit or detrimental. - Synonyms: (conspiracy, plot, scheme)

Nigel Farage is great at creating political stories with a splash of intrigue.

3. fertile [ˈfɜːtaɪl] - (adjective) - Capable of producing abundant results; productive or conducive to growth. - Synonyms: (productive, fruitful, prolific)

And in that environment, that's pretty fertile for someone like Nigel Farage.

4. momentum [məʊˈmɛntəm] - (noun) - The strength or force gained by motion or by a series of events. - Synonyms: (impetus, drive, thrust)

But right now, Nigel Farage has a certain momentum and that's why I think that photo was newsworthy.

5. temptation [tɛmpˈteɪʃən] - (noun) - A desire to do something, especially something unwise or wrong. - Synonyms: (allure, enticement, urge)

It creates a kind of a dot to dot narrative where the temptation is to draw the next line to the next dot.

6. vulnerable [ˈvʌlnərəbl] - (adjective) - Susceptible to physical or emotional harm. - Synonyms: (exposed, defenseless, unprotected)

Members of the government and Conservative Party are vulnerable to such potential changes.

7. expedient [ɪkˈspiːdiənt] - (adjective) - Convenient and practical although possibly improper or immoral. - Synonyms: (opportune, advantageous, tactical)

That kind of runs the risk, from the government's perspective, of having the whiff of changing the rules halfway through the game because it's politically expedient to do so.

8. omnipresente [ˌɒmnɪˈprɛzənt] - (adjective) - Present everywhere at the same time. - Synonyms: (ubiquitous, pervasive, all-present)

Nigel Farage maintains an omnipresent influence in British politics.

9. audacious [ɔːˈdeɪʃəs] - (adjective) - Showing a willingness to take surprisingly bold risks. - Synonyms: (bold, daring, fearless)

The audacious nature of these political maneuvers reflects the unconventional strategies.

10. perception [pərˈsɛpʃən] - (noun) - The way in which something is regarded, understood, or interpreted. - Synonyms: (understanding, interpretation, view)

Media portrayal and public perception are critical in shaping the narrative of such political developments.

Could Reform Get Millions From Musk? - BBC Newscast

On Tuesday afternoon, a picture was posted on social media of some British political figures meeting Elon Musk at Mar a Lago. If you look closely, it looks like it took place in front of a picture of Donald Trump dressed to play cricket. That's of secondary importance. What is more important is what is going on in that meeting and does it herald a massive change in the funding of British politics? That is what we will discuss on this episode of Newscast, the BBC's daily news podcast.

Chris, would you like an update on our new newscast Christmas gimmick which is Father Chris Mason? Oh yes, yes. I can offer an update of my own actually in a second but I'll hear yours first. Well, so Lily has sent us a picture of you in the festive Santa hat, elf hat artwork in a gay club in Sydney. Terrific. With actually a big screen saying slayer which is all year round word now spelled it now S L A Y. All right, okay. Do you know, but that's, that's for next year. And then we've had a message from Thea who's on a raft off Coron Island. I hope I've pronounced that correctly. What's that? The Philippines. And it looks very, very scenic. And yeah, I think it's sunset in the Philippines and there's you on, on Thea's phone on a raft. Oh well thank you the Philippines and thank you Australia.

That is terrific. Thank you Thea. And there's a little, a little update that I can offer which was within moments of this particular wheeze being rolled out, a, you know, you have kind of WhatsApp groups that can remain dormant for quite a while and then suddenly spring into action. I've got a WhatsApp group of former school friends who I often, you know, can go years without seeing in person. And yeah, it suddenly sprung into action with a screen grab and all the rest. It and promises to take it around, you know, various Yorkshire Dales, pubs, etc, etc, which is also terrific. So the, the sort of virtual or cardboard world tour I am embracing entirely.

Well, there's not a lot of days to go because we don't have a lot of live newscasts left before Christmas as it were. So if your mates on the WhatsApp group or anyone else wants to email us newscastbc.co.uk or WhatsApp us on 03301239480 I suspect we can fit in one more episode of where in the World is Father Chris Mason? Although actually keep sending them in because we keep monitoring it all, all the time. And it's really fun. Oh, yeah. It can roll on into January. Terrific. Exactly. I mean, I mean, when's Christmas in Russia? Isn't that like on the 6th of January, like the Orthodox Christmas? Exactly, exactly. Right. Let's get on with an Orthodox episode of Newscast.

Hello, it's Adam in the newscast studio and it's Chris at Westminster. We've never done an Orthodox episode of Newscast, have we? Well, it's like it's semi Orthodox because we're gonna talk about just all the things that have been happening in British politics the last few days. Cause there's quite a few things. Yeah, that's true. Shall we start with the social media post that caught everyone's attention on what day was it? Tuesday afternoon. Which was. And I'm now going to try and paint a picture with words. Elon Musk with Nigel Farage, leader of Reform and MP for Clacton, and Nick Candy, former donors, the Conservative Party, who's now a big donor and fundraiser for the Reform Party. And is it a portrait of Donald Trump wearing cricket whites in Mar a Lago? Yeah, they look like cricket whites. I think I'm informed that it's actually tennis attire, apparently, which is more kind of, I guess, believable, given that I don't think cricket is massive in Florida. Classic Anglo centric interpretation of. Of American politics.

And yeah, what do we know about what those two were doing there when they got their photo taken? The Elon Musk. So the short answer to this whole thing is that that was making photograph because there is. Nigel Farage stood alongside the world's richest man, who also happens to be a guy who is, A, interested in politics and B, has a track record of giving money to political causes that he believes it, I. E. Donald Trump recently. And then them winning. And then them winning. Exactly. On top of that is something Nigel Farage does incredibly well and incredibly well for a couple of decades, which is that he is great at creating political stories with a splash of intrigue. So when he got back from Florida, I was speaking to him and obviously I asked him about a donation.

There's been this suggestion that was floated in the last couple of weeks of Elon Musk wanting to give a hundred million dollars. Now, natural Farah said, you know, it's nowhere near that kind of number. And that would be ludicrous. But of course it could be nowhere near that kind of number and still a big number. And what did Najafara say? We talked about money, but then he wouldn't get into any kind of Numbers. Now, what we don't know is how much further the conversation or not might have gone in private around all of that.

But it creates a sense of intrigue. It creates a kind of a dot to dot narrative where the temptation is to draw the next line to the next dot. And that is, that's what he has sort of mastered the art of in terms of keeping himself kind of in the news. Now, you might think as a newscaster, Ah, yes, but people like you, Chris, shouldn't fall for that. But the reality is right now, at a very senior level, folk in the government and folk in the Conservative Party are frightened of Nigel Farage because they can see how a case can be made at the moment that neither the government nor the Conservatives, granted Labour have only had a handful of months, but can necessarily point, when you look at the opinion polls to track records in government, that voters in significant numbers are lapping up, up and are full of praise for.

And in that environment, that's pretty fertile for someone like Nigel Farage. And Nick Candy is a big addition alongside him also very deep pocketed. Zia Yousef, the relatively new party chairman, is doing a huge amount in terms of professionalization and organization, in terms of building from the bottom up, a kind of operation that they think can be very successful. Now, who knows whether it is or it isn't or whether it fizzles out or whether people conclude in the end that a government, either Labour or Conservatives, is delivering sufficiently that they're happy to re elect or elect the other lot between the main two parties at Westminster.

But right now, Nigel Farage has a certain momentum and that's why I think that photo was newsworthy and whatever comes next might well be too. And here is some of Chris's conversation with Nigel Farage after he came back from that famous photo op. And you can interpret it how you will. We did talk about money and we will have ongoing negotiations on that. I mean, he is fully, fully behind us. He wants to help us. He's not opposed to the idea of giving us money, provided we can do it legally through UK companies. Did you get to numbers? No, we didn't. We didn't, we didn't. But I mean, it's an open negotiation. It's a conversation we will have again with him. And so Chris, just on the technicalities of electoral law and specifically the funding of political parties.

So, I mean, Nigel Farrow said it there. It's like a company can donate money to a political party in the British political system. It has to be a UK based company, but that could be a subsidiary of a company that makes lots of its money in other countries. Exactly. And therefore an entrepreneur with the range of kind of business platforms that Elon Musk has in this instance, would have a vehicle through which, pardon the pun, in the context of one of his businesses, he could channel a donation legally. Now, what we've now got is a conversation where, given the potential scale of donation from Elon Musk, the government is saying when it wants to look at kind of foreign donations, you have a bunch of MPs called the All Party Group for Fair Elections, suggesting that the law needs to change, needs to be tightened, and that channeling it through a company, if ultimately you are a foreign donor, shouldn't be allowed.

That kind of runs the risk, from the government's perspective, of having the whiff of changing the rules halfway through the game because it's politically expedient to do so. But then there's that wider thing that, you know, when you've got someone like Elon Musk who is, as I say, super rich, mega politically interested and willing to spend money, you know, put his money where his mouth is, you know, how collectively comfortable is the UK with the prospect of someone, one individual, having perhaps massively outsized influence? And on that point, thought Miriam Cates, the former Conservative mp, who's been on newscast, I think, in the past, she said something on X actually, as it happens, saying, look, when you're weighing up this in your head, in your mind as to whether you think this is a good idea, you've got to detach Nigel Farage and Elon Musk from it.

So run the same argument in your head with Bill Gates and Keir Starmer, and then ask yourself if that changes your view because your political prejudice lines up on one side or the other. And instead, so she argues, you've got to come to a decision as to whether or not, in principle, this sort of thing is something the UK should encourage or not. Yeah, because, I mean, if you look at the numbers, Labour get quite a small percentage of their financial donations from companies and an even smaller percentage from companies that are based here and also somewhere else. So, yeah, you can see why it'd be very easy to make an argument that they were kind of rigging, rigging the rules in their favor, because, yeah, the Conservatives, for example, get a lot more money from corporate donors.

Yeah. And then. And then pretty quickly you're back into that argument that always pops up when you have rows about political donations and political donors, which is the ultimate alternative. If you were to sort of turn all of those taps off is all of us is state funding. These are mandatory taxpayer funding of political parties, which political parties tend to be sufficiently self aware of the unpalatability of for most people that they never suggest. But the alternative to that is these moments of kind of anguish, awkwardness around what is a legitimate donation. And then the obvious secondary question to that, which is what does the donor get out of it?

Now, the moment in which we're recording this episode of newscast is 6:38pm on Wednesday and we just had an email drop from Downing street about some more transatlantic traffic. And this is a phone call between Keir Starmer and President Elect Donald Trump. So Nigel Farage didn't quite get to Trump this time, although he spent plenty of times with him before. But Keir Starmer has had a phone call and actually the readout, as these things are called, you can sort of, you can actually picture this conversation happening, can you? So the Prime Minister congratulated President Elect Trump. I bet he did. And then President Elect Trump warmly recounted his meeting with Prince William in Paris at the reopening of Notre Dame. I bet he did.

And then is then when it gets a little bit bit more, kind of less agreeable, as it were. Yeah, I mean, so I was trying to work out actually when this just dropped into our inboxes, I thought, oh, because they haven't spoken all that often. But actually they've spoken. They've met once at Trump Tower back in September, which Prime Minister talks about the whole time and the chicken dinner. The chicken dinner. And David Lammy was there, the Foreign Secretary, etc. Etc. Second helping, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. They have actually had a couple of phone calls because there was a phone call shortly after the first assassination attempted against Donald Trump earlier in the year. There was a congratulatory call when Donald Trump won. And then there was this, and then there was the face to face meeting.

So there's been a few and there might have been another one that I've forgotten about, but yeah, what else does it get to in this? The Prime Minister reiterated the need for allies to stand together with Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression. And the fact that the Prime Minister reiterated it means that Donald Trump didn't agree. Yes, or he felt he had to say it again because exactly. It wasn't, it wasn't exactly the same words or similar formula and sentiment didn't come back from down the other end of the, the, the phone line. So yeah, you can, you can begin to see, even when sort of washed with the highest kind of diplomatic detergent of these things, to turn it into something that just sounds very bland, where the. Where the kind of tram tracks of argument are going to come.

Now, another big story that's been brewing at Westminster in the last couple of days is to do with the WASPy women. So WASPy stands for women Against State Pension Inequality. And they've been campaigning for many years on behalf of women who were born in the 1950s who saw their state pension age increase quite dramatically so that it was equalized with men. But some of them didn't get informed quite in the right time period, and so they've been campaigning to get their pension made up as a result. And this has been a campaign that you and I have been reporting on for years and years and years as political journalists. But it's now reached Keir Starmer's desk as Prime Minister, or Liz Kendall, the Working Pension Secretary's desk as working Pension Secretary.

Yeah, and it's nuanced, this, as these things so often are. So it's nuanced because it is principally a row about a failure to properly inform those who were affected. Some of the campaigners make a broader argument about the money that they lost as a result of the changes. Over and above the failures of communication. There was a report done by an ombudsman into all of this that concluded that there was a communications failure and that there should be compensation. The kind of wider context is the big picture, one of the government public finances being in a bit of a mess and then also handing out compensation in other cases, like the Post Office scandal and the effective blood scandal, two of which, amongst a number of others, were kind of more egregious state or institutional failures than this one.

And then I think it's worth saying that if you follow politics minute by minute, hour by hour, as I do and you do, I don't think there's much surprise Amongst that tiny 0.01% of the population that the government has not given compensation. And by the way, the Conservatives wouldn't either, in all, like, because it would be tens of billions, because it'd be tens of billions of pounds. And again, you know, as I say, not as egregious as some of these other cases, state of the public finances, et cetera, et cetera. But. But the problem for Keir Starmer is a massive failure of expectation management, because even though he didn't promise to pay compensation in the Labour manifesto, by the way, neither did the Conservatives in theirs. In recent years, he and Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, and Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, were photographed alongside WASPY women to use the campaign acronym for the campaigners, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly giving the impression that a they supported their cause and balance, ergo they would give compensation if they won the election.

And here we are afterwards with this gap in expectation between what it was probably always likely would happen, that is they wouldn't pay the compensation and the expectation from the campaigners that they felt that they were on their side and that in an era of these kind of hurricane force, cynicism about politics is a massive problem for a government because it just adds fuel to those who think that governments of any recent color either don't keep their promises or can't be believed or don't deliver. And actually, that loops all the way back to our conversation about Nigel Farage a bit ago, because that's the kind of political atmosphere, if you like, in which he can make a message that he can, you know, articulate a political message that says neither the Conservatives nor Labour are any good when they're running the place. Nothing changes.

Etc, etc, that kind of argument, that might be unfair, it might be opportunistic, but the, the climate, the atmosphere in which that argument might receive a warm kind of welcome is probably helped along by moments like this. Very interesting. And of course, because politics is hooked on the recent past, everyone goes straight to Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems and tuition fees before the 2010 election. Yes, yes. I mean, the one distinction there is that it wasn't a manifesto promise in this instance, but that almost sounds like dancing on the head of the pin because who on earth reads election manifestos other than people like you and you and me? But they are the kind of meant to be, the kind of sacrosanct promises.

Now, it doesn't stop a government doing something. You know, you can do stuff that wasn't in your manifesto if you're in government, but the fact that it wasn't there means that they can say we didn't promise to do it in our kind of bundle of promises before the election. But as I say, it's the sentiment that they left hanging in the air creating that gap in expectation. Chris, thank you very much for that minute by minute account of the state of British Democracy on Wednesday 18th December. I was trying to think of something witty to say and I couldn't think of anything.

Well, you know why I did it like that is because I'm next Gonna have a conversation with Professor Ben Ansell, who's professor of comparative democracy. He hasn't got any lectures to give, so he's coming on newscast. Exactly. We're giving him a platform. We are his new podium. And basically the reason we thought we'd catch up with him is because at the start of the year, because he did the reflections about the state of democracy around the world, we got him to preview all the many, many elections that are happening. Oh, yes. And now he can do all around the world now review now. Yes.

In particular, his predictions about the US elections, which he made in quite strong terms on the episode of Newscast before the American turned out to be really quite wrong. Oh, right. So we can now listen to me catching up with Ben Ansell earlier on, where the first thing I did was challenge him very gently on his incorrect predictions about the American elections, which he very gamefully held his hands up to being. Yeah. Quite wrong. Professor Ansell, hello. Hello, Adam. Welcome back. Thank you. Last time we were sat in this room was the day before Election day in the U.S. yes, it was. How did that go for you? Well, not very well for my prediction that, that Harris would win, which turned out like many other people's predictions. Yeah. You weren't alone, including Rory Stewart. Yeah. To be wrong.

I think I had fortunately said on Newsnight a few days earlier also to me that it was, it was a very, you know, it was very tight and no one could tell you what was going to happen. I think a number of people like myself thought over the week before the election that Harris had caught up on Trump and was pushing ahead. That clearly was not true. The polls, in fact, were not that far off. The problem is they were still off and they were still biased against Trump. So it looked like it was going to be, you know, very marginal lead for Harris in the popular vote. That didn't even transpire. And you know, when that didn't transpire, there was no hope of her winning the electoral vote. Is that going to change how you think about future Democratic events? I think it's going to change how I think about trying to poll populist candidates.

You know, the funny thing about that is we did really well here this year with polling reform. The polls had them at about 15. They got just over 14. That's, that's pretty good. And the group of people who vote for reform have some similarities to the group of people who vote for Donald Trump in they're motivated by some of the same kind of anti system, you know, down with the mainstream Parties, you know, sets of thoughts. And yet it seems to be easier to pick up reform voters than it is Trump voters. And actually, I'm thinking back to the. We're now talking about a different election, but I'm thinking back to the exit poll on the night of the Fourth of July, the British election, where actually John Curtis was predicting that Reform would get 13 MPs.

Yes, I should tell John Curtis that when he criticizes my US Election prediction. But, I mean, he did revise it throughout the night, didn't he? But just. And Marine Le Pen was overestimated earlier in the year. Right. So populists had been. Had been. You know, the polls, people have been adding secret sauce to them to. But it turns out that there's a special Trump secret sauce that's different from other populists. Yeah. And also what I'm trying to work out is because it's very. It's very hard to actually put yourself back in the mind that you had, like, months and months ago. And I'm just thinking two things.

Was it actually that the American polls were right in the end? It's just that the actual outcome was within the margin of error because actually, the election was still fairly close. It wasn't like a Trump, like, mega landslide. No, absolutely. And actually the polls have a margin of error of plus 2 or 3%, don't they? When you're in that very, very close domain, anything could happen. It was in Electoral College terms, it was more than Biden got. It was a borderline landslide, but not a landslide like the 1980s where Ronald Reagan would win all but one state, or even like the landslide that Barack Obama had in 2000. So this was a huge victory for the Republican Party, in part because it's a trifecta and in part because Trump did better than most of us thought.

But it is not remotely unprecedented. And also the other thing that makes it difficult for us observers who are not on the ground the whole time talking to American voters, the whole time is that are a lot of our experiences mediated via the American media. And it turns out lots of the American media was biased in favor of Harris and reported and analyzed accordingly. Yeah. Now Trump's going to sue them all. It's true, you know, probably in most countries around the world that there is, there is some form of implicit bias in, in the mainstream media. It's very, very hard to be totally objective about multiple parties when, you know, journalists are people, too, and, you know, they're allowed to vote as well. And it's very easy for people to engage in just a little bit of wish casting.

But I think what's more important in the American case, actually wish casting is where you sort of predict based on what you want, what you would like to happen. But in the American context, I don't think that people were doing that at the start of the summer, even had they been more pro Biden, because it really looked like he wasn't going to win. What American media love more than anything else is a horse race. And Harris gave them a horse race. Yes, because she managed to recover so much ground that Biden had lost. So it looked competitive. So arguably the Democrats are not in a bad position with the House of Representatives.

Representatives right now because of some slightly bizarre choices that Trump has made in terms of who he's putting into his Cabinet, taking them from the House. The Republicans have a one or two seat real majority in the House now. That may change as some of these seats are filled, but it makes it really hard for Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, to get anything through. So they have a trifecta. It's quite a narrow trifecta. And to the degree that Harris did anything for the Democrats, I think she probably got the House of Representatives closer than Joe Biden would have done.

And you mentioned the trifecta, which is the presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives. And if you've got all three, you've got the trifecta. But the other point about that is that, okay, you're president for four years, but there's an election in one of those other bits every two years. So it's a kind of rolling thing, almost like the weather versus British general elections. Right, where should we go next then, in terms of elections we've had this year? Well, we've had some recent elections since we spoke last, or we've not had them. In other words, in Romania, there was a presidential election and then there wasn't, which is a very unusual thing to happen in a democracy.

So, yeah, this, this kind of came from nowhere. Populist candidates who did very well on Tick Tock. Yeah. Colin Georgescu was the winner of the first round, surprised everyone. But then the Supreme Court like struck it down and said, no, that isn't what happened. Yeah. So it's a bit murky and I've been trying to figure this out. The European Union have got involved, the senses that the intelligence services in Romania have very good information that there was a concerted Russian campaign to influence Tick Tock, a Chinese owned social media company, to promote videos of Kalin Georgescu, this populist candidate that is being considered in some way or another.

And I'm not enough of an expert on Romanian electoral law to know exactly how to have violated the presidential election or the first round of the presidential election in some sense. And so it has been annulled and we go again next year. And I think, well, obviously that's significant for people in Romania, it's significant for the eu. But where it's extra significant is I feel a lot of the conversations we've had over the last 18 months about the role of outside interference or disinformation, there have not been that many concrete examples people can point to and say, oh, look, here's an example where it might have happened.

This is an example where it looks like it, it might have happened and we will be able to get, get some data as a result of this to then judge the threat and the risk posed by these things. Yeah, I mean, what's true here is, I think more broadly true, which is that outside interference generally helps populist candidates. Is it because those populist candidates are Manchurian candidates secretly sponsored by the Chinese or the Russians? Not necessarily, and probably not in many of these cases. The Nigerian candidate being a famous old film where that happens. Yes. Thank you. Obviously, we're all fans of 1950s movies, so that is probably not the case.

What is the case is that China and Russia are interested in sowing dissension about the mainstream parties of the west and those that they see as, you know, backing, for example, Western intervention in Ukraine. That's something that Georgescu was very unhappy about and spoke about being a candidate for peace. We saw a similar pattern in Georgia, where Georgian Dream won the Georgian elections. Again, a Russia backed party, we think, or at least a Russia sympathetic party. And getting elected, you know, on a kind of combined policy program of social conservatism, on the one hand, which is not unpopular in places like Romania and Georgia, and being pro peace, where pro peace means not wishing to engage in further Western intervention in Ukraine.

Right. Let's look at France now, where they had those surprise elections in the summer for the national assembly, which has ended up in a situation where no group of parties has a majority, which means Macron just can't get a Prime minister who lasts, for example, last candidate being our old friend Michel Barnier, who did not last very long. Is that an example of that old phrase of the people have spoken? We just don't know what they've said because actually the national assembly there is split into three blocks of a similar size. Yeah, well, look, what I think it is an example of is how much Emmanuel Macron loves drama. I mean, having the selection in the first place that he entirely did not have to have was a very dramatic thing to do.

He then ended up, somehow, by the skin of his teeth at least, surviving. His own party got decimated, but he didn't face what I think we all thought the risk for him was of Marine Le Pen's Resemblement Nationale getting a majority or a near majority in the French Assembly. That didn't happen. So he sort of survived because he actually did do better than he, in theory, was going to.

His party didn't, but his opponent also didn't. Right. And the left did. Well, that, of course, creates a new problem for Macron, which is he doesn't really want a prime minister of the left either. And so then he imposes Michel Barnier. He can choose the prime minister that's the French president's right. Barnier is sort of supported by a group of Macron centrists, the remaining French center right party, Le Republican, where he comes from. And then in a kind of confidence and supply kind of arrangement by Marine Le Pen's party.

That can't last, really, because Marine Le Pen and Macron are loggerheads. But Macron also doesn't want a candidate of the left who, you know, themselves have a large bloc. And so now we have Macron's sort of old Svengali figure, Francois Beru, who is this sort of centrist, Chekhov's gun candidate, who's been around French politics forever, if you've ever been looking at it. And finally he gets to be prime minister. So in the end, everybody becomes prime minister in French policy.

Is this an example of the French system working as designed? Because, of course, the current French electoral system is really. Our constitutional setup is really not that old. It's from the 1950s, isn't it? Well, yeah, exactly. From 1958. And it is so nearly the 1960s. Right.

And it. Well, so the currency, it was never designed to come up with this kind of outcome, was it? Well, it was designed to come up with a strong president, but exactly what that meant for the national assembly wasn't always closer.

So the Fourth Republic, because this period in France, after the Second World War, before 1958, which doesn't last very long at all, of constantly cycling governments and a prime minister every week, and then you have the Algerian civil war and it collapses. De Gaulle comes in to provide strong leadership, but that strong leadership is based in The President. Now the President hasn't lost their powers. The only real difference is that they've moved from a seven year term to a five year term. Macron still has huge powers in foreign policy. He has the power to pick a Prime Minister. And basically anything that happens at a European level, that's my grandson decides what to do.

Yeah, but for budgetary matters and for pension reforms and all of those kinds of things, which are hot potatoes at the moment and that never happen in France. Right. Or that every time they do happen, get, get removed again, that's where you need, you need the French, you need the Assembly.

And they are elected in a somewhat similar fashion to the UK in that there are, there's geographically based seats, but they have two round elections. And so you end up with, you know, in the second round, something that looks a bit like the UK with plurality voting. But in the first round you can have lots of different parties. So we've ended up with a slightly awkward situation of having quite a lot of parties being represented, being able to coordinate in what's called the pro Republican front against Marine Le Pen. They could do that because of the second round.

But that doesn't mean that the anti Le Pen parties really get on with each other. And that is where we have got stuck. Some people sort of fantasizing about, oh, Macron's final role of the dais would be resigning and triggering a new presidential election. I mean, it doesn't look like that's going to happen, but if it did, would that necessarily solve anything? Because that doesn't really. That just means somebody from a different party might have the same problem that he has with the Assembly.

Yeah, I don't, I can't see a world in. I mean, look, well, I've already told you that Macron loves drama. So I guess, you know, all bets are off in the world of Emmanuel Macron.

But, you know, he will stay in place. The problem that Macron has created for himself is he has no obvious heir to Macronism. There was this, his initial Prime Minister, who lasted a long time, Edouard Philippe, that was the guy that people thought would be the second coming of Macron. But Macron has essentially fallen out with anyone who could replace him. He didn't even want to put in his old kind of mentor, Beirut, as Prime Minister.

Macron said a week or so ago, you know, give me two days and I'll come up with the Prime Minister. And the two days elapsed and he was still basically going, oh, I don't really want to have Beirut, I guess I've got to have him. And they were. Didn't the Elyse brief out that even while Beirut was sat there being hired, Macron was thinking about if there could be somebody else. The French presser are reporting that Beirut has discovered he will not be Prime Minister in the room.

Exactly. Let's look at Germany then and there. I mean they were due in election but it's just happening much sooner.

Yes, exactly. So the Social Democrats are governing in a multi party coalition. The first sort of proper German multi party coalition that, you know, it doesn't involve a kind of grand coalition.

So it's the Social Democrats, the Greens and then the, the FDP who are what Europeans would call a Liberal party, but actually doesn't really have a counterpoint in the UK or the US they're, they're basically an economically conservative, socially liberal party.

You know, those tend to get sucked into parts of center right or center left parties here. And the problem that the Social Democrats have faced is that this Liberal Party does not want to go along with their budgetary policy. And so they've basically blown up the coalition and that's meant they're stuck, they don't command a majority anymore. And so roll on the new election.

So we just had a vote of no confidence and we will have new elections early next year which I suspect will go very badly for the Social Democrats. And at the moment the interesting thing is sort of who is in command of the CDU and who's really going to be the next German chancellor? And will it be Frederick Mertz? Somebody who had basically had been around for ages and then got written off and actually sort of retired from politics is the Francois Beyrout.

Yeah, exactly. Lots of these figures. An election that didn't get as much coverage as it maybe should have done because of other things happening or maybe because the outcome wasn't very exciting.

Ireland. Yeah. What's your take on that on the Irish election? So basically fine. Gael Fina Foyle, who were like sharing power before, are going to share power again. They're back.

Yeah. So having never gone away, important time for anybody who doesn't know what Gale are to remember that these two parties have been around forever. The distinction between them is largely a distinction about how they felt about the treaty that established the Irish Free State back in the 1920s and their disagreements on that. In terms of party politics, in an ideological sense, they don't differ that much. Ireland has basically always had two centre right parties and those parties have alternated in government and Sometimes they've joined in government and they remain joined in government.

And so you might think, well, how can this continue? Surely there is some opposition to this and there is Sinn Fein. And I think we all thought two or three years ago that come the next Irish elections, this would be the moment for Sinn Fein, a nationalist party of the left, which is quite a rare thing internationally, obviously a party that wants to reunite Ireland, that they would finally get into power. And they've flunked it, which is a surprise. I think the other thing that except for Sinn Fein to get into power, they would need to win like more than half of the vote.

That is. No other party is prepared to go into government with them. So they, for them to win, they need to win really big, whereas the other parties can win really small. Yeah. And so maybe we were kidding ourselves thinking that, well, this is their moment because it's, it's an impossible barrier for them to meet, given this, you know, what we would call in Europe, accordance, sanitaire by the other party, suggest they draw a line and they won't, they won't cross it.

We did. And I think also think political scientists studying Ireland that there might be more voting for right wing populists in Ireland. They certainly got a lot of social media coverage. They also flamed out. So everything is sort of the same in Ireland as it was before.

Irish politics truck along looking much like they did in the 1970s or 1990s or the 2010s. I mean, the big difference in Ireland compared to the uk, though, is that the Irish government has got shed loads of money to spend because they rake in so much corporation tax, including corporation tax from people like Apple, that they didn't charge enough corporation tax on a few years ago and the EU told them to collect some more.

Right, let's think about 2025. I won't get you to make predictions because as we've seen, they can be. Yeah, yeah, it's terrible. I can bite you in the bum. Yeah. John Curtis has reminded me never to do that. Although give us some things to think about in 2025 then, in democracy terms. So we already hinted at some of the elections.

Yeah. So we're going to have the German election. I think it would be surprising if, if the Christian Democrats didn't do very well in that election. I think the thing that people will be looking at and getting excited about, though, is how alternative for Deutschland do the rfd, that's the German right populist party who have been very successful at winning regional Elections in, you know, German east ex East German states. Right. They've done really well there, haven't really crossed to the West.

The other interesting party that's been doing well in East Germany is the Saravagenknecht party. Pronounced that correct. That is a populist left party. That is a sort of anti migrant populist left. Now again, that's an unusual combination in Europe. Not necessarily unusual though in Eastern Europe because we're talking about the old East Germany.

It's, it's interesting to see that kind of crossover there. So I think that election goes one of two ways. Probably either the cdu, the Christian Democrats, Angela Merkel's old party, Friedrich Merz's party, they do really well. We go back to kind of standard German mainstream center right governance, or these two populist parties do really well and we have a fragmented French style parliament.

Interesting. And I know you've been doing the Radio 4 series rethink over the last few months where you look at big subjects like AI or the nature of the price of things. Things. I just wonder what's it been like for you having like your normal politics bit of your brain and then this really kind of not out there but like just thinking about other trends going on. Because I'm still waiting for the moment where British politics moves off the classical things of taxing spending, the deficit, the NHS reform of the planning system, the benefits system and the rates of tax and that it actually starts thinking about things that feel really kind of modern.

Well, obviously every politician should be listening to my show. Thank you Adam for that BBC sounds. One thing I will say about an episode that we have coming up in January is we have an episode on political labels. Because one of the questions we had is do the old labels of left and right make much sense for British politics anymore? And I think there's good reason to believe that this election that we had in July 2024 was one where a multi party electorate was pushed screaming into a two party wardrobe.

And it's producing our electoral system is producing outcomes that fundamentally don't fit the way that people are voting. So not only did the Conservatives and Labour get the lowest ever two party share of the vote, but actually the three party share, which includes now reform, was also the lowest ever of the vote because the Lib Dems and the Greens did so well. And yet we are in this situation where a government that got 35 odd percent of 34% of the vote has 2/3 of the seats in Parliament. And so, you know, we can have all these exciting conversations about Rachel Reeves's budget and taxes.

But underneath all of that, there's clearly a lot bubbling under in how people are feeling. And maybe we saw some of it in the riots in the summer. We're going to see, we're going to see in terms of issues around social rights, environmental rights, and it's just not well dealt with in our system. And then you realize when the system does try to acknowledge that.

So, for example, Keir Starmer doing something that previously he disagreed with, or not doing something he previously promised to, he gets completely pillarized. I've just invented a new word, pillarized. Pilloried. And criticized pillarized for not being true to himself.

But actually you could make the argument he's just trying to govern for a broader group of voters than his core vote. Yeah, I mean, being the prime minister does mean leading the country. And you would hope that politicians were public spirited enough to say, yes, I'm going to, I'm going to be trying to govern for more than just my party base.

Especially if you're Keir Starmer and you know that lots of people lent their votes to the Liberal Democrats or the Greens because they knew they were going to win and they were trying to get the Conservatives out. Okay, so fair enough. I think the real challenge we all have at the moment is Labour clearly benefited from an extremely disproportionate way into which votes turned into seats in Parliament. That's true.

And their polling rates, polling ratings are very low at the moment for an incumbent government. Also true. But they're going to be in power for another four or so years. It is almost inconceivable to think of a way in which that doesn't happen unless the party fragments. Crazy. And historically, Labour doesn't get rid of its own leaders when they're in power.

Really. It's also not clear who that rival would be. I mean, I was thinking about this the other day.

Any Conservative cabinet, you can pick at least 12 people who fancy themselves as prime minister and let you know it all the time. It's actually quite hard to see that with the current Labour cabinet. So he's probably safe. And he's in this unusual position, which is he's going to be in power for a while.

He knows he has to govern for the long term. We're all looking at his appalling approval ratings and saying, gosh, those are terrible. That is true. But Emmanuel Macron has always had appalling approval rates. When you're president, you're still there until the end of your five year term.

So we might have to look at it a bit more like that. And ultimately, Starmer will be judged by the time he comes to the next election. That's a long time away. Ben, thank you very much. See you in 2025. See you in 2025.

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