EMQs: Is Wes Streeting a good health secretary?

0:00Do you want your soccer analysis more direct than an Arsenal set piece? Join me, Max Rushton and the Guardian's expert soccer journalists for the latest action and news from the Premier League to the Champions League and all the way to the World Cup. We'll have chat more out of the box than a Dominic Sobber's live free kick, more panellists than Chelsea have players and unlike VAR, we know where to draw the line. For fine margins, fun debates and full-blooded tackles, Football Weekly, listen wherever you get your podcasts and watch the full episodes on YouTube.

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1:59George Osborne: The Chancellor of the Exchequer. Getting a lesson from the Shadow Chancellor on how to balance the books is like getting a lesson from Dracula on how to look after a bloodbath.

2:08Ed Balls: Ed Balls. A steady as she goes budget. What kind of ship does he think he's on, the Titanic? Bermary, Celeste.

2:16George Osborne: Welcome to EMQs from Political Currency with Ed Balls and George Osborne.

2:26Ed Balls: So hello and welcome to EMQ's Ex-Ministers' Questions. And this is our final pre-Easter question session before Parliament will be going into recess and so is political currency. But we're not, George, denying our listeners the Easter delights of our podcast. It's just going to be changing somewhat.

2:46George Osborne: Yeah, that's right, because we are going to do one of our Inside the Rooms. which is often over several episodes and I think we'll be over this. We haven't recorded it yet but we are about to. And it's going to be about the campaign in Libya in 2011. So we're going to be speaking to some of the key participants in that and of course there's some echoes with what's going on in the world at the moment in the Middle East. But for those who've listened before to for example our inside the room on the Scottish referendum with Nicola Sturgeon or the Brexit referendum with Michael Gove or the first few months of the Cameron premiership with David Cameron you know you'll know we go through it in some detail so that people really understand what it's like to make decisions in real time how government makes decisions but this is quite interesting the first time we've done a kind of armed conflict isn't it where there's a kind of fusion of the politics with the military and the spies and foreign affairs and so on and of course

3:42Ed Balls: you were in the war cabinet with David Cameron as prime minister, US Chancellor, William Hay, Foreign Secretary, Nick Clegg, Deputy Leader, I'm sure was in the room as well. But we're also going to be talking to the intelligence experts, the military strategy experts, and also a European dimension, because this was a campaign which was initially led by France, as well as the UK, Sarkozy in the driving seat. but with the endorsement of both the European Council and the United Nations. And so different from some other complex.

4:19George Osborne: Although I think the critics would say, well, we shouldn't get involved in any of these things. Look at Libya. And the supporters, I went, you know, we're not going to prejudge the end of the show, but the supporters would say, no, no, no, we avoided a massacre and it was the right thing to do to get to intervene. I mean, these issues to some degree are timeless. and I hope people are going to enjoy it. I'm going to ask you one Easter question though before we get on to our serious questions, which is when it comes to actual chocolate at Easter, do you think like you've got to have an egg because that's the traditional thing?

4:52George Osborne: It's got to be egg shaped or do you think you can go for like an Easter bunny? And when it comes to kind of preference, do you like milk chocolate or white chocolate or posh dark chocolate? What's your...

5:05Ed Balls: So I think you definitely need an egg, although it's OK for there to be other shapes as well. I'm very much a milk chocolate person. Don't mind white, not hugely keen on dark chocolate. Don't forget that our Easter tradition, I've told you before, is to throw raw eggs over the house and catch them on the other side. But I think you're talking about eggs to eat here. I think the one thing that I think is really important. Is that a kind of Yorkshire thing? I don't know what the hell it is. the one thing to say as a parent is the one day of the year when you want your children to have a lot of eggs they should eat more than they want and learn the lesson so don't skimp on the eggs

5:45George Osborne: the trouble is you then have eggs like lying around the house or chocolate bunnies or whatever lying around the house for months after it well this is a great advantage of being a parent that

5:55Ed Balls: you wait till they feel queasy with excessive chocolate eating, slip them away somewhere, then just late at night when the kids have gone to bed, pull them out.

6:03George Osborne: Tuck in yourself.

6:04Ed Balls: Absolutely. That's what I would do.

6:06George Osborne: Would to do. Sounds a bit abstract. Sounds like it's exactly what you have done. The chocolate thief is revealed. Your children finally know. The chocolate didn't go off. It wasn't eaten by mice.

6:22Ed Balls: I know, but look, but the whole point is if they've eaten enough, They don't want to mention chocolate for a while.

6:27George Osborne: Well, for about 24 hours.

6:28Ed Balls: OK, that's true.

6:30George Osborne: Anyway, we should get on with our questions, shouldn't we, for EMQs? We should. So our first question comes from Steve Brine, who was a health minister in the last Tory government, among other things.

6:42Ed Balls: Hello, Ed. Hello, George. Thanks for the podcast. Steve Brine here. I used to be a health minister. I noticed that you don't talk health all that often. And I just wondered what your view is, given that ministers in this government, on the media, in Parliament, the political currency that they definitely deal in and how they seemingly judge their success is how they're turning around the NHS. So my question is, how do you judge Wes Streeting? You often talk about him as a good communicator and a good political operator. But how do you judge him as a health secretary? Or is it the case that you can only really judge health secretaries some years after they've left office?

7:16George Osborne: Thank you. Steve, great to hear from you. And I know Steve is a big fan of the podcast and also does a health podcast with James Bethel, who was a health minister as well. And that's well worth listening to. That's a good question, isn't it? How do you judge the success of a health secretary? And is West Streeting, I guess, therefore doing a good job? So I was kind of thinking, well, first of all, classic way of judging the success of a health secretary is they get out alive. It's regarded as a pretty difficult job where things can go wrong on your watch. Winter crises, waiting lists going up.

7:48George Osborne: Think of Jeremy Hunt and the junior doctor's strike. Think of Patricia Hewitt being booed by the nurses, I think it was. You know, so it's seen as a pretty tough wicket, even for a Labour health secretary, even tougher for a Tory one. And so I think there's a sort of first test is you seem to kind of get out alive, build your political career. That might seem a bit narrow, just focused on the health secretary themselves. But within that context, you know, did you win a big settlement from the Treasury? Were you successful in getting the Treasury to kind of open the coffers for you? That would be another kind of way of being regarded as a success.

8:28George Osborne: But I personally think all those are a bit, you know, narrow. I think particularly a health secretary in a new government after an election where there's more freedom to do things and the opposition is less dug in and the health service itself and its different representative parts might be more open to change. I think you would want to leave office with at least one kind of really notable, lasting change to the way health care is delivered, probably within the NHS. But it could be also public health as well, which is a shared responsibility with local government and other bits of Whitehall, like the Education Department.

9:05It would be quite sort of depressing if you left and all you've done is kind of survive the winter crises and got some money out of the chance, which probably anyone would have got because ultimately it'd be a kind of prime ministerial decision.

9:18George Osborne: And made changes that really, you know, have overall improved the service and I guess reattached people in the current climate to the NHS. I don't know. What do you think, Ed?

9:28Ed Balls: See, I think most of the time with health secretaries, when they do a big reform, they get remembered for it kind of in a negative way rather than a positive way. Think of Andrew Lansley and his reforms. Think of all the messing around with different forms of primary care trusts under the Labour government. and West Streeting is running a risk that his big reform abolishing NHS England, which has still not happened and still unfolding, very complicating. You know, it's a big reform. It's not clear what impact it's going to have positively, but it's causing quite a lot of internal instability. So that is a risk.

10:08Ed Balls: The second thing with health secretaries is they deal with crises. Obviously, COVID is a classic. But West Streeting has been dealing with two crises, one around doctor strikes and the strike action over pay. And, you know, I think the jury's out as to how he has handled that, because, you know, on the one hand, he's been tough. On the other hand, he gave quite a lot of money at the beginning and didn't get a lasting deal with the doctors.

10:32George Osborne: I mean, no one would have assumed it would still be going on, would they, like two years into a Labour government? There was an assumption Labour would come in and basically the doctors would agree a deal.

10:41Ed Balls: Whereas in the last week, there has been a potential crisis, a big news story about meningitis in Kent and the outbreak at the university. And the public health authorities, West Street, were quickly out of the traps. Antibiotics, vaccinations being done. He was very effective on the television.

11:01George Osborne: And he went, didn't he? He went to Canterbury. Classic example of you need to actually turn up.

11:06Ed Balls: That's a good example. And as Steve says, you know, good political operator, good communicator. I think the thing about the NHS, which is very unusual and different from pretty much anything else other than maybe the economy, certainly schools or local transport or whatever, everybody in our country has a direct impact with the NHS almost every week. either themselves going to the GP or the dentist or to the hospital or a family member doing that or having a family member working in the National Health Service and either as a nurse or as a doctor or as a consultant or working somewhere else in the NHS.

11:50Ed Balls: So the mood in the National Health Service about how it's doing and whether things are getting better and whether people are satisfied with how the NHS is going seeps through into everybody's lived experience in real time. And I think that's the most important thing. And I say that the economy is a bit like that, because whether people feel better off is a similar kind of thing. Everybody's feeling it. So in the end, I think for the health secretary, it doesn't matter how much public profile you get. It does matter what's happening to waiting times. But what really matters is, do people feel that the NHS is getting better and you can rely upon it and morale is up?

12:28Ed Balls: There's a good patient experience. And I think the times when we in government had a better time politically in the polls were the times when the NHS is going in the right direction. And the surveys show that as well. It's very difficult to turn around an NHS in difficulty in just one parliament. And we were still, you know, 2001, we were still under pressure on the National Health Service. It may well be that Keir Starmer and West Streeting will be under pressure at the next election on the health service because they start from a much, much more challenging situation in terms of weights and resources.

13:02Ed Balls: But will people feel in their lived daily experience, them, their friends, their family, the NHS is getting better? If that is how they feel, then that is the time when the health secretary is seen to be succeeding. That's the most important thing. And whether that will be how people feel about West Streeting at the next election. I still think it's too early to tell, and that's what he'll be focused on. But it's what happens behind the scenes in terms of NHS resources and reform, which deliver that reality on the ground. That's the most important thing that he could be doing rather than speeches and press conferences.

13:35George Osborne: He does a few speeches and press conferences because he's got another objective in view. Which we don't criticise him for. We do not. We support ambition. By the way, Steve and James Bethel, who was another health minister during COVID, they have a great podcast called Prevention is the New Cure, and you should definitely listen to that after you've listened to us. So the next question is actually from a colleague of yours, a university colleague, is that right? Yep, that's true. Michael, take it away. Hi, I'm George. My name is Michael Sanders. I'm a professor of public policy at King's College London, where I co-supervise a PhD student with Ed, and I'm also a kitchen cabinet member.

14:15Our new study published this week giving unconditional cash transfers to care leavers, the first such trial in the UK, has found improvements in health, housing and criminal justice outcomes and even a reduction in spending on drugs and alcohol. Given the success of this project, as well as others like it around the world, why are our benefit systems so locked into heavy conditionality and what would it take for that to change?

14:37Ed Balls: So this is a really interesting study and Michael and I worked together at King's and he sent me this research And it's just one of those things, it's interesting because it provokes lots of debate. There is a common result in developing countries for communities in poverty that handing out cash transfers can lead to better outcomes in terms of people's housing, their health, their well-being. But it's not something which you would likely do in the UK, all of our handing out of money.

15:09George Osborne: This is unconditional cash transfers, isn't it? This is basically, we're not going to ask questions. This is what the studies show. And that's what I guess your colleague is referring to here.

15:17Ed Balls: But what they're doing, interestingly, and they've done an experiment amongst 18 to 25 care leavers. The whole point about a care leaver is it's somebody who doesn't have a parent, doesn't have the bank of mum and dad, doesn't have the kind of support and nest egg, which can be both financial, but also more widely kind of support and encouragement from the parents give or hopefully giving to their kids. and what they said was for 18 to 25 year olds who were known to the local authority who'd come out of care what they would do is they would do an experiment for two-thirds of the trial they gave them money two thousand pounds for the other third the control they didn't give them money and they then looked to see what the outcomes were over the following year and the outcomes were that they were more likely to be in stable housing.

16:11Ed Balls: And this work was supported by the Centre for Homelessness, as well as King's and the Policy Institute. They were less likely to get in trouble with the law and with crime. They were much less likely to be homeless and sofa-serving. Their measures of health and wellbeing were better. Now, it's a small sample. I think they did it with 300 young people over nine local authorities over that year. So they say you should look at this further. But it is an interesting example of proper empirical research amongst, in this case, a targeted group care leavers, which says if they get that kind of support a parent would give, the outcomes are better.

16:51George Osborne: I mean, it sounds like a very interesting study. And I have, I think in this case, a lot of sympathy for what they're trying to achieve and the way of going about it, because I think there's a kind of special responsibility, isn't there, for society. Certainly, I always felt this in government. For, you know, people who are in care, I mean, you would have said in the past in an orphanage or with foster parents or whatever. And, you know, they got so many obstacles in their path compared to, you know, so many other young people in our society. And the state has assumed the responsibility of bringing them up.

17:22George Osborne: And therefore, most people, you know, get some support from their parents. Obviously, it varies a lot depending on how well off the parents are, but they get emotional, moral support, but they also get potentially some financial support. Even quite low-income families will provide you with some support. These people don't have any. So I can see there's a kind of very strong case for it. I think the kind of problem is when you take that kind of special case and then try and extend it more broadly to welfare. And there's a whole debate, isn't there, about, you know, which has been going on since the welfare state was created 100 years ago.

17:56George Osborne: or even you could argue right back to the kind of Elizabethan poor laws in the Middle Ages and Victorian workhouses and so on, which is, do you just give people money without sort of the indignity of them having to prove that they are good people or they'll spend the money well or they're upstanding members of the community? And something like, until it was means tested by me for the well-off 20 % of the society, things like child benefit were universal, or the basic state pension. You know, it was certainly universal people at the time, mainly men who had been in work. But, you know, then you get into all sorts of issues, which is basically, I think, mainly driven by a lack of resources, i.e.

18:38George Osborne: we don't have enough money to go around, so why don't we target it on those who really need it? And because, you know, directly to kind of Michael's question, because this is other people's money, it's coming from taxes that you're extracting from other people who are working, you know they have a view which they express through the ballot box that there should be something in return that we should expect something of people who receive this money and that debate kind of goes backwards and forwards and i mean i think you can find you'll correct me within the left both traditions are strong you know often quite contradictory within them the way they apply these rules we'll do one thing in one space and another thing in another space but the fundamental difference i think here and it's a you know is that here i think most people in society, everyone when people would say, we owe an obligation to these children who've come out of care.

19:26George Osborne: Whereas that's not something that is necessarily felt about other people in society who receive welfare payments.

19:32Ed Balls: Yes. I think there's cross-party support for their big conditionality, for their big rights responsibilities. And the arguments tend to happen about exactly how you draw the line and who shouldn't benefit. The only thing I'd say, there are arguments for universalism. One argument is everybody feels as though they have a stake in the system, the fact that the basic pension goes to everybody, the fact that until you changed it, the child benefit went to everybody. Everybody was part of this welfare state, support for all, more support for those who need it most. But there is another thing, which is if you take, for example, child benefit, a cash payment paid to the vast majority of mothers at child's birth, at a time when you're also wanting parents to see the health visitor, for their children to get into the cycle of inoculations and vaccines.

20:28Ed Balls: And part of the reason why we have been successful in having very high take-ups of vaccination amongst children, for which there is a societal interest, you know, everybody benefits from the individual decision to have the vaccine, is because that is happening alongside the provision of child benefit. It happens at the same time in the bounty pack through the early health visitors coming round. And so there are times when you get wider benefits as a society from that payment. But in this case, it's not about conditionality. It's about, as you say, targeting. And the targeting here is care leavers.

21:05Ed Balls: And, you know, you can see why every care leaver deserves support, as you said. So very interesting study, Michael. We'll take a break and then we're on to another question.

21:39where to draw the line. For fine margins, fun debates and full-blooded tackles, football weekly. Listen wherever you get your podcasts and watch the full episodes on YouTube.

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23:26George Osborne: Welcome back. Our next question is from Julie. Hi, Ed and George. You often hear in other sectors that graduates struggle to get jobs due to lack of experience. However, the opposite seems to be happening in education. When experienced teachers apply for teaching jobs, it's not unusual to find that all the other candidates are newly qualified teachers. Schools are often forced to choose between hiring a cheaper, less experienced teacher or a more expensive experienced teacher. My concern is that if this is to continue, many experienced teachers will eventually have no choice but to search for jobs at private schools or even abroad.

24:06This would only add another layer to the retention crisis. Do you think there's anything that the government can do to help schools find the balance between making teaching an attractive job for graduates while still giving experienced teachers opportunities throughout their careers?

24:21George Osborne: Ed, you were the, were you Children's Schools and Family Secretary? I was. Rather than the Education Secretary, as you keep pointing out to me.

24:29Ed Balls: I actually had a plan for this. If you remember back to a few weeks ago on the podcast, we had a question from John, a police officer, talking about how the experience and value of police officers was not being properly recognised in the way in which pay and recruitment was happening, and that undermined the quality of the service. And Julie is making a kind of similar point here. You know, it is about whether you value experience and whether individual school leaders value that when they're making hiring decisions. But I think there's something that you could do more than that. I, when I was Secretary of State, hasn't happened yet, proposed two things, that teaching should be a master's level profession, a bit like in accountancy or in the law.

25:15Ed Balls: People do qualifications alongside their job and that you ought to be able to allow people who have been in teaching for some years to then, if they want to, to do a qualification. Quite a lot of it would be practical, supported by the sort of teaching, learning establishment that we have. But also to say that to make sure that everybody's skills are up to date, you should have a license to teach, that people ought to sort of check in every few years to show their skills are up to date and that they are doing. You know, it doesn't have to be the full masters, but doing the right kind of learning.

25:50Ed Balls: And if you do those two things together, so there is the license, but also the support for the masters, and you're a good school leader, then wouldn't you then want to make sure that the kind of people who are doing the study and doing the learning and renewing their licence are being properly supported, remunerated, promoted within the school? So I wonder if there's a way to make this more of a progressing profession.

26:13George Osborne: I mean, I kind of defer to your greater knowledge of this stuff. And I think the idea of making sure people are up to date, which would also apply to doctoring. Are you up to date with the latest techniques and are you aware of the latest technology? And that's true in the classroom, particularly as things change with artificial intelligence. I think the fundamental thing, though, Julie, is the question you're asking is one that most organizations face, which is how do you balance the cost of having longer-serving, more experienced people versus the relative saving you make by having new people?

26:47George Osborne: And in parts of government, there's a kind of structure. In the Treasury, where both Ed and I worked, you know there was a huge turnover of younger people in the treasury so people would spend a few years in the treasury and that they kind of get that under their belt and then go off and do other things either in the public sector or elsewhere and i think there's definitely a bend not everyone who goes into teaching has to do it for the whole of their lives and it's probably a great thing for society that more people have experience of what it's like to be a teacher and you know exposure to the pressures of a classroom and enormous skill required so i I don't think we necessarily should expect everyone to be long-serving.

27:25I think the kind of key is, and this is always a challenge for the public sector,

27:28George Osborne: but to be fair, it's also a big challenge in the private sector too. Are the longer-serving people the really good people, which I guess the kind of reforms you're talking about would help ensure, or are they the people who sort of get stuck in that role and haven't moved on and haven't been promoted into jobs outside or to another school or whatever? I think that is the kind of challenge and it's not at all unique to teaching I would say that is a kind of challenge of management I've always thought there was a bit too much you know I mean I wish I definitely would have indulged in myself in opposition like you know too many bureaucrats too many administrators too many leadership courses when we just get on and teach same in policing and nursing whatever but you know actually leadership and management skills in the public sector are incredibly important including in schools and everyone knows I mean certainly My experience as a constituency MP was you absolutely knew within about 15 minutes of being in the school, whether it was a kind of well-run school or a not so well-run school.

28:26George Osborne: And you knew that all of that or a huge amount of that direction came from the head teacher and his or her very senior leadership team. They're priceless when they get it right. Absolutely right.

28:38Ed Balls: We've got time for a quick question from Thomas. This one, George, you're going to love.

28:41George Osborne: Hi Ed and George. I was visiting Bruton this weekend, George's domain, and it struck me how charming it could be if the car-choked high street gave way to pedestrians, bikes, shared surfaces and al fresco dining. Anne Hidalgo has transformed Paris over the last decade with cycling now twice as common as driving. If Paris can do it, so can Bruton. And if so, will George lead the charge? I've mucked up a before and after image of the high street to see what it could be like. Which one do you prefer?

29:14Ed Balls: Thank you. So I have to say, Thomas, brave, creative, brilliant as your proposal is. I'm not sure how well it will go down in Bruton, George. I mean, what would the residents think of pedestrianising the main street?

29:29George Osborne: Well, I think, Thomas, they like the comparison with Paris. that you know the two kind of epicenters of western european culture are um paris and bruton and that we should learn from some of the um i guess is she the former mayor of paris or she's just leaving mayor of paris anyway because if paris can do it so can bruton this is mayor ann hidalgo who's who's just leaving actually there's a new mayor who's just been elected we should talk about the French elections on our podcast. And she has kind of driven quite an aggressive pedestrianisation policy in Paris, which we've seen elements of in London over the years.

30:06George Osborne: So the problem in Bruton, without getting too parochial, is that the traffic is pretty bad on the high street, because it is the only route basically through the town and onto other towns in Somerset. You know, it's a kind of through road onto places like Shepton Mallet and Froome and so one. There's no real kind of way around. And then when you look at the way the town is sort of situated in a valley, it's not obvious where a bypass would go at all. So it's not like one of these, you know, I represented a constituency where there was a town called Alderley Edge, which was kind of famous back in the day for all the kind of Manchester United footballers and Manchester City footballers that used to live.

30:48George Osborne: The Beckhams used to live in Alderley Edge or on the edge of Alderley Edge. And, you know, there had been a kind of proposal for a bypass since the 1930s and everyone knew the route and it you know eventually got built thanks to an excellent local MP but I think in the case of Bruton and certainly not I'm aware of there's unless it goes straight through my house anyone's ever come up with a route for a bypass because it's just very very hard to work out where it would go because it's so hilly and you'd have to kind of put a tunnel through a hill or maybe a very deep cutting which seems very unrealistic and very expensive and And given, you know, we've spent 20 years trying to sort out, you know, the bypass around Stonehenge on your way to Britain, I think it's going to be a long time yet.

31:30George Osborne: But stop off on the high street. Stop off at Bill the Butcher. Stop off at the chapel as you're driving through. Enjoy all the local shops.

31:40Ed Balls: I think, Thomas, George is saying, nice idea. Like the pictures. Total non-starter. Thanks for your contribution. And so let's move on. Quick ad break. One more question.

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32:54Ask the test of Cologard to your doctor. For more information in Spanish, visit Cologard.com. Do you want your soccer analysis more direct than an Arsenal set piece? Join me, Max Rushton, and the Guardian's expert soccer journalists for the latest action and news from the Premier League to the Champions League and all the way to the World Cup. We'll have chat more out of the box than a Dominic Sobber's live free kick, more panelists than Chelsea have players, and unlike VAR, we know where to draw the line. For fine margins, fun debates, and full-blooded tackles, Football Weekly, listen wherever you get your podcasts and watch the full episodes on YouTube.

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34:04Welcome back.

34:05Ed Balls: Our final question comes from Hass. Hi, Ed. Hi, George. This is Hass Amit, big fan of the podcast. As a Muslim who used to be involved in the Tory party and someone who was on the parliamentary candidates list not long ago, I wanted to raise Nick Timothy's post about praying in Trafalgar Square. It's totally fine to criticize religion, any religion, but what we see from Nick's post is the singling out and framing of Islam as a uniquely problematic, especially with Muslims treated as a cultural threat in ways no other faith is. If you look at Nick's tweets and speeches over time, there's an obsession that fosters a climate where suspicions of Muslims is normalised rather than challenged.

34:43And frankly, this wouldn't have been tolerated under David Cameron's leadership. Whatever you say, there was a clear standard of decency and respect that aligned with British values. And today, figures like Tommy Robinson praise this rhetoric and Kemi is silent on this.

34:58George Osborne: What's your take? And isn't it time mainstream politicians spoke out on this? I've known Nick Timothy for a long time. You know, there are the three stages of Nick Timothy, And I think the third stage is still to be decided. And that's why this is a very good question. Haz, it's great you were a parliamentary candidate. And please don't give up on your ambitions to be in mainstream politics and serve our country. So the first Nick Timothy I came across was when he was a young Conservative researcher. He would actually help out a lot at Prime Minister's questions. He was part of the core team prepping David Cameron, who was then leader of the opposition.

35:35George Osborne: and you know he was really bright he is very bright you know i don't think anyone would dispute that um and personable and unbelievably helpful in that job and we had quite a few people do that job and he stood out and that was like nick timothy 1.0 nick timothy 2.0 was the nick timothy i saw advising theresa may and that was an absolute disaster i mean it was an absolute disaster for him and it was an absolute disaster for the May premiership. And he and his colleague at the time completely misread, I think, how to operate in Downing Street as an advisor. And in the end, not only did I think they contribute to Theresa May's poor election result in 2017, because Nick was kind of instrumental in drafting the manifesto that unwound in the middle of the election and I think misunderstood what Theresa May's mandate was, but also you know it was a condition of her survival after that that from her senior cabinet colleagues that he was fired which he was so that was like nick 2.0 nick 3.0 is he's now a member of parliament and he's now in the shadow cabinet and this is the big time for nick right and you know he has the opportunity to be a really important figure in the conservative party's future you know if the conservatives come back to government he could be a very senior cabinet minister.

36:58George Osborne: And he has to decide what kind of politician he wants to be. Now he's a public figure because it'll be less forgiving than it's been in the past for his career. And I think the kind of comments he's making here are the kind of things that are going to send him up a dead end politically. They're not really what people want to hear. It's not the Conservative Party's route back to government. It's not, in my view, in any way, a kind of accurate depiction of the kind of city we want to live in in London and actually Mayor Sadiq Khan, Labour Mayor, I'm a member of the Conservative Party, but I think he goes out of his way to celebrate quite a lot of different religious festivals including Christian ones in Trafalgar Square which I think has been a really good innovation.

37:37George Osborne: So I don't know support at all what he was saying and I think if I was giving him some advice which he won't want from me but you know I know him pretty well over the years, think about where you want to be. People are now going to be forming a view about you and they don't want to be forming the view you're creating at the moment.

37:52Ed Balls: Well, I wasn't in Trafalgar Square for the open iftar, but I was in Trafalgar Square in 2008, the celebration, the anniversary of the State of Israel. I was there as the cabinet member, the only cabinet member, I think, to be invited. And I spoke in front of 20 ,000 people on the stage with the chief rabbi, a celebration of Israel, but also with the chief rabbi. I think we actually danced the horror in front of the stage, a celebration of the Jewish contribution to Britain's national life and culture. And it is no surprise to me that over the last week, you've had leaders of the Christian and Jewish faiths alongside the Muslim faith, all coming out and saying together that we have to have tolerance and respect for each other's religions and our ability to pray and celebrate in public.

38:48Ed Balls: There was a brilliant article by Fraser Nelson drawing upon his own experience about Protestant-Catholic tensions in Scotland during his upbringing and then taking that learning into the modern day. And he says the open iftar was not a challenge to Britain but a test of it. And the answer came quickly, Jews and Christians defending it because in doing so, they were defending their own freedoms and the country that makes them possible. You know, and the fact that in Britain we've seen Islamophobic attacks, we've also seen a big rise in anti-Semitic attacks, the terrible events in Golders Green earlier in the week.

39:22You know, in this world, it crosses a line when you say

39:26Ed Balls: that it's OK for Christian ceremonies to be conducted in public places, but not for other minority religions, whether that is the Islamic faith or the Jewish faith. I just think that that is not the tolerant, open, multi-faith Britain any of us have grown up in or want to live in. And sometimes when you cross the line, you have to acknowledge that. And I don't know whether Nick Timothy will, but I agree with you that that is not the right direction for politics to go in our country. And I understand very strongly the concerns that Haz is raising in his question.

40:06George Osborne: Haz, thank you for the question. Good to hear from you. That's all we have time for this episode of EMQs. Enjoy Easter since we're talking about religious festivals.

40:15Ed Balls: We are going to do a what if EMQs over the Easter break alongside our Inside the Room about the 2011 Libyan conflict and how that was conducted for the lessons which we learned for contemporary Britain and the contemporary world. But then we'll be back with our normal podcast and our normal EMQs when Parliament returns after Easter.

40:38George Osborne: If you want to hear all three parts of the Inside the Room on Libya, which is going to be fascinating and you want to hear them together, then you can become a member of our kitchen cabinet or a gold scrubber. All three episodes will be available for you on Thursday.

40:51Ed Balls: And also George and I will do a bonus reflection episode where we look back on our Inside the Room and ask what should politics learn in 2026. And that, like with our past Inside the Rooms, will be available to our subscribers, to our Kitchen Cabinet and Gold subscribers. In the meantime, have a very good Easter. Don't eat too many eggs unless you're under 14, in which case go wild. If anybody wants to send photos of them throwing raw eggs over the house and catching them, then I'd like that because you'd be joining a very important British tradition celebrated in our household every year.

41:30George Osborne: And I'm sorry, we've talked about various traditions celebrated by large numbers of Britons. I don't think the egg throwing one is.

41:38Ed Balls: It is. I tell you, George, you don't underestimate how big a thing this is. Anyway, as a British person, married to a British person, we will be carrying on with our British children having a British tradition. We'll be throwing raw eggs over the house. See you for Inside the Room on Thursday. Utterly eccentric.

41:54George Osborne: See you then.

42:02George Osborne: Thanks for listening to Political Currency. This has been a Persephoneca production.

42:16Do you want your soccer analysis more direct than an Arsenal set piece? Join me, Max Rushton, and the Guardian's expert soccer journalists for the latest action and news from the Premier League to the Champions League and all the way to the World Cup. We'll have chat more out of the box than a Dominic Sobber's live free kick, more panellists than Chelsea of players, and unlike VAR, we know where to draw the line. For fine margins, fun debates, and full-blooded tackles, Football Weekly, listen wherever you get your podcasts and watch the full episodes on YouTube.

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