EMQs Political Craft Special: Speeches, diaries and the art of politics

0:00Ed Balls: This week on Outrage and Optimism, we look at the remarkable summer we've been having in Western Europe with heatwave after heatwave that has now translated into wildfires in France, in Spain and even in Scotland. There has been a conspiracy of silence in the media that is preventing us from seeing what is really happening. This week on Outrage and Optimism, we cut through to understand what's going on and how our society can and should change to deal with these issues.

0:30Ed Balls: This message comes from Jackson. Taxes aren't something you can only think about once a year. With investments, planning for tax days year-round. Fortunately, Jackson offers tax-efficient products. Visit jackson.com for more information on how our products can make your tax bill a little bit less painful. Jackson is short for Jackson Financial Incorporated, Jackson National Life Insurance Company, Lansing, Michigan, and Jackson National Life Insurance Company of New York. Purchase New York. This podcast is brought to you by Thomson Reuters. The best don't just do their work. They change what's possible.

1:02Ed Balls: Cases won, audits completed, jobs saved. Behind every one of those moments is a professional who needed to get it right and did. Thomson Reuters builds the technology that sharpens insights, speeds up decision-making, and powers the outcomes that matter. So when professionals act, the impact is felt by everyone. Be a changemaker. Visit tr.com forward slash changemakers. While every other channel is fighting for your customers' attention, podcasts are where they've already given it. No one accidentally listens to a podcast for 45 minutes. They choose to be here. They trust the voice in their ears.

1:37Ed Balls: And when that voice talks about your brand, it doesn't sound like advertising. It sounds like a recommendation from a friend. Acast gives you that trust at scale. Digital precision, post-read authenticity, and performance data that proves it worked. Don't fight for attention. Buy it with Acast. Learn more by visiting acast.com slash advertise.

2:29Ed Balls: so hello and welcome to this summer edition of emq's ex-ministers questions and today we're talking about surprisingly for our podcast politics but no political craft is what we're

2:43George Osborne: talking about that's the real art of political craft these are the things i guess it's a sort of back to basics, isn't it? What are the things you need to get right in terms of balancing your time as a politician or a minister? Do speeches matter because they take time to prepare? And I guess the kind of tricky political decisions, particularly the people in the Treasury face when managing the public purse. So we've grouped all of these questions together into a single session, which we hope you're going to enjoy. Shall we go for the first question? let's get stuck straight into it hi ed and george my name is frank i'm a gold subscriber and i graduated from king's college london last year with a degree in international relations my question is inspired by george's comment on alan johnson's speech which helped tony blair fend off a rebellion on top of fees which you guys discussed in the context of the welfare u-turn it got me thinking because as somebody who follows politics closely and who has a lot of free time I routinely tune into both major and minor debates in Parliament and really do try to engage with what is being said.

3:51George Osborne: But the whipping system means that MPs are generally free to change their minds based on, quote, unquote, the merits of the argument. Unless, of course, we're talking about free votes. And in a time where people are increasingly getting their political content and small TikTok-sized soundbites, less and less of the public is ever seeing any of Parliament other than major government statements and maybe PMQs. So my question is, do parliamentary speeches and debates still matter in this day and age, or have they ever mattered at all? Who is the target audience? And could either one of you give an example in the past of when a backbench intervention really turned the debate or had a significant impact on the legislative programme?

4:31George Osborne: Thank you and keep up the good work.

4:33Ed Balls: So I think the answer is they absolutely do matter and in very different ways. Let's start with your kind of backbench intervention. I remember talking to Gordon Brown about parliamentary speeches and him talking to me about his early time in Parliament, just after the 1983 election, when there was a vote on hanging. And at the time, quite a lot of gung-ho speeches. I think even the Thatcher government was kind of, you know, it was quite up for, or at least some members up for this. And he said there was a particular moment he sat in there as a young backbencher when former Prime Minister Edward Heath got up to speak from the backbenchers.

5:15Ed Balls: And there'd been a guy who'd just spoken, a Conservative, talking about how he would be willing to be the hangman, so convinced he was of the case for capital punishment. And Edward Heath kind of punctured that kind of the mood by saying the issue is about justice, not about retribution. and the question is, is he willing to be the innocent man hanged? And Gordon said that this backbench intervention just changed the whole mood in this packed chamber and that legislation to bring back hanging was lost and that he felt that Edward Heath made the decisive intervention. So that was a backbench intervention.

5:59Ed Balls: If you remember Norman Lamont standing up from the backbenchers after he'd been removed as chancellor and talking about John Major being in office but not in power, I mean, that had a searing and long-lasting impact on the major government. I remember when Yvette was a junior health minister, she had to speak early in her parliamentary career in a debate to lead from the front bench, a debate around embryo research, and it was a free vote. And it was packed chamber because people had come genuinely deciding how to vote on the basis of the speeches which were made. And her speech was acclaimed at the time because it was so good in persuading people this was an OK thing to vote for.

6:45Ed Balls: I think there will have been speeches in the Assister Dying debate which had that kind of impact. So there are times where speeches from the front bench and from the back bench can actually change the course of a debate or legislation.

6:58George Osborne: Yeah, so I'm going to start. That's true. And I still think it's true today because I still think there are moments when everyone who is making the decision i voting in parliament is in the chamber listening to something you know the the chamber will still be full uh for big big moments i'm going to start with so you know give an example of a speech did you not like my example i did like your example i've got some more ones coming just checking um i thought you're just ignoring what

7:26Ed Balls: i said and i'm just sort of sitting here thinking why am i why am i even george is not listening

7:30George Osborne: what's the point no i haven't listened i was trying to do you know i was trying to work out whether i heard yvette i mean i remember i mean i remember when i was i think it was pre-2001 that's what i was thinking but um i definitely remember hearing her you know i remember when i was a new backbench mp seeing her perform as a minister um and i also remember a key vote on embryo research but it came much later and in fact um it's recently this was all about changing the way you could use embryos and basically be able to create children from three different dnas three different people in order to deal with a disease and the news has just come out that some children eight children have been born as a result of this decision made in 2015 because of mitochondria disease yes and i remember that debate because i was i was in government at the time and that was a free vote and you know it's the sort of thing where you could easily get parliament voting against it if the mood switches to that i was sort of thinking in my own time as an mp i feel i thought the most powerful speech that i heard wasn't or you know took part in was that not when i was in government not when i was chancellor nothing david cameron said or whatever um actually there are two speeches they were both by labor politicians and the first was Tony Blair's opening speech in the Iraq war debate where I was a backbench MP.

8:57George Osborne: Robin Cook had resigned, which was a big deal. He'd given a very powerful resignation speech the night before in Parliament, which was electric. You know, I remember sitting there thinking, God, there's some rhyme that kind of witnessing kind of history here. And then Blair had to respond with his speech. And it was, you know, masterful. I mean, whatever you think about the Iraq war and whether it was the right thing to do and all that happened subsequently, in terms of a parliamentary performance, it was so impressive. And then I was thinking of, here I was in government, but this was the use of the British military to deal with ISIS in Syria and whether Labour would support the use of military force.

9:43Jeremy Corbyn, by this point, was leader of the Labour Party.

9:47George Osborne: And the kind of history here was that under Ed Miliband's leadership, Labour had voted against missile strikes in this era. And Hilary Benn gave a speech. I think he was in the Shadow Cabinet, wasn't he?

10:00Ed Balls: He was.

10:01George Osborne: And Corbyn was sitting there and he basically gave the Labour, the left-wing case, the kind of progressive case, for why the use of force is sometimes necessary. And again, it was a kind of electric moment. So I think those two occasions mattered and probably shifted votes or certainly shifted the kind of mood. I'm going to come up with a great historical example of a backbench intervention, which is, well, not a back, sorry, a parliamentary intervention, which has been used three times in our history, the same words. And at least two of those three had a big impact and arguably all three times so oliver cromwell who actually had been an mp he goes into the parliament which is called the rump parliament and he basically dissolves parliament and he says in the name of god go and it's a famous phrase he walked he marched into parliament with his soldiers and he basically kind of winds up the parliament then in 19 may 1940 neville chamberlain's the prime minister uh the nazis nazi germany has invaded norway it's called the norway debate as it happens france is about to be invaded literally any days uh after this and neville chamberlain's leadership of the war has been weak and there's a tory mp who gets up makes an intervention and uses the same words as cromwell i did in the name of god go and that was the end of chamberlain and that led to his resignation even though he didn't lose the debate that day didn't lose the vote but he'd lost the he'd lost the floor of the house commons lost the confidence against everybody and uh winston churchill has chosen as the prime minister as a result and then in january 2022 david davis gets up in the house of commons and says to boris johnson during party gate and all that in the name of god go so the same three the same phrase oliver cromwell's phrase in the norway debate and probably does set in train the kind of questions about johnson's leadership and whether he's going to survive and you know david davis is obviously a big senior conservative matt pencher at the time so um uh in terms of interventions i don't think i can't think of anything that's been used three times with quite that effect.

12:27George Osborne: Very, very interesting.

12:29Ed Balls: It is true, isn't it? Even today, when I think speeches and debates have less coverage in the news and in the newspapers, if you are a cabinet minister under pressure and you perform well or perform badly in questions or on a debate, that can make or break your political career. I think parliament still in those moments massively matters. Thank you so much, Francis. Great question. our next question is from Priya and this question has been voiced by one of our producers.

12:58George Osborne: Hi George and Ed, I'd love to ask, when you go from MP to Chancellor, how do you manage your diary given you have a busy schedule? So what was a typical day like as Chancellor and what time would you wake up and sleep etc? Yeah well I have always thought that the single most important thing you need to get right, probably in any job but certainly when you're in a kind of top job and certainly when you're in a job like chancellor is management of your diary. And you cannot contract that out. You can have a, you know, senior members of the government do have people called diary secretaries who, you know, are very hardworking civil servants and they organize meetings and make sure people can come or organize phone calls and put together all the logistics.

13:44George Osborne: But anyone who allows their civil servants, if they're a minister or their office, if they're just an MP or an opposition spokesman or spokesperson to fill their diary without their kind of active involvement is making a massive mistake. Because your time is your most precious commodity, right, in politics. And it's not like, I guess, in a kind of business where maybe your kind of investing power is maybe your most precious commodity. But time is absolutely precious. And you have to manage so many different competing demands on it. And, you know, there's time to do the work in the department, have meetings, decide what the best policy is, hear all the different points of view, listen to, you know, there's time to go outside the department to hear, you know, other experts, other people who might have a different view from your civil service and trying to find those sources of information.

14:41George Osborne: There's time with your fellow MPs so that you're not detached from what's going on and your own kind of personal support is maintained. There's time, you know, in the cabinet or with the prime minister or other members of the government that, you know, those are meetings which you have actually less control over when they're held. There is time traveling around the country to sell your message. You know, it's no good just being in London the whole time. You can't be a chance extreker and never visit Scotland or never visit Wales or never visit the north of England. There's time in your constituency because you'll also be an MP and you can't be completely absent from your constituency.

15:20George Osborne: And, of course, on top of all of that, there's time with your family alongside of that and time with your friends. And your family is not just your immediate family, but maybe your parents or your siblings or whatever. So managing all that is really, really hard. and uh and you know i learned a lesson when i was um you know as kind of special advisor i worked for some people it would be unfair to name names who were kind of hopeless at it you know like the day by the end of the day you know everything was already running two hours late and you know meetings were backed up and people were queuing up to see these politicians and then i worked with william haig who was such a so fastidious about time he would organize meetings and if the meeting started at three and if you turned up at 301 then you were not allowed in the room and i heard a story actually in the last week about him at the foreign office when he became foreign secretary and uh first day he has a meeting on something it's three o 'clock um one very junior foreign official turns up on time and then the sort of mandarins of the foreign office turn up at 301 302 he won't let them in the room and so they go oh i'm so sorry we were late foreign secretary and once they realized you know they weren't being allowed the rooms okay so we'll reschedule the meeting he says no no i'm having the meeting um you can tell them outside i'm having the meeting with the official who turned up and so this junior foreign office official gets to you know have his meeting with the new foreign secretary they were never late again so i think managing the time is absolutely critical and then just you know there was to answer the second bit of the question which is like the typical day i mean there wasn't kind of a sort of typical day but you know i would wake up pretty early 6 30 uh you know my kids would at the time would go off to school and um they were at school at the time and so i'd have breakfast with them there would be a meeting with david cameron at 8 30 every morning so i would meet my team at eight in the morning and then i'd work during the day, usually in the Treasury, probably go to Parliament at some point, but be back in number 11 in the afternoon.

17:29George Osborne: I used number 11 much more, actually, than many chancellors, partly to be then around the Prime Minister for the afternoon meetings, try and get a break, see the children, and then often work at home at night. I tried to not do too many evening occasions. I think that's another key lesson. If you're kind of talking to the Society of motor manufacturers in Birmingham on a Tuesday night you know it's an important part of being out and about but it can make you absolutely exhausted and you're not you're ultimately being paid to try and make the right policy decisions and there's a lot of paperwork so that would be a but you know you'd always build into any week wouldn't you like a trip around the country somewhere that'd be foreign travel as well so there was nothing I guess the sort of templates is the day I've just described.

18:16Ed Balls: The interesting thing, though, Priya and George, is that I think of the range of cabinet jobs there are, in some ways the Chancellor is one of the easier ones.

18:27George Osborne: And it's the only job in government I ever had.

18:30Ed Balls: But you were Chancellor, but you're also playing a number of wider political roles and tasks. It's not generally the case that the Chancellor is going for the daily meeting with the Prime Minister in Downing Street. But if you think, you know, the prime minister, I mean, incredibly hard diary to manage. If you're the foreign secretary with a lot of foreign travel, if you're the home secretary with very, very many daily competing problems you're solving. Actually, when I was doing education, I mean, we did hundreds of schools visits. You always have to go off and ground the country. The great thing about being chancellor is you have quite a lot of control of your time because you have big set piece events.

19:10Ed Balls: you can generally devolve most stakeholder meetings to somebody else to a junior minister or to another cabinet minister. So I think you can be there's more space to be strategic as chancellor than than some other jobs. The other thing I was just going to say.

19:28George Osborne: No chances always are excused to being submarines, aren't they? That they kind of surface for the big moments and then disappear.

19:34Ed Balls: Which is which is a really good way to do it because you want to because your big moments are so big.

19:39George Osborne: I always think it's a job which is, you're completely right, that you have the most kind of control except when you don't. So Alistair Darling or Norman Lamont, when there's a bank run, when there's a crisis, you're more out of control than any cabinet minister.

19:54Ed Balls: The other thing I was just going to say, I am just kind of in this context of diary management, and you're talking about civil service diaries. If you are the chancellor and you are called to a meeting with the Prime Minister, and you kind of have to say yes, and you cancel a couple of meetings and move them to later in the afternoon. Or if you are the Chancellor and you say, I need an emergency meeting in an hour with these officials, the knock-on implications that has...

20:24George Osborne: Down the drain.

20:25Ed Balls: Down the... And you have... So within the Treasury, there will be people running the diaries of lots of the senior people, and not just the ministers, the senior officials, but also there'll be lots of junior civil servants who are running their own diaries a word comes out the chancellor has moved the meeting from two till four or needs to have the meeting in half an hour that means all these people's diaries which were full of stuff are all moved all have to be rearranged the knock-on consequences that's all being managed and and because it's so political with a small p in the sense that which meeting takes precedence who decides who comes to what how do you cancel this person but do you actually is it better to send your junior to the meeting rather than cancelling the one two hours later those are not decisions which can be made by computers or by ai they are made by very skilled diary secretaries who who manage these processes kind of by the hour and i always felt that it's one of the hardest jobs which you wouldn't have in the same way probably in any other organization in quite the same way in in a company the hierarchy is really clear and um whereas in in you know especially when it's interdepartmental the hierarchies are much more complicated who gets to cancel what and who can rearrange what and who goes to what those are really really tough jobs

21:50George Osborne: Yes. Don't you think a really key political skill is knowing when to press on with your day and then knowing when to cancel your day? If there's a crisis, you know, you don't want to be or, you know, things are always coming up in politics. So you can't constantly be cancelling your day and then you never get anything done for the long term. But equally, prime ministers who don't, you know, it's often prime minister, but it might be like a cabinet who don't recognize this is a crisis. you absolutely need to grip right now. So forget the meeting you were about to have on the health service. You know, cancel that meeting with the CBI.

22:29George Osborne: You know, whatever it is. You know, we've got to go on a long time on this. But the Cuban Missile Crisis is a brilliant study in politics for lots of reasons. I won't go into all of them today. But one of them is diary management. So John F. Kennedy, they discovered their missiles in Cuba. but they don't want to alert anyone that they know in Washington. And so Kennedy has to carry on. And the whole crisis takes 13 days. But the first few days, they don't say anything publicly. So Kennedy reduces to an absolute minimum the things he's publicly committed to as president. So no one suspects there's a crisis, whilst then keep sort of nipping into the emergency meeting that's being convened on what to do about the missiles and the threat of nuclear war.

23:16George Osborne: and um one of the people who i remember speaking to was michael howard's wife sondra howard uh who you know was a fantastic person today but in her day was the kind of great it girl and she was uh you know really glamorous and was um uh you know knew the british ambassador in washington at the time it was called david orms we go and she had dinner a dinner that was with the ambassador and John F. Kennedy in the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Amazing. Because he couldn't cancel the dinner because that would reveal that there was a crisis going on.

23:54Ed Balls: I've met Sandra Howard, and I think she's become more glamorous over time. Yes, definitely.

23:58George Osborne: No, she's a brilliant, wonderful person. But in terms of having a kind of front seat in history, how about that?

24:04Ed Balls: I had the same diary secretary from my first two months into arriving as a Treasury as an advisor in 1997, all the way through to leaving Parliament in 2015. And she, Julie McCandless, was with me in the Treasury for eight years, then came to my first ministerial job in the Treasury, then to education for three years, and then resigned from the civil service and spent five more years with me as Shadow Chancellor. She was utterly brilliant because you become so dependent upon that relationship. She was the one, I've told this story before, on my last day in the Treasury after eight years, she was the one who said to me, I owe you an apology and I said what is that she said for the last eight years when you've come into your room every day there have been two bottles of Malvern spring water on your table which you have drunk with glasses and given to guests and you just need to know every day since 1997 when I came in the office in the morning I went down the corridor and filled up the bottles from the tap she said it was never Malvern spring water it was always treasury tap water and I said And Julie, that is the most treasury story I have ever heard.

25:12Ed Balls: We're going to go to a break and then we'll be back.

25:37Ed Balls: our products can make your tax bill a little bit less painful. Jackson is short for Jackson Financial Incorporated, Jackson National Life Insurance Company, Lansing, Michigan, and Jackson National Life Insurance Company of New York. Purchase New York. You've got social dialed in. Search is doing its thing. So why do your marketing results look the same as six months ago? That's because you're fishing in the same pond as everyone else. Podcast listeners are a different audience entirely, more engaged, harder to reach through traditional channels, and ready to act when someone they trust makes a recommendation.

26:08Ed Balls: We're Acast, and we put them right in front of you. Browse thousands of the world's leading podcasts, book host reads or run your own ads, and track every conversion in real time. Same skills you already have, brand new results. Acast. Acast.com slash advertise.

26:32So welcome back.

26:33Ed Balls: our next question is from Lewis.

26:35George Osborne: Hi Ed and George it's Lewis here really enjoy the show my question is around how cabinet or shadow cabinet ministers manage their obligations within their constituency as an MP is it simply that they just have a double workload or are there people who act on their behalf within the constituency I imagine there's quite a big time constraint between the two obligations so we'd be interested to hear your views thank you Ed, let me ask you this question. So you were in the cabinet, but you were also sitting on a fairly marginal seat. It turned out to be, I think, more marginal than even you suspected.

27:11George Osborne: But how did you balance being a constituency MP with being a cabinet minister?

27:17Ed Balls: I think what I experienced was unusual, although it may be much more usual now because politics is in such turmoil. Lots of cabinet ministers in the current government who are now told by the opinion polls that they are fighting marginal or potentially even losing seats. But the normal tradition had been that people who get to big cabinet jobs, by that point, they've managed to get themselves into a safe seat. I got elected in 2005 into a safe seat, Normanton, 10 ,000 majority. Then the boundaries changed. They actually changed before the election. And much to our consternation, my seat got sort of carved in three ways.

27:56Ed Balls: I ended up jumping over to Morley and Outwood, which was a marginal seat. And, you know.

28:02George Osborne: Which was the Tory bit of Morley and Outwood? Morley or Outwood?

28:06Ed Balls: No, it was actually across all of the wards. I think it was close all across. Renthorpe was a bit more Tory and parts of Outward. But also there was a...

28:20George Osborne: Would it be a simplification to say they were just a bit more middle class and African?

28:25Ed Balls: It would actually. It would be more that they were what was called in the voter segmentation of the time A's. So it would be people who... A. Yeah, I think the segmentation was A's at the time. So these would be people living in private homes, but often semi-detached with young children and kind of working hard. But they weren't affluent, but they were people aspirational and with votes, you know, which switched.

28:54George Osborne: I think we had a category for them, which I think it came from the company Experian, and they were called Pebble Dash Subtopia. I think what you're describing. I just remember that category name.

29:09Ed Balls: It was so good. Pebble Dash Subtopia. Places like Stockton South, places like Swindon North, places like Kingsbury in Bristol, Warrington South, or Northampton. There were certain seats which had this. So it wasn't university intelligentsia. It wasn't sort of affluent leafy Tory. It was just kind of hardworking families who had bought their home and were working hard and you know yeah and and they were they were very switchable and people who um said this was the time of labor Tory switches so I would go up to the constituency um Thursday night or Friday morning and do a full day on the Friday and then I would also then go out knocking on doors talking to people every week every week all Saturday and morning and all Sunday morning and I did that every weekend because that was the only way and I They did that all the way through both being in the cabinet and a shadow chancellor.

30:06Ed Balls: And I think there are lots of cabinet ministers with safe seats doing big jobs who go to their constituencies less often. They might go every couple of weeks or every month. But if you've got a marginal seat and there are lots of Labour MPs in the cabinet now who will be thinking they're in the same category, you cannot afford.

30:23George Osborne: They don't want to think they're sitting on marginals.

30:25Ed Balls: Well, they know they are and they absolutely cannot afford. So if you think about, you know, just in the cabinet, obviously there are a number of Redwall cabinet members who will be thinking we've got to work hard to hold on to our seats and they will be up and down all the time. But on the other hand, there is a benefit from that because all those conversations you have on the doorstep in the town centre, in the visits you do, if you're good, reflect back into your politics and your communication and your understanding of the national challenges. I think if you are a cabinet minister who becomes disconnected from your constituency because your seat is safe, there's always a danger.

31:04Ed Balls: You then become disconnected from the reality of politics on the front line when it comes to voting in a general election in a few years time. So there is an advantage to it as well, but it was quite hard.

31:16George Osborne: No, I mean, I had more leeway because my seat was safer. and I guess you're just sort of more ruthless at boiling down to the kind of essential of what you need to do as a constituency MP. So you can certainly get your office if it's well run and I had two brilliant people in my office, Jane and Philippa, who would basically handle a lot of the correspondence and the kind of constituency casework and only need to kind of bring it to my attention if there was something kind of really complicated that needed my involvement. And often, you know, to be honest, you know, the chancellor's constituency office, if they contact a government department saying, well, we've got a problem with this, they do get a better hearing.

31:58George Osborne: So, you know, I think constituents benefit from having high profile MPs in that respect, in terms of their casework. But so you have the casework kind of managed effectively. And then you probably don't really see anyone up in Westminster much connected with your constituency anymore. You know, it's all kind of focused on the visits you do. And then, yes, you reduce the number of times you're doing the visits. I mean, that's the case if your family's not living in the constituency, as was the case when I was the MP there. They were kind of fun and enjoyable days because you're sort of, you know, careering around as, you know, at the top of politics in Westminster.

32:39George Osborne: And then suddenly you'd have a day in the constituency. and Jane would, you know, drive me in the car and we'd have the police still there, but it was all much more...

32:50Ed Balls: You're going from a lunch club to a sure start and in that half an hour in the car, there's some massive national problem. I was continually having to do media on national issues in hotels or community centres around the constituency because the media needed you to talk on a Friday and you had to do it. So it was quite stressful, the balancing.

33:11George Osborne: Sometimes you could combine the two. I remember the Speaker of the House of Representatives, it was a guy called John Boehner, and he was bringing a delegation of people from Congress, particularly from the House of Representatives, to Britain and wanted to know if I'd meet the group. And I said, well, I can't really. It's quite hard because I'm committed to this day in Cheshire on this Friday. And he says, so it's fine. We'll go there. So this congressional delegation flew from Washington to Manchester Airport. I organized, we had a big lunch at a place called Peaver Hall, where the family who owned Peaver Hall were very generous and kind of let us do the lunch there.

33:57George Osborne: And the reason why the Americans loved it was where General Patton had been headquartered during the war. and then um i got them to do a kind of visit to a local factory that had a kind of american connection but it soon dawned on me that the real thing they wanted to do was play golf but they and in fact they were only stopping off on britain on their trip to the middle east that was why they were here and that was basically so they kind of you know he you know speaker baner was you know he was a pro he's like they loved the lunch that they regard that as part of the fun the trip to the factory well okay you know i guess we have to um but i remember going in and saying that all you need to do all you need to say please john is northern powerhouse if you can just say this as many times as possible during this visit and of course you know you don't get to be speaker

34:44Ed Balls: if you're not good at politics so he said it's great to be here with the northern powerhouse

34:49George Osborne: yes it's going to be here in the northern powerhouse was his uh anyway so you can combine the both sometimes you can right let's go to a break and then we've got a final question from nick

35:09Ed Balls: do you keep hearing podcast ads like this one for example but always wonder how you actually get involved with them for your own brand or organization well it's easier than you think We're Acast, and we give you the platform to do it all yourself. Browse thousands of popular podcasts, choose the shows that match your perfect audience, set your budget, and launch. And if you want a hand, our podcast specialists are there to help you launch with confidence. This is podcast advertising without barriers. Get started at acast.com slash advertise.

35:50George Osborne: Welcome back. Here's our question from Nick. Hi, Ed and George. Nick, Kitchen Cabinet member, and actually one of the people lucky enough to be at your first live EMQ session. It's a year since the largest new crop of MPs entered the House. As you know, my friend Andrew Lewin was one of those, another friend of the podcast. I'm just interested in your reflections on the first time you won, what it was like, what the process was like, how you felt when you first walked into that incredible building and just really what the life of a new MP is. Thanks for everything. Cheers.

36:34Ed Balls: Can you remember your first moment arriving at the House of Commons?

36:38George Osborne: As an MP? Yeah. I do remember, but it was not as kind of big a moment as I suspect it is for lots of people. There are two reasons for that. One is I had been working in the House of Commons for the previous few years in William Hague's office. So I was extremely familiar with the building. I mean, there's no doubt turning up as a member of parliament is unbelievably exciting. But it's not the moment I really remember. I remember the thing that really sticks in my mind is the returning officer reading out the result in Macclesfield Leisure Centre. That for me is the memory, not the kind of turning up in the House of Commons.

37:17George Osborne: And then the other thing was that at the time, my son Luke was born a week after I got elected. And so, you know, at that time, I associate more with his birth than turning up in the House of Commons. And as a result, I was one of the last people to swear in. because when you turn up people may not know this but everyone who becomes an mp has to take an oath of allegiance to the crown you know usually on the bible but you can choose another religious book like the quran or whatever and you don't and some people who are not religious don't have to you know just swear a kind of non-religious oath but you all have to line up every single the 650 odd mps all have to take this oath and there's a basic rule which is the prime minister goes first, the leader of the opposition, the senior members of the cabinet, they swear in first because they can't all swear in the same time.

38:06George Osborne: And it takes about four or five days. And then they come to the new MPs towards the end. So it's done on seniority. But it matters when you sign in, if you are planning to stay in Parliament for a very, very long time, because if it comes to the point where you are the longest serving MP, you become the father of the house or the mother of the house. And that's a thing and it matters, you get to preside over the election of a speaker. But if there are two people who are elected in the same election, they choose the person who swears in first and the first time they become an MP. And I remember because of the birth of my son, Luke, I was one of the very last MPs to sign in of my intake and uh and if you're really if you're a very sharp elbowed new mp i'll tell you what you can do you can kind of hang around on the first day when they're doing the prime minister and wait for a gap because maybe the secretary of state for health hasn't turned up yet to sign in and swear in and and you go oh they say oh yeah okay you can go in turn out to be moot yeah it

39:14Ed Balls: did yeah for both of us for both of us because we got nowhere near being father so i'd also worked in Parliament for a lot of years, really from 94 till 97, full-time in Parliament. And so although we'd then been in the Treasury for eight years, I'd spent a lot of time working there. But I do remember it really well, partly actually for a funny reason, which is on the night on the count, when you get your result, the returning officer gives you a letter saying that you are now the Member of Parliament. And it said in it, please bring a copy of your election address, your election manifesto. So old-fashioned.

39:53Ed Balls: So old-fashioned. And I think, what is this all about? And I arrived at the entrance in Parliament Square where all the police officers are. And I said, I'm a new MP, Ed Balls. And the guy said, the police officer said, have you brought your election manifesto? And I handed it over to him. And he looked at the picture and said, yep, that's you. And that was the security check on the way in. Did I look like the person on the election manifesto which said I'd been elected? and then so you go in the first hour or so I was going to I went to the tea room a tiny little room which you can't do if you're an advisor you can't do if you're an advisor

40:30George Osborne: I agree that that was exciting that was exciting

40:32Ed Balls: but before I did I was in the corridor walking along and I've told this story in a slightly more hammed up way since but this is actually the truth I'm walking down the corridor and David Ruffley the Conservative MP comes up to me and I'd known him from Gordon and I appearing at select committees when he was on the Treasury Select Committee. So I never really knew him well, but I knew who he was. He knew who I was. And he said, he said, welcome to the Commons. He said, I will shake your hand only once. And shook my hand. And I said, great. I said, why only once? He said, well, it's a House of Commons thing, you know, it's about...

41:09George Osborne: I think it's only a Tory MP thing, isn't it?

41:11Ed Balls: Well, so it was, I thought it was all about kind of swords and whether you put your sword down. So I then go to the tea room and sit down with all these Labour back benches. Kevin Barron was there and he put out his hand and said, welcome to the conference. And I said, I'll shake your hand only once. And he said, what are you talking about? And I said, well, apparently we only shake hands once. He said, do we? He said, I've never heard that before. He said, he yelled, Ed Ball says we only shake. They knew nothing about it. And so David roughly, inadvertently totally dropped me in it. It was humiliating.

41:45Ed Balls: It is a Tory,

41:46George Osborne: it's a weird Tory MP thing. And even now when I meet Tory MPs, you know, current Tory MPs, and they go, oh, I guess we can shake hands now. I'm not an MP. It's not an MP thing. It's a Tory thing.

41:59Ed Balls: I assumed it was because if you shake hands, you put your sword down. And I'm only going to do that to you once. But anyway, it's not a Labour thing at all. So what I remember, though, was going into the tea room, but then into the chamber, and in particular also in the voting lobbies when there's a big vote. Because you don't get to see that as an advisor. You never see any of that as an advisor. And also the smell and the wood panelling and the sort of sense of occasion, going in for prayers, being there when questions were answered, sitting on the benches. It was a completely different perspective than I'd ever had before on Parliament.

42:33Ed Balls: It's not like it is on the television. It wasn't like it was from one of the boxes when you are an advisor. It just felt really different. And so I found, I spent a lot of time just sitting in there, watching it, thinking I'm in the middle of something which I never expected to be, which is so different from how I imagined. So the answer, Nick, is it was exciting. And the smells and the taste and the mood was something. I mean, going into a vote, especially if you've cut it fine, which I told the story before about me missing that vote. but the packed lobbies and people all talking to each other and the sort of famous people being in there and it's all kind of exciting it it would it's true that even if you've worked in the house

43:17George Osborne: commons as both of us had i think you you have put your finger on on the two places you don't ever get to see unless you're an mp and those are that's the tea room which is the basically the cafeteria for MPs only and the voting lobbies on the sides of the chamber. I remember when I went into the tea room on my very first day, I was very excited. You've reminded me of the tea room. And there's a bit of the tea room. It's sort of divided into two. And there's a bit that the Labour MPs sit in. And there's a bit that the Conservative MPs sit in. And I walked in and I sort of been told, you know, go to the kind of second half, go to the back.

43:55George Osborne: That's where the Tory MPs sit. So I go in, I'm a brand new MP, and there's all these Labour MPs. Remember, I'm elected at a time when there's a massive Labour majority, and so there's many more Labour MPs in general. And so I walk through all these sort of Labour MPs, all kind of exciting. And I get to where I think the Tory tables are, but I've never been in this room before.

44:18Ed Balls: No.

44:19George Osborne: And you can't even see in it.

44:20Ed Balls: You've no idea. The tea room, it's a phrase, but you know what it means. Yeah.

44:25George Osborne: So you go in and then I came to these tables, which I've been told were the Tory tables. And there were a load of Labour MPs sitting there as well. And so I go like, shit, maybe I'm just in the wrong room altogether. Right. There's no. And I couldn't see any Tory MPs. So I sort of hesitate. Right. And then I kind of turn around. Then this table of Labour MPs all laughs at me. Right. And what they'd done.

44:50Ed Balls: No.

44:51George Osborne: No, they'd taken over. Because it was another Labour landslide. Oh, I see. They decided as a kind of, you know, I guess it was a bit of a joke, to take over the Tory tables in the tea room that day.

45:02Ed Balls: So it wasn't just a prank on you?

45:05George Osborne: No, it wasn't just a prank on me. But they had sort of decided to kind of occupy these tables. How funny. And I was, you know, a victim to this. How funny.

45:16Ed Balls: There we are, Nick. Your question provokes loads of memory and reminiscing.

45:20George Osborne: yes they were good they were good cheese toasties weren't they in the tea room very good

45:26Ed Balls: cheese toasties with a salad i used to have a poached egg on toast yeah with a couple slices of bacon i never used to have the um the um the dish of the day i would always i would always give

45:36George Osborne: a poached egg on toast there were various attempts while i think we were both mps to make the make the uh kind of offering a bit more um you know diet friendly there were sort of salads and things introduced but you know but most people were still having either the full english almost at any time until about four in the evening and then um and then the kind of cheese

45:55Ed Balls: and ham toasty was there were lots of labour mps who would go in every day for breakfast and you know if they were living away from their families get in there at 7 30 breakfast read the papers

46:03George Osborne: it was something it was called the breakfast club in the bunks the tories the the tory mps who had breakfast there in like seven in the morning i sort of i think it's probably quite good politics to do that.

46:13Ed Balls: That is it for this episode of our summer EMQs.

46:16George Osborne: Please do keep sending us your voice notes, your emails over the summer and as we get into the autumn via questions at politicalcurrency.co.uk. Make sure you review the show too because it does help other people find us.

46:29Ed Balls: And don't forget you can always get the show early and ad-free if you're a Gold or Kitchen Cabinet member. The links to subscribe are in the show notes and see you soon. Have a good summer.

46:39George Osborne: Yes, enjoy the summer.

46:48George Osborne: Thanks for listening to Political Currency. This has been a Persifonica production.

47:12Ed Balls: listeners are a different audience entirely, more engaged, harder to reach through traditional channels, and ready to act when someone they trust makes a recommendation. We're Acast, and we put them right in front of you. Browse thousands of the world's leading podcasts, book host reads or run your own ads, and track every conversion in real time. Same skills you already have, brand new results. Acast. Acast.com slash advertise.