Ed Davey sees off a coup

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0:37Tim Shipman: Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots. I'm James Heal and I'm joined today by Tim Shipman and Isabel Harpen. Now, we've just finished PMQs. Isabel, what did we learn? Well, it was quite a, I wouldn't say a consensual PMQs, but it was a session where Andy Burnham kept trying to praise anyone who asked him a question for something they'd done, even if he disagreed with everything else that they'd done. So he praised Kemi Badenoch, for instance, for standing up to reform on the question of whether or not her kids were British. He praised Nigel Farage. Well, he wouldn't praise Nigel Farage. He expressed sympathy for Nigel Farage following the threats against him and said that he disagreed with everything he said, but he would defend his right to be able to say it.

1:19And he took the protection of people like Nigel Farage very seriously. and I was trying to work out whether this was part of Burnham's, you know, he's only still a few weeks into the job of being PM, he still believes he can do things differently, which they all do and then they revert to type, or whether it was because the Commons was marking the anniversary of the death of David Amess and when MPs remember an MP who has been lost, particularly in the circumstances of David Amess or Joe Cox, they tend to be a little bit nicer to each other for a couple of hours. So there was a slightly different atmosphere there.

1:51That said, there was still quite a lot of knockabout between him and Kemi Baden-Ock, who I think was trying to set out the dividing lines between the parties that have become much clearer during conference season on welfare, on Brexit, but also to try to drive home this depiction of the Prime Minister, not just as somebody who flip-flops, which we've all known for a long time, but as someone who kind of shoots from the hip and then gets cleared up after either by his own colleagues in Number 10 or indeed the head of MI5, as happened. this week. Tim, take us through the knockabout then.

2:23James Heale: Yeah, I mean, look, I think this was an interesting session actually. I rather enjoyed it. It felt to me like they were both quite relaxed. They both know what they think. But Burnham is so trying to have it both ways. You know, on the one hand he says, you know, we'll do politics differently and then he praises, can we pay knock? Which is another way of just having a pop-up reform. But yes, you know, good. But when it suited him, he also came out with the gags. He said, well, the leader of the opposition presented herself as one of the world's leading experts on defence and then proceeded to take the mickey out of her announcement about the Iron Doom which all went a bit skew-whiff.

2:57James Heale: So Burnham is not above that and he does seem to use this technique of sort of playing Mr Nice Guy as a way sometimes of failing to answer questions. But Badenock herself, you know, I mean her question on Europe was the sort of jocular one basically saying, you know, do you just say the first thing that comes into your head Prime Minister? And then he got deadly serious about, you know, the fact that Russia is trying to interfere with our elections and this is terrible and, you know, really kind of hilariously self-righteous about the whole thing. But look, I think, you know, for those of us that did the hard yards of early Baden-Ock versus mid-period Starmer, I mean, I've been doing this 25 years, I don't know what you think, Isabel, but I think there's not been such a sort of eye-bleedingly awful kind of combination as those two in the early in the early stages and this now feels you know Bade Knox in her element she's got a tail up a bit Burnham is glad to be in charge and kind of knows what he's about and I think while not all the questions and answers are hugely revealing I think the sort of tone of it and the little asides and the sense you get from just watching the two of them I think you know this feels a little bit like battle joint and the other thing that's interesting yes this is the House of Commons and broadly speaking it's irrelevant to the lives of the people of our nation.

4:12James Heale: But even when he had a question today, Farage looked a little bit sort of, he didn't look like the sort of rambunctious, bullish Nigel Farage of old. And the challenge, as James, you and I have both been saying during the party conference, you know, where you've got the two traditional main parties very clearly keen to have an argument about principle and economic matters, can for our sort of bust his way into the conversation. And it felt a little bit at times in this session, like that was proving more difficult than it used to. And as I say, this may be just Westminster village nonsense. It may be completely irrelevant to what's going on out there.

4:53James Heale: But I do think things that start in Westminster have a way of sometimes percolating outwards. And the fact that these two seem like sort of equals having a ding dong, that will have a bit of an impact on public perceptions, particularly of Baden-Ock.

5:09Tim Shipman: And of course the main issue which is increasingly dominating in Westminster, Isabel, is about the budget in a fortnight's time. And I think you saw it today with Kevin Baden-Ock trying to talk about how, on the one hand, Andy Burnham wants to talk about ending 40 years of neoliberalism, but on the other hand, Labour MPs are briefing the Financial Times that they want this budget to do as at least time as possible. I mean, that sort of difference between the rhetoric and the reality is something they're going to try and exploit, right? Yeah, and they've got a long time in which to do that as well, because it's not just actually the next two weeks before the budget and the aftermath of that.

5:38It's the next year in the run up to the spending review. And whenever it is that they're going to let poor Alan Milburn publish his final report. Out of his cage. Yes, exactly, on NEATS. I mean, Burnham is still using Milburn as a holding answer to the welfare question. And I wrote this on Coffeehouse a week or so ago that actually that report is becoming useful in its lack of existence at the moment. And once it does exist, it becomes a real problem.

6:05James Heale: It's like one of those perennial inquiries, isn't it? That can be why we can't talk about that because there's an inquiry going on. Yeah, it's a very expensive way of answering a question. As if they haven't got a clue what Alan Milburn is going to say. We all kind of know what Alan Milburn is going to say. We've not read it. He's not finished it yet. It's not Alan Milburn who's the problem guy. He's not having an essay crisis overnight. The exchange on welfare I thought was quite interesting as well because Burnham's answer is always, oh, I've said we need to change the way everything works for young people and it's wrong, all these young people are sitting on welfare.

6:31James Heale: She never seems to come back as I would, as what I'm screaming at. What about all the other people on welfare? You know, it's not just young people's lives that are being chucked away, sitting idle at home, supping from the teat of the state. It's quite a lot of people all the way up the age range. And I'm not sure how long this argument will sort of last, really, for Burnham to keep always putting it back on young people where he's much more comfortable. What about the freeloaders elsewhere? But Alan Milburn hasn't done the report on that. No, he hasn't. So that's five years away. Well, maybe Alan can pull his finger out.

7:05James Heale: And once he's delivered this report, instead of trotting off to top of his tan, as Alan likes to do de temps en temps, he might knuckle down and have a look at slightly older working age welfare claimants. And maybe, you know, if it takes Alan Milburn to do it, I think, you know, Alan's been out of government for a very long time. And I think I'll be the first to tell him to his face that he really needs to sort of step up and take one for the nation, the national team here. Become a hate figure, you mean? No, I don't think so. I think the interesting thing actually is that Labour MPs have bought shares, I think, in Alan Milburn's review.

7:41James Heale: I think they are prepared to see some changes to the way that it works for them at the younger age range. And I think there won't be the rebellions that there were before. I think people in the Labour Party who are invested in Andy Burnham, they're invested in this nebulous report. And even if it makes them a bit uncomfortable, it does at least give them something to hide behind with their constituents. And they can say, well, the great Alan Milburn has pronounced who was one of the more effective ministers in the Blair years. The interesting thing about this is that this is one of the few Blairites who is still allowed to darken Andy Burnham's door.

8:13James Heale: Tony Blair is not being listened to. He's too busy working out, isn't he?

8:18Tim Shipman: And there's guns. And the other big story that's been rumbling on, and of course predictably ended with a damp squib, was about the Ed Davie challenge, which sort of seemed to fizzle out yesterday as well. Just take us through what the Lib Dems are thinking. Well, it turns out there was only one Lib Dem who was thinking one thing and everyone else, whether or not they were thinking it, he'd not checked with them. So Charlie Maynard launched a coup. It's not even the Grand Old Duke of York, because I think the Grand Old Duke of York did know that the troops were behind him when he went up to the top of the hill.

8:49James Heale: Yeah, he marched actual people up the hill, didn't he? This was a sort of just a hill walker, really, just setting off up our city. The lone wolf. The lone wolf. The lone wolf. The beachy head. Yeah, or Scarfell Pike, and then realising that they were only wearing trainers and that they needed to be rescued by the Mountain Rescue Force. So they had a very long meeting where everyone was very nice about it. Davey, basically. The leadership coup didn't happen. Davey got up today at PMQs and had a big cheer and then went back to asking about social care again. And just, I mean... God, how many more years?

9:20James Heale: This Charlie Maynard coup, it reminds me of the Raymond Shishty leadership election. Remember Raymond Shishty, yes.

9:26Tim Shipman: Raymond Shishty, Kent Tory MP,

9:29James Heale: who announced that he was standing for the leadership. and nobody but nobody else stood up with him.

9:35Tim Shipman: He needed, I think, two nominees or something. Do you want to hear my theory on this? So, you know, the great British politics theory is you have jock, nerd, jock, nerd. In terms of prime ministers, you have someone like Theresa May, who's a nerd. They have a jock, which is a Boris Johnson, et cetera, and it alternates. My theory is there's something in the water in Whitney, which is you go boring, grandee-type, absolute maverick, which is you had Douglas Hurd and then you had Sean Woodward, the only Labour MP with a butler. Then you had David Cameron. Now you've got Charlie Maynard. And so I think this pendulum theory applies on a local level to Whitney.

10:03Tim Shipman: And there's something about Whitney.

10:04James Heale: Well, it's like the Tories saying back in the day, the nation is sick of this amazing political operator, Tony Blair. What we need is Ian Duncan Smith to run the show and the quiet man and a serious character, not like this sort of showy, brilliant political operator. What we really need is someone bald and not very charismatic. And they ran that experiment for two whole years in the end. Tim, you said that you've been doing this 25 years. And I don't want us to sound like an old people's home, but I've been doing this for 15 years. And I suspect that when we are actually in an old people's home, we will still be listening to Ed Davey asking for cross-party talks on the social care that has not been found in order to house us properly in that old people's home.

10:43Well, Lord Ed Davey will still be asking for it. Boris Johnson will be dead but still making a leadership comeback via Ouija board.

10:50James Heale: Will he still be throwing himself into swoop pools? That's the question. That's the test, really, for me of Ed Davey. Not whether he can keep up a campaign on social care, but whether he's still prepared to do the stunts in his late 70s. But I found it fascinating that Ed Davie asked about cross-party talks on social care and Andy Burnham said he was going to arrange a few more. And I don't know whether this is a bit like a sort of child or social care solution for Ed Davie in that they're just going to keep him busy with these cross-party talks. Well, once Alan Milburn's finished with his report, he'll be coming in to chair them.

11:18James Heale: You know, he's the only acceptable face. I actually thought that Andy Burnham had accepted that cross-party talks weren't going to work. Nobody who knows anything about social care actually thinks they're going to work. They just say we're going to do cross-party talks. Well, the same with Brexit. He keeps saying he wants a consensus on Brexit.

11:33Tim Shipman: I mean, good luck with that. But how long can these answers keep holding? I mean, obviously, Milburn's time-sensitive. I mean, Kimmy Bain said it would be after the budget now, but it said it would be before. But these answers about this sort of consensus, surely at some point, Burnham's got to drop the act, hasn't he? Well, I mean, I've been writing about Andy Byrne and trying to reform social care since 2009. So a long time is the answer. But actually, yeah, I mean, I think next year is going to be the tough year. You can have an awkward budget with a lot of gaps in it this autumn. And, you know, some people are a bit cross.

12:04Hopefully, you know, white van drivers, of which I am one, will be very happy with the budget. Yeah, there we go. Breaking news.

12:12James Heale: Spectatorless. Ed Miliband feels real respect for me. do you fly across of St George out of the back window? Not quite. But, you know, the budget for, I think it's white van drivers and nail technicians, which is probably where my two interests actually cross over. But anyway, those two groups will be happy. Everyone else will just be left thinking, what about defence? What about welfare? What about all these big questions? What about social care? What about the NHS? Those questions will have to be answered next year because that is the point at which actually you can't do that much hiding in a comprehensive spending review in the way that you can with a budget.

12:42Tim Shipman: Well, someone who's been covering politics for eight years, not compared to you two. A mere stripling. You are old, Father William. I feel old and I've very much got used to the can kicking. Thank you, Tim. Thank you, Isabel. And thank you for listening to Coffee House Shots.

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