EMQs: Lasagna plots and Shakespearean AI bots

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2:01The 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.

2:10Ed Balls: Ed Balls. A steady-as-she-goes budget. What kind of ship does he think he's on, the Titanic? They're married, Celeste. Welcome to EMQs from Political Currency with Ed Balls and George Osborne.

2:29Ed Balls: So hello and welcome to EMQ's Ex-Ministers Questions. And still getting loads of feedback from our August episodes. And one which went down, I think, really well was the discussion about books. What was your best summer book? Oh, I read a really good book. I mean, it's not a new book, but it's Gorky Park. It's a thriller. It was written by a guy called Martin Cruz Smith. And the reason I read it was that, sadly, he died. I mean, he died of a good age. And I read his obituary, and I thought, I must read Gorky Park. I knew of it as a movie, not that I had seen the movie. But it was basically written in 1981 at the kind of height of the Cold War.

3:13And it's about a kind of honest Moscow cop in a kind of corrupt and difficult communist system who is investigating three murders in Gorky Park in Moscow. And it's just a gripping thriller. It's really brilliant. And actually, it wasn't as much as I was reading the obituary. I read the obituary because Robert Harris had said that it was really sad this man had died and Gorky Park was a brilliant book and it inspired Fatherland, his first novel, Robert's first novel. And anyway, it's really good. If you like a good kind of, it's not really a political thriller. It's a sort of crime thriller, but set in the middle of the Cold War and written in the middle of the Cold War as well.

4:01And it's got that classic, you know, the honest cop in the, you know, up against the machine. Anyway, really good. Strongly recommend it.

4:12Ed Balls: my recommendation i actually um remember when i was an undergraduate going to um oxford in 1985 and reading testament of youth by vera britain which is about her as a woman going to oxford at the end of the first world war having lost her i think her brother and her fiance in in the war and for two days not doing any work just sitting in the library reading this amazing novel but there's a new novel out by a she wasn't she the mother of um shirley Williams that's exactly right that's exactly right and also a very close friend of Winifred Holtby who was also one of the kind of big um kind of early um feminists but also kind of internationally campaigned strongly for the League of Nations in that um right in that kind of post First World War period there's a novel out I mean we've talked about me enjoying Downton Abbey in the 1920s there was another novel first novel by Joanna Miller called The Eights and it's um it's the story of four women who arrive at the same time at St.

5:16Ed Balls: Hugh's College in Oxford in 1920, I think. And they are the first year that Oxford admit women students for full degrees. Until then, you could go and study, but you weren't allowed properly to matriculate and then to get your degree and that was the first generation who who did and at this all women's college and it's um it's really really good of capturing the the politics of that period but also you know the um the kind of slightly antediluvian way in which uh women were treated by um the men and the dons and all the kind of rules about what they were allowed to do and where they're allowed to go it's it's um I really enjoyed it.

6:01Ed Balls: It's a very nice book. It's not the Oxford of Brideshead? It's not the Oxford of Brideshead, no. But, you know, they would have been rubbing shoulders with those people. Because that's set immediately after the war, isn't it? And Dura Brideshead, yeah. Also, Chariots of Fire, do you remember the movie starts? Is that incredibly moving bit where they, you know, they arrive at university. the athletes who later run in the Olympics. And all the kind of, basically the men who had graduated before them had been killed in the First World War. And there's a kind of moving scene in the kind of chapel of the college.

6:46And they feel they kind of have this huge burden of being the living, the next generation.

6:53Ed Balls: We have to end our audition to replace Melvin Bragg in our time on Radio 4. I think both of us would be great. And if they want a double act, we are up. But we're going to start with EMQs. And actually, our first question starts with something which picks up on one of our summer editions. And after the government reshuffle of the summer, it's very timely. Hi Ed and George, love the podcast and just caught up on your summer episode reflecting on reshuffles, which was very timely. I was wondering what actually happened to the new minister or cabinet minister when they were appointed. Do they go straight to the department or are they briefed in Downing Street?

7:30And how long does the induction take? Are you given piles of reading and hours of briefings to get you up to speed? Or does the whirlwind of decision making and the requirements of the news cycle mean that you're thrown straight in at the deep end? And have there been any changes to the way this happens during your political lifetimes? I really loved the reflections and longer form interviews over the summer, but it's great to be back into the weekly cut and thrust. Wishing you all the best, Chris.

7:51Ed Balls: So that's a really good question from Chris. And the answer is that other than a fleeting walk into Downing Street, and not everybody who is appointed to a cabinet job will get to walk into Downing Street. often you will get a phone call from the Prime Minister. I think in the ear of Keir Starmer, sometimes not even from the Prime Minister, sometimes he devolves it to the Chief Whip, which is slightly risky, especially when you're sacking people. But you get a phone call and then rather than, as you suggest, Chris, going to Downing Street for a briefing, you go straight to your department and you are into the whirlwind.

8:32Ed Balls: You meet your new private office and they have erased any sign that anybody else has ever done that job before you. No pictures on the wall, no detritus of anybody else. They start totally afresh. And I think there is a difference between it happening when you move from opposition into government and a reshuffle like we saw last week. When it's opposition into government, everybody knows the big change is happening. So the civil service has been preparing for your arrival for weeks and they'll have lots of briefing notes and papers ready for you, meetings to be had. They will know, though, because you'll have been preparing for months and maybe talking to them in those meetings you have with the permanent secretary before the election.

9:21Ed Balls: They'll know what your plans are. So that transition is actually much easier to handle. In 2007, when Gordon Brown became prime minister, that was more like one of those transitions. It wasn't, of course, the case that Gordon Brown was moved from opposition into government because he was already the Chancellor of the Exchequer. So in no sense was that the opposition. But everybody knew that transition was happening. But if you take last Friday, the civil service will not have known there was a reshuffle happening until that morning. It's a huge shock for the departments and also for the ministers who suddenly find they're changing.

9:55Ed Balls: Nobody has any idea what the new agenda is going to be. no briefing notes have been written or prepared but you have to come in in those cases and start immediately so it's quite normal to get the call in the morning arrive at lunchtime and find at three in the afternoon you are making a speech in parliament on a new policy subject in your new brief for which you've had no prior knowledge or done any work so i think for the civil service and for cabinet ministers when you're making the transition within government in the kind of reshuffle we saw last week that is much more destabilizing yeah i mean i i don't speak here from enormous personal experience because i never did any other job in got i only had one government so i was never reshuffled um and i didn't ever have to sort of walk up downing street and do all of that i mean these days let's start with the kind of regular reshuffle um so these days what tends to happen but as ed says you know we're learning under kistana that things are a little bit different because he devolves to his chief whip or his chief of staff some of the conversations both the appointments and the dismissals and uh you know some people think that's uh you know a bit high-handed um and i guess he would say well i've just got like a lot on and i gotta get things right and like no it might be nice to get a call from me but it's not necessary um these days what happens is that people are generally fired in private they used to have to walk up downing street everyone would use a reshuffle on you know suddenly the government would say we've got to reshuffle on and people would walk up down the street and they'd be fired and then they'd have to walk out of that they'd go and see the prime minister you normally see the prime minister usually with one at the prime minister have someone else in the room usually as principal private secretary or maybe as chief of staff and then you would walk out disappointed or indeed in tears these days people tend to be fired in the house of commons in the prime minister's office in the house of commons which is behind where the speaker sits if you can imagine a chamber like you know you walk through the doors you sometimes see people walking in on television behind the speaker's chair and you walk about 40 yards and you get to the prime minister's office and so you know and that's a non that's a kind of that's far away from the kind of media glaze because the cameras can't go there so they're fired there they're appointed but they're awarded a job so i walk you up downing street you will often be told the first briefing you will get is from the prime a good prime minister although they will be doing a lot of reshuffling and have a lot of conversations will probably still have like here are three things i want you to focus on in your department you know they will they will give you a kind of instruction of what they want you to do from the job which they will you know if they're good they will then follow up with a much longer conversation later but the first briefing you get is from the prime minister and then you see as you say and you you would then go to your department the driver will be waiting and there's we've discussed this for our drivers episode there's for some reason the drivers know more than the politicians do about you know who's got what because they're all in sort of pre-positioned and then you turn up in the department and your private office and that's you know there's civil servants who to who are uh you know they're they're not the most senior civil servants in the department but they're very capable and they're on their way to the top probably in the department which is why they're coming through the private office as part of their career.

13:18And that's the kind of outer office of the Secretary of State. And they will arrange for a meeting with the permanent secretary, the most senior civil servant. They'll probably introduce you over the next 24 hours to the kind of key civil servants who are doing the different sort of sections of that department. You'll meet your junior ministers, who will be a brand new team as well. And although you might know each other as MPs, you won't necessarily have ever worked together. You'll have to, if you've never been appointed for, you have to find some special advisors. If you have, you'll bring your special advisors over.

13:54These are your political aides. And as you're saying, you have to get, you know, if you're the new foreign secretary, to take a random example, and there was a call booked at 3 p.m. with the Indian foreign minister for the previous foreign secretary, Well, you do the 3 p.m. call as the new foreign secretary. And you'll probably get a few people phoning as well, saying congratulations and so on. And if you've got a, you know, if there's a Ukraine conference in, you know, Brussels the next day that David Lammy was going to, well, then Yvette Cooper has to go to it. I mean, that's so you do step immediately into it.

14:30And I think one of the kind of challenges is what do you scrap of the old diary? What do you have to keep? And how do you create some space for you to think about your new job? and then you know i don't really have much to add to what you were saying there about it's very different coming from opposition where there will have been a years a year of conversations with the civil servants before you arrive on the kind of official contact with the opposition you'll have as shadow minister thought a lot about the job crucially you'll have met all the kind of key kind of stakeholders and you know if you're the if you're the shadow business secretary you'll They've met the head of the CPI and the head of the chambers of commerce and the heads of lots of companies already.

15:11So you're not, you know, often as a brand new cabinet minister and a new department, you haven't met all the key people. If you're the shadow who becomes the real thing, you will have already met them all. And then the civil servants literally give you a kind of physical briefing book, or maybe it's in digital form these days for many people, of, you know, issues in the department. And they put a lot of effort and time into that. And they do produce a briefing book for a Labour government, a Conservative government, a Liberal Democrat government, and I guess now a reform government. So they prepare four versions of kind of what you might want to do now, minister or indeed prime minister.

15:50Sometimes it goes, I'll just finish by saying, sometimes it goes wrong because everyone was expecting Neil Kinnock to win the 1992 general election. And John Major won it and remained prime minister. But he tells the story that, you know, he goes in Downing Street and that night in his red box, he gets like, Prime Minister, one of your first acts you'll want to undertake is to join the European Social Chapter, which was a big Labour pledge back then. And they'd put the Neil Kinnock briefing into the John Major box that night. So occasionally I mix up. I did once receive, it's kind of complicated to explain actually on a podcast, but you receive these paper submissions and they've got the title of the submission on the front of the folder.

16:34And they cross out the last one and put a new one in. So you can see all the titles of the previous submissions. And once or twice I got ones that had been for previous Labour ministers. So I could see the things that they had had submissions on. But that was generally there was, it was all very, very smooth.

16:52Ed Balls: I think there's one good point you made in there, which I'll highlight. What do you mean one good point? Of your many good points in there, there's one which I'm going to highlight because I don't think we said this when we did the podcast in August. The phone calls you make on the first day in a new job as a government minister are really important because people you call never forget. On that day when there's so many other things going, all those priorities, you chose to ring that person because that relationship is really important. And I think, you know, people often forget it's easy to arrive as a government minister and think I need to get on top of my briefs and read it all before I call people.

17:27Ed Balls: But just making the calls. I'm also reminded you're going to enjoy this one. I actually had a message a couple of days ago from Jake Richards, who is the South Yorkshire MP, just got his first job in the Justice Department last weekend. And he said the message to me says, I'm in a government car on my first day with Sean, George's driver. he sends his regards he said great i listened to your pod prior to this jake so um jake's driver is sean your old driver he heard us talk about it on our summer pod and um so sends his best wishes so jake well maybe sean's listening but if sean isn't listening please please tell him sean is a legend he was brilliant he was a really good driver and far more to the point fun to be with in the car and uh it was a few years ago but he was a bit of a jack the lad and it we had a lot of funny times in that car yeah but that was the phase when you were a jack the lad as well wasn't it george no i think i was no a bit of a man about town i was all bit serious then you know gadding between restaurants and nightclubs you and sean on the town he was shall we popped up to smithfield for a 6 a.m breakfast before we start the morning meetings or do you feel the need to go back for an hour sleep minister he was uh he really really good guy sean so please bear us on my best wishes very good right let's uh let's take another question from joe and um he's a listener ever in california and actually this is this is very specific to you and to yvette i think and a lasagna here's the question hi ed and george love the podcast Question for Ed.

19:09Several years back, you and Yvette were accused of plotting to overthrow Ed Miliband as leader while hosting guests at your house and serving up lasagna dinner. Is this true? Lasagna gate. Come on.

19:25Ed Balls: Tell us the truth. I know. It was the front page of the Mail on Sunday. Must be true. Ed, Yvette and the lasagna plot. And the story was, I was Shadow Chancellor, Yvette was Shadow Home Secretary, and I'm having a weekday evening dinner for my Shadow Treasury team and their partners. So 20 people come on a Thursday night, cook dinner. And Yvette, who's, what can I say, who hadn't got around to organising her own event, said, could I invite the Shadow Home Secretary team to come to the same event? So it was about 35 people in the end. And so I decide to cook lasagna. And because of the nature of the modern world, I had to do my proper lasagna, vegetarian lasagna, vegan lasagna, and a celiac lasagna.

20:18Ed Balls: So I had to do quite a lot of different lasagnas to meet all the dietary needs of our guests. And they all came. We had a nice evening. It was as innocent as that. But at the time, Ed Miliband was under a bit of pressure. and so the judgment of the bell on sundae was this must have been a plot to unseat him as leader by me and a vet a cabal and therefore we splashed the bell on sundae this was our lasagna plot and what it did though was it meant that one of my lasagnas became a thing so for the next few years probably about once a month I made a lasagna you know until the final cook it needs another half half hour 40 minutes in the oven um would deliver it to um a member of parliament who would then take it to their constituency fundraising dinner and auction off my lasagna with the recipe and you thousands of pounds i think one went for 10 000 pounds at some london dinner so all these lasagnas over the years the thing i would just like to say to joe though because joe no horse meat in them no horse meat no it was a beef lasagna um joe is a california listener and my mum and dad went out to um oregon and then to berkeley and california in 1963 64 65 um they were there during the berkeley riots it was the first time really they ever um kind of went to the united states my dad was a postdoc student and my mum really learned to cook these non-brillish dishes in the west coast of america so the lasagna i've cooked all of my life is a californian a west coast american italian lasagna the recipe's in my book and it's a great lasagna i'm just gonna say one other thing on that vegan vegetarian thing my daughter had some friends around and she said you know can you cook for us um four of them are vegetarians and two of them are meat eaters so i made um a meat lasagna and a vegetarian lasagna and then the next day that both had gone entirely and i said you know please i like the vegetarian lasagna but i said but I'm surprised with only two meat eaters.

22:21Ed Balls: It all went. And my daughter said, I know, she said, the vegetarians ate the vegetarian lasagna and then they ate the rest of the meat one. And I said, but they're vegetarians. And she said, yeah, she said, but they're against food waste. So they were against food waste. In the hierarchy of causes, food waste came above being a vegetarian. If I'd known they were against food waste and I'd just made one big meat one. I mean, it was a bit ridiculous. I think you're getting off a bit light on lasagna. We are. Anyway, Joe, thank you for being a California listener. And thank you to you and your Californian compatriots for giving my family and the world our Californian American Italian lasagna.

23:00Right. I think you're getting off a bit lightly on this. Hold on. I'm not letting it. We're not moving on yet. We're not moving on yet. So I think we need to go to a break, don't we?

23:07Ed Balls: Isn't it time for a break? No, no. I've looked up lasagna gate in Google. so the first thing i'll come up to is lasagne gate refers to a 2006 incident where a number of tottenham hotspur players suffered food poisoning from a pre-match meal so that was not cooked by me even though knowledge at the time might have been playing spurs so anyway i've i've done for you know i don't give up when i fall at the first hurdle so i did some further research and here i've got the story you know at a gathering over new year at their north london home Mr. Ball's cook lazani from 30 of their closest political allies.

23:44Ed Balls: Our team members. When a guest cheerily observed to one of their children, well done. This was after apparently your children had performed a party piece for the guests. So when one of the guests then says, well done, you would clearly make a great leader of the Labour Party. The youngster replied, no, my mummy is going to get that job. Yes. Well, no, I do remember that moment. and we did think actually it was slightly unfair on one of our kids to end up in the newspapers in that way. But to be fair, I stood in the Labour leadership in 2010 and lost. And so were there to be a vacancy, it would have been a vet's turn and as subsequently transpired in 2015.

24:23Ed Balls: But the whole point, George, is there was no vacancy and Miliband was the leader and nor was our lasagna plot aiming to create a vacancy. This is all nonsense. I haven't finished yet. Blairite David Miliband. Yeah. He is a long-standing personal and political foe of the Brownite, Mr. Balls. A source close to the former foreign secretary said, the Balls Coopers are like the Borgias. They invite you around to lunch and then they pour poison in your ear. He did not say that. Look, the guy cleared off to the East Coast of America. He hadn't hung around. What was he doing? anyway let's be absolutely clear there is no vacancy for the Labour leadership today either is there and uh there's not even though although i tell you i'll tell you time for a party get them around do you think lisey powell's cooking lasagnas i think i think it's time to fire up the uh the lasagna oven again oh i knew um anyway i won't be i won't be but i bet And there will be some people.

25:26Invite me, please.

25:28Ed Balls: Well, at the time, at the time, at the time, you were definitely not invited, if I remember, in 2013. We're taking a break and then we're back with some more questions after that.

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26:25Ed Balls: Add teammates as you grow. No IT, no hassle. Quo's built-in AI agent even handles after-hours calls and books appointments. So you're covered around the clock. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo free, plus 20 % off your first six months at quo.com slash tech. That's Q-U-O dot com slash tech. Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk.

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27:51Ed Balls: Now, welcome back. And we're going to talk about another art, another dark art, not politics, but podcasting. And we have a question from one of our gold subscribers. He turns out has launched a podcast of his own. See if you recognise who this questioner is. Hi, Ed and George. I'm Michael. I'm a gold subscriber, huge fan of the podcast and willing apprentice, as it were. I'm launching my own podcast with Madeline Grant, who is assistant editor of The Spectator. It's going to be called Quite Right, and it's going to be broadcast every Wednesday, and it will cover politics and a little bit of culture.

28:31My concern is this. As politicians turned podcasters, we wondered if you had any tips that you could offer us on how best to make the transition from Westminster to the podcast studio.

28:44Ed Balls: good question for michael i'm not sure what you think i think one is pay no attention to um the viewer figures from the rest is politics and spend no time racking your brain as to how all these people listen to it uh and while you're doing that make sure you never do an emergency podcast can cause that can get you to very very hot water we should say that's michael gove we didn't actually do our big reveal but i thought it was obvious i thought it was obvious yeah the um By the way, I saw an advert for this podcast on the Tube the other day. What? Yeah, for the quite right podcast. They've got a good marketing budget.

29:19They've got a lot of money. Clearly, you know, someone sold The Spectator incredibly well to its new owner and they're flush with cash. Anyway, and also I thought, Michael, when you say we are politicians, I don't think Madeline used to be a politician, did she? Unless I've missed that part of her career.

29:39Ed Balls: She was the sketch writer for The Telegraph, wasn't she? Yes. Do you remember we worked with her on the Andrew Neil show? She was actually really good. Yes. I remember now. Okay, but actually your tips about... I'm so fascinated to see what tips George is going to give them. Well, so the first thing is, you know, you've got to try and develop a conversational style, which I don't think we did actually in our first... You know, our first episode was not as conversational as obviously we've become over the last couple of years. But it's different from doing a radio interview or a TV interview. It's very different from even a kind of long-form interview where you have lots of time to talk.

30:24It's very, very different from broadcasting.

30:29And I think it's trying to find a tone and then trying to find, which people will judge whether we have or not a kind of a relationship with your other podcaster that works and uh that people you know find engaging and i think what i've discovered about podcast the thing that surprises me about podcasting is the number of people who come up to me saying i'm listening to your podcast or and often like oh i listen to your podcast in the bed or uh you know someone's like oh you know my wife's always listening to you before she goes to bed and and it's a very intimate because it it feels like a more intimate medium than the radio even though they're both audio and uh i think getting used to that and that you're it's sort of invading people's private space invited in nevertheless and and trying to find a tone that works in that um in that kind of very intimate space i think there's something which flows from

31:33Ed Balls: that as well um which is i think something that we've learned and we probably agree on although we have discussed this in the past which is we in our summer um episodes did um guest interviews just one of us with emily thornbury west treating we said sarah fine quasi kuateng we've done our inside the room deep dives into a piece of history where we've had a guest but in general when we're doing the podcast we're having a conversation the two of us about what's going on and we haven't had guests in those conversations and i think that is because of that particular podcast form which is people want to feel that it's a very familiar conversation that they are joining and it's like meeting your friends at the pub on a Friday night.

32:20Ed Balls: If every time you went to the pub on a Friday night, your friend bought a new person who you'd never met before and you had to get used to meeting them and talking to them and being slightly kind of working out where they were really coming from, you wouldn't enjoy your Friday nights as much. Every now and then you want your friend to bring a friend along. You're right, Mr. Misenthrope. You don't want to meet any new people. No, I just think that that is the nature of the podcast thing. It's personal and people join us as friends having a chat. And we are different when we are interviewing or talking to a third party.

32:56Ed Balls: And sometimes that works. But I think a lot of people, the feedback we get is that they like joining our conversation. And we like having you along to our conversation. And it's intimate. It's just us. certainly some podcasters are shameless self-promoters who use every opportunity to plug their podcasts and are you back to are you back to the rest of his politics again it's good to see that michael is already adopting that uh by sending us a question plugging his own podcast so i hope he's going to invite us to send a question to his podcast do we want that well let's see how it goes let's see

33:35Let's see how many listeners he gets.

33:37Ed Balls: Do we want any more listeners? Do we regard this as competition? Are we feeling the pressure? Is he buried down on our backs? I think we're feeling more benevolent. We want to bring on the next generation. We want to pass on a few bits of knowledge. We're Manchester United to their Grimsby town. They'll make mistakes. and um and that's it you learn from your mistakes michael and uh and and sometimes you bounce back and have a have a second go and and you know it doesn't have to go well every every time it can't be a rolls royce in week one that's true or even in week 100 week 105 whatever it is um okay right next question um this is this actually i thought was really interesting you have to be a bit nerdy find this interesting.

34:28But anyway, here is a question from Alice. Hi Ed and George.

34:33Ed Balls: Love the podcast. I was recently listening to your summer episode about the WIPs office. As a recent special advisor in the Home Office, Foreign Office and Department of Health, I found it very interesting. I think some of your information about the voting lobbies is slightly out of date. After COVID, MPs no longer get manually ticked off in the voting lobby, but scan their parliamentary passes on electronic readers. That's why the names of who voted and how are released almost immediately. It's quite possibly one of the few examples of the House of Commons moving with the times. Keep up the good work.

35:08Actually, that was more, wasn't it, a correction than a question. And Alice was a spad in the last government. So I don't know, I'm not sure how she knows this, given that she wasn't an MP. But Anyway, I think on a previous episode we said, and certainly when we were MPs, the way you voted was a vote's called in the House of Commons and you have eight minutes to get into the lobbies on either side of the chamber. These are long, thin rooms, and one's called the I lobby and one's called the no lobby. You go through the doors. There's several doors into it, some doors from the back of the chamber, directly from the chamber into the lobby, and some from the kind of outer atrium, one from the outer atrium and then you there's a like load of you in the room you know there are 400 labor mps and so there'll be 400 labor mps often every night in this room and and it's crowded and small and then you file out one by one uh once they've shut the doors um or even before they've shut doors but after eight minutes they've shut the doors so they locked everyone in and then And you file out and you have your name ticked off by a clerk on a piece of paper alphabetically.

36:21So you go into your sort of alphabetical lane and then you get counted by a whip, a government whip and an opposition whip as you come out. But what Alice is telling us is that that has all changed since our day, that we are hopelessly out of date and we are dinosaurs because these days it's all done with a electronic pass, which you assume pass over a reader. Is that true?

36:45Ed Balls: That is apparently true, at least according to how it's... Do you know an MP you could ask? Like your wife? I do. I should have done. I didn't do my research, but let's assume she's right. I now feel bad because, I mean, I assume she must know what she's talking about, unlike us because we have not been in the Commons since COVID. I remember a story of a new MP came in actually after I was out, but before these changes and they mischievously once they were going through they were ticking off having their names ticked off and that they they organized this and two or three of them went through and they suddenly at the point where the whips were counting they all started shouting random numbers um 55 62 3 10 and and the whips lost count and um so they didn't know what the tally was because they forgot what number they were in with all these numbers ricocheting around Of course, in the new regime, you would think that's now solved because they've got these passes and nobody can make mistakes.

37:47Ed Balls: But I actually had a message. I'm on a WhatsApp group for former members of parliament. And I was just reading earlier that there was a point of order today in the House of Commons before the urgent question. It sounds as though the government whips made a mess of division votes last night. It seems the wrong numbers were delivered to the House after the division. There was a meeting this morning with the Speaker, but the reason for the mess up remained unknown as far as the record is concerned. So, Alice, even in the new world, with all of your fancy technological solutions, today or yesterday in the Commons, it went wrong.

38:27Ed Balls: They miscounted. And you can't blame people shouting numbers randomly. I think it was just a screw up. But anyway, there we are. It was quite true. I was a junior whip. And so I quite often had to stand on the door and count. Now, I was the opposition whip. So it wasn't my responsibility to get the number right. I was basically checking that the government whip had the right number. Because the government whip will go like one, two, three, four, five, as people file past, you know, 210, 211, 212. 75. And then they go in. Yeah, exactly. So they go into the House of Commons and then they announce that number.

39:02and i remember standing there as an opposition whip and thinking you know you you can kind of you if your attention wanders and all these people are finding past you and say hi how are you and whatever if your attention you do forget the number and then you go like oh my god i've like forgotten the number and it's in you know and i was just like oh well i hope they got it right

39:22Ed Balls: the government this was the thing spotted by the new young mp jonathan ashworth although actually I promise not to say his name, so I won't say who it was, but whoever it was who organised this, shouting out the numbers, whoever it was you know I can't believe he'd be such a troublemaker I don't know where that name came from Let's take an ad break before I dig myself a deeper hole

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42:04Ed Balls: Welcome back. Our final question is also a follow-up from one of our summer specials, this time on political speechwriting. This question has been voiced by our producer. It's a question from Laura. Hi, it's Laura from Balham. Political Currency is by far my favourite podcast and I look forward to it every week. I found your summer episode on speech writing very thought-provoking, as afterwards I wondered how the use of large language models such as Gemini or ChatGPT could impact political speech writing. Can you envisage a time when the role of the political speechwriter is replaced by AI? And if so, what impact do you think this would have on political discourse?

42:42Ed Balls: So we start our EMQs today with book recommendations. And there's one more book recommendation that I'm going to give because I mentioned this book on that summer podcast about speechwriting, but I couldn't remember the name. So I'm just going to mention it here. There's a brilliant book called The Speechwriter, A Brief Education in Politics by Barton Swaim, S-W-A-I-M. And this is written by a guy who became a speechwriter to an American state governor. And it's a fictionalized but fundamentally true story. He did go and work as a speechwriter for a state governor. And the state governor behaves, you know, he's idiosyncratic.

43:21Ed Balls: He's quite wild, gets into trouble. and in the end our speechwriter hero becomes a bit disillusioned. However, as an insight into American politics and being in an office and speechwriting is really, really good and it's been a bestseller. And I can promise you that Barton Swain does not use AI for writing his books or for writing speeches. And I think the answer to Laura's question is if you want to have a work-a-day speech covering three issues, which is basically gleaned from all of the speeches which are on the internet in history, and you get your specification right, what you'd come up with would be something which is perfectly usable and serviceable, but it won't be new or innovative.

44:11Ed Balls: It won't give you the kind of wit and flourish that a great speech does, because great speeches have a spark and a difference of creativity because they've never been done before if you think of martin lusuf the king in 1960 um 364 65 if you um if you asked at the you know ai to write a speech they'd write a serviceable speech but having a dream about a world in which people had um civil rights and there was mutual respect i mean the insight of the dream i mean that hasn't been done before And that's why that is a memorable speech which goes down in history by Martin Luther King. I don't think in the end, and this may be antediluvian, and I may get kind of shouted down by you.

45:00Ed Balls: I don't think that AI can be... I never shout you down. What do you mean? No, but I mean, because you love all these tech bros and AI and you think technology is going to be the answer to everything. Whereas I sort of think, I don't think it can write a great speech. not a great a great speech you can write a serviceable speech but not a great speech and so it all depends laura what you're looking for if you want a few remarks to say in a generic way if you want a gordon brown style uh joke um mr chairman it's good to be here and uh and and thank you um for for having me along it's um in mark contrast to the speech i gave last week where the chair turned to me after coffee and said do you want to speak now or shall we let them enjoy themselves for a little bit longer and um that kind of um that kind of generic joke in a generic speech can work perfectly well but it's not genius no my my classic go-to joke was or one of them was um you know i said you know my early experience i'd gone to speak to a meeting of the uh conservative women in aberystwyth driven for four or five hours to get to Aberystwyth and I'd come to this meeting room above a pub and there were four women conservative activists gathered in the pub to hear me and the woman who was introducing the speech said really ladies if more of us don't turn up how are we ever going to get better speakers I've got also a great one I was asked to speak in Wakefield at the relaunch of a local trade union branch in the town hall and i arrived and there were chairs for 100 and a buffet for 50 and the chair and the secretary were on the front row at the top you know on the top table and there was one person in the audience and so i'm supposed to talk about you know the revival of the wakefield economy to one person and i say you know i'm not sure we really need a speech if we have a conversation and then on the way out i say to the secretary i said i'm so kind of sorry that you planned for 100 and had food for 50 and there was only three of you and he said eddie said what you're talking about it was a big success until tonight there's only ever been two of us and so that is an entirely true story i mean their numbers went up by 50 they thought it was a triumph i was appalled but there we are that is that's what it's like when you're on the way up can i just say what i did answer the question you're saying if you're martin luther king write your own speeches unfortunately not everyone else in the world is martin luther king and uh you can have some really successful politicians who are not very good speech givers or indeed speech writers and so i think you'll find quite a lot of people i actually saw an article on this the other day that um uh there's evidence that mps are using chat gpt to write speeches for the house of commons um although i then have just put into chat gpt is chat gpt used to write speeches in the house of Commons.

48:01And this is the answer I've got. There isn't any public evidence that MPs are officially using ChatGPT or other generative AI to write speeches in the House of Commons. But it does say there are currently no explicit bans either on MPs using AI to help draft remarks. Though the House of Commons library has noted that MPs are responsible for what they say, and they must be able to defend it. So yeah, that's the problem. If you simply get the the AI bot to write your speech, you might read out something that turns out to be completely untrue. But I guess that's a hazard anyway in politics.

48:36Ed Balls: Have you ever put into ChatGPT, you know, write a Shakespearean sonnet in, you know, in the style of Shakespeare for a person? It is quite amazing. If I put in sonnet for George Osborne, listen to this, Upon the stage of Britain's stormy years a Chancellor did stride with steady hand Through deficits, austerity and fears he claimed to guard the nation's fragile land With budgets drawn in ink both sharp and cold he carved his sums with calculated art yet many cried his numbers harsh and bold did way too heavy on the common heart still like a player turned to other scenes he sought new roles beyond the Commons fight from press to finance shifting through the means he kept his staff still burning in the night thus history writes in measured balanced tone a man who sought to make the debt his own this is brilliant that just i typed in as i spoke to you a sonnet about george osborne and that's what it came up with in that time are you i hope you're now revising your opinion that people shouldn't use it i'm now totally revising my opinion isn't that astonishing i wrote in sonnet for george osborne and it says here's a shakespearean style sonnet for george osborne um for our kitchen cabinet members we'll put that in our our newsletter better that's what it came up with in real time right then i promise you no preparation it's astonishing isn't it do you think this ai is going somewhere i think laura you may be onto something and um and with that we're gonna have to go lay down with a wet towel on our head that is it for this episode of emqs maybe podcasting maybe michael's getting in too late we'll just get AI to do the podcast why did Peter Mandelson resign well and do that in a Shakespearean sonnet style anyway that is it for this episode of VMQs maybe the last ever human episode of VMQs in the meantime if you think there's any chance we might carry on you can send us a voice note and an email via questions at politicalcurrency.co.uk although you know just ask Jet at GPT what question to ask and send that in.

50:43Ed Balls: It would be fine by us. Do make sure you review the show or get your AI bot to do so because it helps other listeners and their bots find us. And we will be back next week with another episode. See you then.

51:04Thanks for listening to Political Currency. This has been a Persephoneca production.

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