Kwasi Kwarteng on the Liz Truss meltdown, getting sacked and Kemi Badenoch’s future

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2:12Ed Balls: This is Political Codency with Ed Balls and George Osborne.

2:26Ed Balls: So I'm here in our Hoxton studio, but today there is no George Osborne. He's off on holiday. Instead, we're starting the first of our special summer episodes. And I'm talking this morning to somebody who had a front row seat in one of the most dramatic moments in recent British economic history, former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng. We've just both of us dashed over from White City, where we were both recording Good Morning Britain this morning live on TV. And good show, lots to talk about. Yes, I mean, I was very impressed with the way that you as a presenter skipped from the budget to surgery, cosmetic surgery, the issues relating to that.

3:10And there's a really good blend actually on the show, which you do very well, between serious political comment and lighter issues that, of course, affect so many people.

3:21Ed Balls: I said the phrase Brazilian butt lift this morning in the context of government regulation of cosmetic surgery more times than I expected to say on breakfast television. Yes, it wasn't a phrase that I expected to hear from you. I know. I actually turned to Ranvier and said, what is the difference between a Brazilian and a Brazilian butt lift? And she said that was an inappropriate conversation to have so early in the day. So we moved on. So I'm talking to Kwasi Kwarteng, MP since 2010, appointed as business secretary by Boris Johnson, then chancellor with Liz Truss, her short-lived premiership.

3:56Ed Balls: He delivered the mini budget, one of the most dramatic events of recent years of economic history, the fallout of which clearly defined the period which came after. I think normally, Kwasi, when you are doing interviews, since you came out of Parliament, people start with the end of your time as Chancellor. Sure. But I'm going to start in a different place. I'm going to start with the beginning and how you got there. Born in London. Sure. Your mum and dad both came to Britain from Ghana as students, an economist as a barrister. That's right. Scholarship boy at Eton. That's right. Double first at Cambridge.

4:32Yes, that's right.

4:33Ed Balls: The interesting thing about your time at Cambridge, I know from contemporaries, was that you were a very big figure, known across the university, really clever, kind of had a big impact, then in the winning team of university. Yes, that was something that made me known, I suppose. Yeah, but I think you were known for wider reasons than that. People thought this is a rising star. You were in the city, lots of different prestigious places, Chase, JP Morgan, columnist for The Telegraph, in as an MP in 2010, then partly held back by that sort of David Cameron decision not to appoint people quickly.

5:09Ed Balls: But despite that, you still become cabinet minister young. You were on a trajectory to the highest officers of state. And that was kind of obvious to everybody really, really early on. Well, look, I mean, I think it's easy with hindsight to say there was a kind of inevitability to it. I don't think there was. I mean, at the time, I wasn't actually at university very focused on politics. I was much more... You actually did classics in history. That's right. And it was only through history that I got into politics and economic history. So in the end, my PhD, I did a PhD at Cambridge. But I was very much somebody who didn't really have a career plan at the beginning of my time at university.

5:48Some people go to university and think they want to be prime minister or chancellor or whatever.

5:51Ed Balls: And you were a Kennedy scholar at Harvard. I was. Which is what you do when you've not got a career plan. Well, it's a good question. But the fact that I went back and did a PhD and was sort of thinking about academia suggest that I wasn't on the classic political career track. But I suppose I was very focused. I think the immigrant background helps with that. You know, I remember talking to my parents about the possibility of taking a gap year. They were quite popular. I don't know what the state is now in Britain, but people used to take a gap year, you know, between school and university. And I remember my parents didn't really understand why anyone would do that.

6:25They thought, get on with it. Get on with it. Get on with it. And I think lots of parents are like that. So I remember thinking, you know, So you do have that slight sort of immigrant expectations. People talk about tiger mothers. I don't think my mother was ever like that. But there's an expectation among many immigrant families that the kids, you know, have to do well through education and they have to get on, as it were.

6:46Ed Balls: And you couldn't have gone to Eton without the scholarship? No. I mean, I was at a prep school before that. So that was a fee-paying school. But it would have been challenging. Who knows? But in the end, actually, I got a full fee scholarship. That was what was on offer at the time. And I did well enough to get that. And of course, that eased my parents' responsibilities. So in that first period when you're an MP, you are actually part of an intellectual group, which is about the future of conservatism and Britain. You write a book, Britannia Unchained, which has a number of different prestigious contributors, including Liz Truss.

7:25Ed Balls: and there is a trajectory isn't there so Boris Johnson resigns you aren't one of the people who is seen to be pushing him out Liz Truss kind of emerges in the leadership election as the likely candidate early on you are a supporter of hers and what is interesting when you look back at the the accounts of that period you know from the beginning of her leadership campaign in particular before the first debate, she is deciding to go for quite a shock and awe strategy. There is a sense that the British economy is stuck, that we're not growing, that we need a real jolt of energy. She says, I'm going to kind of outflank the rather cautious Rishi Sunak with big tax cuts.

8:10Ed Balls: She says, we can borrow the money to pay for that. You come in as Chancellor. That's a strategy that you, with her, are adopting. actually on the day of the mini budget where you know big package of tax cuts paid for by increased borrowing income tax cut cut in the in the top rate of income tax i mean it's actually heralded as a you know at last a conservative budget from the newspapers in that period because i know there were moments when economists within the team said you know got to be careful here the markets may not wear this were you worried or did you think this is the plan i've been working with liz for the last 10 years the problem was there was massive mission creep because during the summer when she campaigned for leader she was very keen there were two things we were going to do we were going to undo the increase in national insurance um the rise um and we were going to stop the rise in corporation tax and if we'd stuck to those two things that was an expansion of about 35 billion.

9:16And I think we discussed commensurate, not exact penny for penny, but we discussed some spending restraint. And of course, as you know, in a budget, you have to present both, you have to do the expansionary stuff, and then also constrictive measures, such as either tax increases or spending restraint, you do the two together. We took a decision, and I think it was very much the prime minister driving this, and we discussed it, that we were just going to do the expansionary stuff. And I'm afraid in terms of the expansionary stuff, two things happened. One, well, three things. One, we didn't consult the OBR because we wanted to get going.

9:55And she felt, you know, with some good arguments that the OBR was a constraint and this discussion is ongoing. The second thing we thought was that we should get going because we only had two years left of the parliament. She thought that was a very short time. I think it tended to be longer because things move so fast, but we had that debate. And then I think the real intellectual failing was we just didn't walk the walk on spending. And that's always the hardest part of this conversation.

10:27Ed Balls: I mean, she had resisted a big package to support households dealing with high energy bills and then changed her mind and announced a huge, very expensive package. I think loading that, so she announced that, I think, God forbid, the day Her Majesty passed away. And I remember we were on the front bench and we got this news, but of course we couldn't tell anybody that Her Majesty was gravely ill. And I remember there was a slight shift in mood from the front bench. I think Nadim Zahari was next to the Prime Minister, as I was. So that was one of those moments. But she went through with the energy announcement, as I remember.

11:05And then, which was a huge expansion.

11:07Ed Balls: It was. And then, of course, the mini budget happened about probably two weeks after that. So the market was essentially absorbing the massive intervention on energy prices and then the unfunded tax cuts. And that was when things started to go AY. The market was also absorbing on the first day, you are Chancellor, the removal of Tom Sculler as Permanent Secretary. So that was on the third day. The third day. The second or third day, yeah. Right. But you'd spoken to him probably on the first or second day. Yeah, no, you're right, actually. It was early on. So he stayed, there was a couple of days and then, you know, Her Majesty passed away.

11:46But he was resolved to leave.

11:48Ed Balls: And there was also the decision, as you said, not to have an officer budget responsibility forecast. My sense is that Liz Truss had had a bad experience with Tom Scholar when she was the chief secretary of the Treasury. She hadn't liked the OBR. she wanted to go for big shock and awe tax cuts paid for by borrowing you've come in as chancellor these are things which are are her things really that you inherit how much do you look back and think you know i should have taken more control so i i i've obviously played this in my head many times and i think the problem that we had the chances and prime ministers have had is that She just won a leadership contest.

12:33It wasn't me going around the country saying, vote for me. And she had a mandate for tax cuts paid for by borrowing. That's exactly right.

12:40Ed Balls: She said the markets didn't feel any obligation to respect her mandate. No, but you've just won a Tory leadership contest and said, this is my agenda. You've campaigned largely on the agenda. And as I said, there was mission creep. So there was more stuff added, which that was probably one of the problems. But she'd won the leadership. And it wasn't my job. This is what I felt. And, you know, people might take a different view. It wasn't my job to then from day one start opposing what she was trying to do. I was very much a facilitator for the mandate she had. Although the budget you deliver is big.

13:13Ed Balls: It's heralded by conservative newspapers. Markets are a bit wobbly. You then go on the Laura Coonsberg show on the Sunday and you say it's just the beginning. And everybody thinks quasi is going to do even more of this. That looks like you owning it. Yeah, I did. I did own it. I mean, I'm not one of these people who said I had nothing to do with it. Of course, I was the Chancellor Exchequer. Of course, I had responsibility. But it was a team effort as well. And looking back, you know, I could have reworded some of the things I said in the interview. The main thing I think that we got wrong, I mean, was not having the OBR.

13:45I think that was an intellectually. And I wrote a book on this 10 years ago called War on Gold. I said to the Prime Minister, I've never been a Reaganite. I don't believe in unfunded tax cuts. What you should have is a balance between tax cuts and spending restraint.

14:03Ed Balls: And she said do the spending cuts later? So we discussed, I mean, you know, Simon Clark, who was, I think, the local government secretary in the campaign, in her campaign, we were discussing spending restraint. And we should have done the two together because then the markets would have absorbed. It wouldn't have been politically popular. It never is when you're restraining spending. but at least it would have been more coherent. And I think the markets would have been more sympathetic to, and I spoke to a very senior banker before the money budget, and he said, look, we don't want you to think there's such a thing as a free lunch.

14:36That's essentially his strapline of how the market saw things. So I think you've got to have some spending restraint. And this is what the government is trying to do, Rachel Reeves, with the welfare bill. You've got to have some spending restraint so that you can lighten the burden on taxes.

14:55Ed Balls: And when you don't get it because you do a UTA on your welfare reforms, that is a more challenging moment for the markets. I mean, this conversation isn't really about going through all the detail. We can do that another time. You then have a couple of weeks. You have the market turmoil, the particular issues in the pension funds, Bank of England saying that they will do time-limited support. That's what killed the government, by the way. The Bank of England, the window they gave to the pension funds, because we didn't know about that. And that's long-dated gilts that were very sensitive to interest rate movements.

15:26And as interest rates went up, the value that the funds had went down very sharply.

15:31Ed Balls: And they say they're going to support, but then they announce the support will end on the Friday. The 14th of October. The Friday being the day... That was the day I was sacked. And that's not a coincidence. The window essentially shut on the 14th of October. I was called back on the 14th of October, well, on the 13th the day before, come back from Washington, driven to number 10. Just before you get to that, I want to tell you what was happening that day. It's sort of an interesting thing. The other thing, of course, we haven't mentioned, you also did the U-turn on the top rate of tax, which was politically significant.

16:01Ed Balls: On that Friday, I teach a class at King's in London with Nick McPherson, former permanent secretary John Davis. Lots of Treasury civil servants do it, a master's course. that week by chance we were doing 1976 the the the um wilson callahan healy period on that friday we were showing in london to our class of master's students the um the the footage of dennis healy being pulled back from going out to the imf to be dragged in front of the labour conference for him to tell them you know you've got to get real about what's going on with the public finances as he was negotiating the IMF programme. You'd been at the IMF meeting, had some tough conversations there, I know.

16:43Ed Balls: You then get basically pulled back from the IMF meetings. A day before it was, that was the bit that I said, why am I being pulled? You're just going to inflame the situation. And then you find out as you drive in from the airport, this was happening in our class. We were announcing this to our class as it happened. This is history repeating itself. You find out from a Steve Swinford tweet that Liz Truss is planning to sack you when you arrive in Downing Street. I mean, that must have been a kind of surreal, sort of slow motion experience. The whole three weeks were very, very intense. And I was in the newspapers all the time.

17:17And, you know, all my friends were saying, we're just on the front page of every single newspaper every day. That's what it felt like. And then, you know, being summoned the day before the IMF meeting was meant to close, you kind of know that there's going to be a big event. Either I was going to be, I thought I was going to be fronting a total reversal of the entire budget. And strategically, somebody said, she'll get you to front that and then she'll sack you. So that was kind of what I was expecting. But as you say, I was in the cortege, I was in the car. And my spad showed me Steve Swinford's tweet.

17:56And I remember, she said, do you think this is true? And I said, it's absolutely 100 % true. But you also thought that it was politically crackers over. I thought it was. Yeah, I thought. I mean, yeah, I thought.

18:08Ed Balls: This is Margaret Thatcher, Nigel Lawson, but on warp speed. Yeah. You don't have to be a great student of British history, political history, to understand that when the prime minister and the chancellor fall out, that essentially shortens whoever the prime minister's shelf life is. And you told her that? I said, you know, it's like watching someone, you know, blow their brains out metaphorically. in terms of their political career. And it was obvious to me that. And as soon as it was announced, a party donor WhatsAppped me and said, but this is just going to make it worse. The prime minister can't last for two weeks.

18:43And I just shrugged my shoulders. And I said... And we know that her own people, some of her own people had also told her this isn't going to work. It wasn't going to work. I mean, I think... Because the thing she'd done was that you can often sort of try and cut the chancellor loose if it's their policy. so even with Thatcher and Lawson there were issues relating to the ERM tracking the Deutschmark there were a whole bunch of things that he'd done that she wasn't aware of and so she was justified

19:12Ed Balls: perhaps but she was aware of everything she had done in fact she was the the author I'd made it a point to say that I will be joined to what the prime minister does because you've just she'd just won this leadership contest. And so I was very careful not to try and supplant her or go against what I thought her mandate was. Did you tell her what she should do as opposed to tell her not to do what she was about to do? So about two weeks before that, I said, when the mini-budget, you know, the first sort of ripple effect of the mini-budget and the market turmoil, I said, we need to just calm everything down.

19:50It's like that in life. There are some, If you're in extreme turbulence, you need to just dial down the pressure and the excitement.

19:58Ed Balls: At what point did you know that was needed? Because you didn't know that at the Koonsberg interview. No, but I was responsible for that. And so I could see that that was. And then I just said, I said, I think, so the mini budget was on the 23rd. The interview, I think, was on the 25th. And the markets were very destabilized Monday and Tuesday. That's right. But the pound almost hit parity. I mean, that's what I'm terrified of. But the pound was coming up, actually, at the beginning of October. And I said, what we need to do now is just to essentially be very still. And then she said to me, and it was reported at the time.

20:33I'm not just making it up. I mean, there's documentary evidence of it. It was in the newspapers. She said, I've only got two years. And I said, if you carry on like this, you'll have two months. Because you could tell it was just too frenzied and frenetic. But it wasn't two months. It was in the end days.

20:49Ed Balls: There's something I want to ask you about that. We'll just go for an ad break and then we will carry on the conversation.

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22:39Ed Balls: Welcome back. I'm here with Kwasi Kwarteng. We've just had this week the news on Sunday. Kemi Badenok, I think, has had a change of strategy. Until now, she's been very cautious about being critical of the Liz Truss period. Mel Stride was allowed to go out and make a critical speech about what had happened. And Kemi Beinock had allowed that on other areas of policy immigration, not on the mini budget and the trust quieting period, if you like. She went out on Sunday and said that this was, you know, that Rachel Reeves was making the same mistakes that Liz Truss had made, that she said they aren't learning from our mistakes.

23:21Ed Balls: and then Liz Trust hit back and said, this is a spurious narrative diverting from the real failures of 14 years of Conservative government in which her supporters are particularly implicated. And then Kemi Beidnock is now hit back again to say as former Prime Minister and former Secretary, she carries quite a lot of that blame. It's kind of an unseemly row between a current leader and a former Prime Minister. On the other hand, is it the right thing for Kemi Beidnock? I think she's clearly decided that having a row with Liz Truss and you, although I think you're not giving her the row. I'm not going into that.

23:57I mean, it's like a mud fight. I mean, it's not going to help the Conservative Party. I mean, having Kemi Bednog and Liz Truss having a ding-dong battle about whose fault it is, it doesn't help the party at all. Because what the party needs to do is essentially project sort of unity, a degree of competence, a degree of humility.

24:16Ed Balls: It doesn't help Liz Truss. It doesn't help the party. And you aren't doing it for that reason. But is Kemi Bainock wrong to try to get definition going forward against that period? Look, I think she should try and draw a line. But it's not just about trust and me. It's about 14 years. I mean, when I talk to people, I look at, you know, the conservatives who are flipping to reform. They talk about economic management, but they talk a lot about immigration. and that's so she's got to somehow distance herself from a whole range of policies over those over that 14 year period particularly the last at the last period on our podcast george has often said though that she is wrong only to focus on these immigration or cultural issues and that she ought to have gone harder on the economy earlier she's been doing that more recently in PMQs, she clearly feels that it's very hard for her to do that against Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves unless she also says critical things.

25:13Yeah, look, I think I don't blame her. I mean, if I were in her position, you know, we can't say that the Tory party did particularly well, and particularly at the end of that 14 year period. And in order to take the party forward, she's got to distance herself from a lot of what went wrong and what happened. So I think she's justified in doing that. As a loyal Conservative, people have to back her.

25:33Ed Balls: But you're not going to join in i'm not gonna you know if she rang you and said quasi liz has had a pop at me which is really helpful do you mind doing the same what against the bed i wouldn't i wouldn't say that i would say look she's got to try and work out what she's for so it's all right bashing liz and me it's all right bashing rachel reeves but what is what is the conservative party actually standing for and that's where i think they need to be more articulate and and and much clearer with the public. What's the one thing that you would like her to talk more about than she's doing at the moment?

26:05I think she's got to be more visible. I think they took a view, and I understand it, because, you know, we all grew up in the Labour conservative alternation of power, essentially. And she took a view. And I've even heard George say this. The first two years, the public aren't listening to the opposition. And that's when you, so whatever you say doesn't matter. And you can essentially focus on reorganising the party and trying to get policy and the right people in place. I think with the rise of reform, the old playbook is irrelevant. You've got a party that's very noisy, that's quite engaged with public debate.

26:43Farage is a great communicator in his own way. And so you don't have the luxury of spending two years essentially looking internally and trying to rejig the party. You've got to be out there, you know, making the case for what your party stands for. And I think initially she thought it was like the usual parliament where you just weigh in. Right. And I think now, given where reform are in the polls, given where the Tories are, she's going out on the front foot.

27:11Ed Balls: So we are talking now. We're recording an hour before the Bank of England decision on interest rates. By the way, one of your great achievements is to entrench Bank of England independence and the role of the Office of Budget Responsibility for this generation. Nobody's going to doubt that anymore. Can I thank you on behalf of the nation? Bank of England, I would go halfway with you on this. Bank of England independence is clearly important. I think this OBR thing is a very harsh discipline, if you like, and it's a false discipline because actually I think it'll force the government to raise taxes more than they need to be raised.

27:48Ed Balls: But let me ask you about Rachel Reeves. You know, obviously, she's got a big fiscal challenge. And there's lots of debate about what she'll have to do on tax in the autumn. The interesting thing is, if you look in the current Ipsos ratings, her ratings are now almost identical to the ratings that you had just after the mini budget. So my question is, what should Rachel Reeves do to turn things around? And if she can turn things around, could you have turned things around if you'd been given the time by Liz Truss? So I always think you can. I mean, I remember at the time going back, I said, look, the fiscal black hole will shrink because energy costs, I was pretty convinced, were going to come down.

28:31The gas price was at a record high. And I thought as energy prices came down, the black hole in terms of the energy intervention would have decreased. And I said to the prime minister, I said to Liz, I said, look, if we get it to the new year, things will get better because the narrative will shift. Other issues will come into play. And of course, but we didn't. I mean, we were six weeks before Christmas.

28:55Ed Balls: Although Jeremy Hunt ended up raising taxes rather than cutting them. Do you think you might have ended up having to do more to reverse the tax cuts? I think that we needed to be tougher on spending. And I think that was a gauntlet I was willing to run. Because I think if you're a chancer, you're trying to be popular. If you're trying to do popular things, I don't think it ends well, generally. And I think Rachel Reese has got to stick to her guns. What does that mean, though, sticking to her guns? What is the thing for her to do now, which means she can learn from your experience and get through this period, turn those poll races around?

29:27And the thing we haven't talked about is Parliament, is the MPs. And I think clearly in her case, what she wanted to do was to be fiscally responsible, in inverted commas. She wanted to change the welfare arrangements we have. She wanted to reduce the spending on welfare, which I think was laudable. But of course, her backbench MPs weren't prepared to do that. And I think that raises a whole bunch of issues about parliamentary management. We were in a similar position in that we tried, even though we had a majority, not as big as the Labour majority, but we tried to reduce spending. But a lot of our MPs just weren't, you know, at that point we burnt through political capital and they weren't prepared to back us on that.

30:12Ed Balls: The List Trust couldn't face them down. No. Can Rachel Reeves face them down? I think it'll be impossible for her to do that. And in that context, if you're not getting growth, you can't borrow more, you can't reduce spending. The only thing you can do is increase taxes. Now, in my view, you might have a different view. The more you increase taxes, the more you disincentivize essentially people from working, from creating businesses. You basically put a dampener on the whole wealth creation impulse. And you're in this doom loop. And it's a phrase that not only Liz Truss used, but I remember Rachel Reeves accusing us when we were in government.

30:49I mean, I'd left the government, but the conservatives were still there. She accused us of essentially creating this doom loop. She doesn't use that phrase anymore. I wonder why.

30:57Ed Balls: I'm not sure listening to this, it's obvious to her from what you've said, what her path is. It sounds like it's... Well, you see, the reason why I talked about Parliament is that I think you're right. I think she's very constrained because I know what she wants to do. And I think her plan is probably, given all the alternatives, the best plan available to her. But what we've seen with the welfare bill is that she doesn't have the parliamentary support backing to do what she wanted to do. Let me end where we began with your career trajectory. So you had a meteoric rise and then a fall when you kind of lost your job after such a short period of time.

31:41Ed Balls: I was sacked. Let's not be cute about it. Absolutely. When you go back to the profiles written of you, when you become chancellor, people say he's clever. They also say he's arrogant, a bit hubristic, a bit lazy. Does he really listen? The interesting thing to me, because we've worked closely together on Good Morning Britain now for a couple of years. I mean, you're not lazy. You're getting up at five in the morning to come on TV. You aren't, to me, arrogant. You are actually thoughtful and reflective and have a humility about what's happened. And you can talk about it, I have to say, in a very different way from Liz Truss.

32:18Ed Balls: Don't comment upon that. You're clearly clever. But those profiles, I mean, that doesn't feel to me the quasi-quarting that I know in 2025. So my question is, were you always who you really are and the profiles were wrong? or has something happened in your experience of, you know, coming out of Parliament, out of the Chancellor job, which has changed you? So a bit of both. I mean, you will know, and you had profiles, and, you know, that what people say, it's a caricature. Oh, I have. Okay, it's a complete, yeah, so, you know, they'll have said all sorts of things, some of which, you know, you'd recognise.

32:53Ed Balls: And you want to say, no, no, they didn't see the real me. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, so I've never been someone who's been obsessed with all of that. But, you know, going through what I went through over whatever it was, five weeks in September to October 22. I mean, that and you've lost your seat. You know, you go through experiences that do bring you back down to earth. And I probably was a little bit more hubristic and confident. You know, I had a pretty good career. I was rising through the government ranks. And then all of a sudden, you know, you're called back from Washington. Everyone is watching.

33:28And the prime minister sacks you. And it's very, very public. And you can't go. And for three months afterwards, I was sort of in shell shock. I was absolutely amazed that it happened. And it takes you a while to get through that. I mean, it's probably similar to losing your seat in an election where you're expected to hold the constituency. There are lots of things in political life that happen that completely set your trajectory in a different way. And you've got to come to terms with that. And actually, what I really want to do, I've wanted to do is to grow and learn from the experience. I mean, I think it was Churchill.

34:04We always quote Churchill. I try to, you know, making mistakes. That's not the fault. It's not learning from them. That's where, you know, there's real fault.

34:12Ed Balls: And you have learned. I'm trying to learn. I'm trying to understand, you know, what went wrong. I'm trying to understand how I could be more resilient. I'm trying to understand how I could be so much more cautious, probably, than I was ahead of that mini budget. And you've got to grow through experience. And what do you think that means for you next? Where do you take that? Well, I mean, I'm doing a number of commercial things. I love talking about politics. In many ways, I think what's happening now is even more interesting than the period we lived through and where we were MPs. The frustrating thing is you'd be a better chancellor now.

34:47Well, Tony Blair said that about being a prime minister, didn't he? He said he'd be better. I mean, I think you learn a lot. I think, and you learn from obviously good things, but you also learn from bad experiences. And it was such an intense sort of emotionally draining three weeks or five weeks that I've tried to learn from it.

35:08Ed Balls: Kwasi Kwartain, thank you so much for talking to me today. That was fabulous. now in a moment George is going to be back for a conversation that we've recorded recently about the art of political speech writing I have to say though that conversation with Kwasi Kwarteng was really interesting what I'd like to do is get him back and do a proper inside the room where we go through blow by blow day by day the events of that period I think that would be fascinating too but his reflections on that period and how it's changed him really interesting anyway George and I talking about speech writing after this break.

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38:28Welcome back.

38:29Ed Balls: This is a special summer edition of Political Currency. And so we're going to be talking about a topic which is so vital in politics and especially for politicians, especially for politicians in the summer, thinking about their big conference moment to come in a few weeks time. Yeah, we're going to be talking about political speech writing or political speech writers. That's a job I did at one point. And it may come as a shock to some listeners that not all politicians write their own speeches, that the prime minister doesn't write their own speech always, that there's someone else or maybe a team of people who do some of the writing.

39:07We're going to be talking about that today. And what do you think? I mean, Ed, I don't know if you were ever kind of formally a speech writer in the same where I was, but I presume you're involved in lots of speech writing. And what would you say are the kind of key characteristics of a good political speech writer?

39:25Ed Balls: I was never formally a political speech writer. I've been involved in very many kind of processes of speech writing. Gordon Brown, as we've said before, used to sit in front of a computer typing while four or five of us would sit around looking at a big projector screen where we could see what he was typing on his PC monitor. And then we would talk and he would read and that was how the speech emerged. Gordon Brown was somebody who... So that's the reverse of the normal process. Most prime ministers or chancellors, someone else would write the speech and then the principal would critique it. But here he was writing the speech and he was getting his advisors to critique it.

40:07Ed Balls: So he did have speech writers, but you are right that very many of his speeches he wrote himself from scratch. Actually, my experience was that Tony Blair was the same. Tony Blair, a barrister, used to writing his own words. He would sit in his room, not in front of a computer. He would write in longhand, in pen, onto sheets of House of Commons paper and write out his words and then hand them over to be typed up. I think what happens, though, if you're Prime Minister, and the same is true with Gordon Brown, there are so many speeches and so many pressures on you. You haven't got the time to write those speeches in the way Gordon Brown did as Chancellor.

40:44Ed Balls: But it's still the case that the essence of the speech, I think Tony Blair has said this. I remember reading Barack Obama talking about speech writing, that they would write the page or page and a half, which was the essence of the speech, and hand that over to the speech writers to then craft the whole speech around that core message. and Gordon would do the same. He would bang it out on his computer and email it and hand it over. So even the people who write their own speeches, and many politicians do, you still need speechwriters. And I would say that there are three things which are vital in being a good political speechwriter.

41:21Ed Balls: The first thing is you have to have, be able to have the time with the principle to talk and listen and work out, you know, what is it they care about? What do they want to say? What are the stories? what are the things which drive them if you're making a speech i don't know about um social care what were their experiences of care or in their lives or the things which motivate them which mean that when you produce a draft they'll say you know i could have written this because you so captured how i feel the second thing is voice can you write in the way that they they speak? Is it authentic to them?

42:02Ed Balls: You can write the same speech on the same topic, if you're a great speechwriter, for five different politicians and for them to sound and be written in very different ways. The great speechwriter can find the individual voice of the politician. And actually, if they are doing this professionally, they might be doing three different speeches for three different people at the same time all in a very different style and then the third thing so as well as that sort of um kind of of kind of understanding and voice the third thing is control that you always have in a political speech writing process loads of people who want to comment and the principal the prime minister will say i need to get this person this person's views and the speech goes off and they come back with comments.

42:50Ed Balls: And it's a catastrophe if the speech ends up with all these comments added in, sounding like it's been written by 10 people. And what the great speechwriter does in an almost Stalinistic way is they absolutely control the draft. Only they write words into the speech other than the principle. People may make comments, but they don't get to see their comments just incorporated. If you want to have any input to the speech, you do it through me. The great speechwriters are controlling, listening, and then they can hear voice. And if you can get all those three things together, then you can be a great political speechwriter.

43:30Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. I mean, I was William Hague's speechwriter, and that was extremely hard because William Hague was a much better giver of speeches than I ever was. And, you know, it was a sort of natural orator. You could say it's the last of a generation of orators, arguably. But I was a speechwriter, and it was a brilliant, brilliant apprenticeship for me in politics and taught me so much and meant that I had the confidence to write my own speeches when I was chancellor and also start with the first draft. And I used to always do my own budget speeches. I sit there with a computer over the weekend for the budget in Downing Street, write the speech myself alone in my room.

44:07So that I really internalized it and I knew what I wanted to say and construct an argument out of the things that we were announcing. But writing for William Hague, you know, the first, I like turned up at the William Hague leadership campaign in 1997. I'd been in Downing Street as a junior aide. There was a Tory leadership contest. William Hague was the outsider, but I turned up and he said to me, and I didn't really know him, but he said, look, why don't you go and write the victory speech in case we win? Because I can't spend any time thinking about that. I'm concentrating on winning. And he said, the only thing I want you to do is take this book.

44:43And it was a book by a British general in the Second World War called Field Marshal Slim, who'd fought the campaign in the Far East in Burma, where the British had been defeated by the Japanese. And then Slim's campaign slowly started to win again against the Japanese. And it's called From Defeat Into Victory. And he gave me this book and he said, go and write my acceptance speech if we're lucky enough to win this campaign. So I went and wrote this speech. And I had done some speech writing for John Major in a very junior capacity. And I've been a special advisor, so I've done some speech writing in my department but i wrote the speech and then he just read the whole thing out because he hadn't had any time to kind of look at it when he uh and that was my that was how i started off and it taught you know he taught me so much about kind of pacing cadence the thing i would however kind of pick you up on i don't think you are in a really good relationship between a speech writer and a politician it's not all one way you're not just simply trying to be the voice of that politician because i think you can improve the voice of the politician you know and first of all some of the politicians aren't very good at giving speeches full stop and so they need a speech writer to make them orators but even if they're really good and i remember doing a speech for william haig everyone was always like we don't know who william haig is and we need to make more of the fact he came from rotherham and so i kept saying like you know in these meetings come on william tell us you know tell me i used to do this with danny finkelstein i should say he was like the head of policy he would often sit alongside me when these meetings say come on william tell us about your background he said well it was just an ordinary background in south yorkshire i go yeah we can't tell us about you know your upbringing must been kind of difficult no no it was very comfortable middle class background i said well that's not there's no material here to go on and in the end i just sort of invented i remember thinking well i've on the m1 there's this sign to rother valley country park like a brown sign if you know i know and so i did this speech for him it's one of his party conference speeches which was come with me to the rother valley which was all based on this sign i'd seen on the motorway meet the children i grew up with we weren't rich but we were comfortable and anyway i basically invented that not quite invented his childhood but i even but william haig was so shy about talking about his own background or mod you know i don't know modesty or shyness or whatever so he was this great artist but he would not talk about himself and we were in a political hole at the time and everyone was screaming we want to hear more about who william haig really is so i think the relationship with the speech writer could be more symbiotic no no well but i completely agree but if you actually listen to you telling that story you listened to what he said was

47:37Ed Balls: important to him and you also listen to the cadence of his voice and then you found something which fitted the wider political purpose which was consistent with him authentically and the way he spoke and that was the speech so it wasn't like he gave it to you you gave it to him but you but you wrote it and thought about it by putting yourself into his being and that is what the great speechwriter does and well i'm not sure i was a great speechwriter but i said the you know i i probably see the the weeks i spent on i wrote all those conference speeches they're long they're like an hour long the leader's conference speech um and we used to go up danny and i would go up and i you know i was the i held the pen in your kind of you're absolutely right you've got to have discipline because back then like jeffrey archer was knocking around he would like want to contribute jokes and alan duncan who was you know a great friend of williams and someone i like very much but he would want to be involved in the speech writing and every you know at a party conference if you're everyone goes like who's writing the speech and who's in the room and if you i had to be like the the person saying like i'm actually in control of this i mean if there was 24 hours to go before the speech and somebody comes along with a whole new passage, the speechwriter says, frankly, you're a week too late.

48:59Ed Balls: We're now at the point of refining the delivery of this speech. And coming up with jokes. And coming up with jokes. Which I was no good at. Danny was brilliant. Danny would do both the jokes and the kind of really purple passages where you kind of try and lift the room with the old kind of orange. But they would have been done ages before. One time when, at the very last minute, I've told about this story before, so I won't do it all again, but I go into Gordon's speech meeting on the morning of his speech. It's at 10 o 'clock and say, I've got the line. This is no time for a novice. And it was very late.

49:34Ed Balls: And the speechwriters may have thought that's really annoying. But the reason Gordon immediately said, yes. And everybody said, you need the big headline. Yes. But also it was such a Gordon thing to say. And it was so politically what we needed. And therefore it went straight in. but it went in because it was in both content and voice it was authentically him and he hadn't thought of it and actually it wasn't me who thought of it that doesn't matter the point was that even though it was late but if somebody tips up at 10 in the morning with some great line which is doesn't help it is not authentic then if you're the speechwriter you basically say do not even come in the room yeah but i think you do need to always have an eye for even if it comes late, really good material.

50:19And I think the single piece of advice I give to anyone who's a speechwriter, or indeed to any politician listening to this, is something that I read in a book, which when we discussed this summer, we were discussing political books, I mentioned this before, but Ronald Reagan's speechwriter was someone called Peggy Noonan. and she she's still very much around and she writes a column in the u.s media and she i got to know her it was like one of the great kind of privileges to get to know this woman and her book what i saw at the revolution is all about speech writing for ronald reagan who was a brilliant speech giver because he partly because he'd been a hollywood film star um and she says in this book think about what is the headline you want at the end of this speech on the news or in the newspaper the headline and it's such a simple point but i saw throughout my entire political career speeches given by prime ministers and chancellors and whatever where no one had you you write the speech and then you try and think of the headline you go well what what what what's the press going to write take from this speech and she always says in that book you start with the headline that's how you start the speech you and it's got to be a credible headline it's not like you know you know starmer's government doing even better than expected is not like a headline but you can expect a newspaper to write at the moment so you have to start with something that a an editor will credibly put that and i one thing i learned from my uh special advisors when i had speeches written for me was if you want something on the news there's no good having a phrase which is like 30 seconds long because the bbc will not use or it will not use a 30 second clip so you have to have it you have to time it you have to read it out and it's got to be like i can't remember exactly what was back then but it was like 18 or 19 seconds that is the absolute there's no point being 21 seconds it will not be used and that discipline of what is the headline what is the clip and and the clip on the news has to be sum up your argument be sufficiently interesting that the the news editor is going to go that's what we want to explain this speech on the news

52:42Ed Balls: very interesting i mean i think if i was advising somebody on training i would say you know when you get appointed you need to spend huge amounts of time reading the past speeches and um articles that the person you're going to work for has written to kind of get into their voice but before that you know there are there are amazing compendions of speeches and you don't want to read one person's speeches you need to read lots of different speeches to kind of get a feel of different ways in which people can communicate i might though go and study um i I think if you think of the Christmas message or the speeches which are written for, you know, I don't believe the Queen herself wrote the words, but the Queen, the late Queen and now King Charles.

53:29Ed Balls: If you think that the speech she gave live on television in April 2020 in the pandemic with the phrase, we will meet again. I mean a brilliant phrase which totally captured the kind of hope and fears of the time absolutely the headline in a few words those speeches always sound hugely authentic but but but but they sound I can't say it is but it wasn't wasn't her late majesty brilliant as she was but the point is the speech writers for the king and queen managed to capture

54:10Ed Balls: the king or queen and their speech in such a way that it obviously one of the great challenges for this government I don't think, you know, when we say Keir Starmer, he's not really a politician, he's not grown up in a great tradition of speech writing, he's not been part of speech processes when he was, and I wonder whether they devote enough time and detail to speech writing. I mean, we know the controversy about Islands of Strangers, which he now says he regrets and he hadn't really read. But I can't imagine how, on the one hand, somebody as Prime Minister could be making a speech of such importance and not have...

54:55Ed Balls: Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, David Cameron, you would have been working on those words for days beforehand. but the speech writers do spend a lot of time on their speeches i mean david cameron would spend a he just on speech much the frustration of like all the civil servants and others political people are like oh come on prime minister we've got to have this meeting and you know he knew that for the big i think that's another skill as a politician knowing which is the speech you've really got to get right and you've got to have speech writers who can find your voice and you know if you aren't yourself going to be be involved in the detail of the drafting you've got to have somebody who you give enough time to that they can do that for you effectively rather than you know speeches which just don't quite sound like it's you they don't sound like you wrote it but is that maybe but you see look i would say you know one of the greatest communicators of my lifetime whether you like him or not is donald trump he's actually one of the greatest speech givers he speaks for hours in these football stadiums and the like in america He's revived the kind of big rally.

56:02And yet, I mean, I don't think he has a speechwriter. I mean, maybe he does. You know, it's not evident. I mean, you know, it's not anything like the way Barack Obama would do a speech in a football stadium. It's more, you know, it's sort of rambling. I don't mean rambling in a sort of, you know, like that's a very pejorative. I mean, it just sort of a bit disconnected. and it's unbelievably entertaining if you're being completely abstract about it because he just comes up with these extraordinary things he says. But, you know, look at him when he's doing his press conferences. They go on for hours.

56:38He does more television and more interviews than any American president before him. They're not classic speeches. And so is the age of the big speech, the big oratory, the big kind of a, maybe Obama was the last of the great, of American presidents and, you know, in the kind of Reagan and Kennedy and kind of Roosevelt tradition. I don't know, maybe in the age of sort of social media clips and whatever, you know, the 19 seconds is a bit of a luxury, actually. So I don't know. I don't know. Maybe we're talking of a bygone age.

57:15Ed Balls: But if that's the case, why is Donald Trump doing these big rallies? He obviously feels as though that works for him and the crowd. I think you are right. There'll be parts of it which are quite rambling but at certain points we will both do this in the speeches we give you suddenly kick into a riff which you've done before and each time you do it you do it better than the last time but he is you know in a sort of slightly random way going through things he's done before which will work for the crowd um but what he's not doing in the way you know an obama might do or blair or brown or whatever making an argument where you take people through the stages of an argument.

57:52Ed Balls: It's much more random than that. Did you have a speechwriter who you should mention on this podcast so that you don't get told off afterwards? I had three or four great civil service speechwriters, so I probably shouldn't sort of signal them out, but they were fantastic in the Treasury. And then I had a series. I didn't have a sort of single person who would do all my speeches. but um i didn't shed a chancellor the only thing i would say is i had when i um started off as secretary of state discovering i had a stammer realizing that i couldn't read a text and having to come up with a way to solve this and we solved it by writing the speech and then me memorizing it and i had a civil servant called richard winson um who um was brilliant at kind of working with me on the text and come and going away come up with the stories and finding ways to you know i had to have written every word but actually he was right and i would rewrite and he was he was he was great and you you do rely upon speech writers so much i'm being a bit i mean maybe i can think of like individuals but it's a bit unfair but the i would um the other thing is take time so you know when i was doing my party conference speeches as a chancellor as i said in the budget speech i would do myself with my computer in downing street but in the party conference speech I'd go to Dorneywood, the Chancellor's grace and favour residence, for a couple of days before, the week before the conference, to really, with a team of people, my key special advisors and a couple of external people I really trusted, and try and get that right.

59:34And when I was writing speeches with Danny Finkelstein for William Haig, we would go up. William Haig lived near Catterick Garrison in North Yorkshire, where his constituency was. And we would be put up at the Bridge House Inn. Now, I don't know if you know Danny, but not everyone listening as well. But basically, a young George Osborne and a young Danny Finkelstein did not immediately blend in to the squaddy crowd at the Bridge Inn in Catterick Garrison. But it was the only kind of hotel around there. So we would, well, not even a hotel, it was like a pub with rooms. And so we'd both like retreat upstairs from this extremely rowdy army scene in the pub and into these hotel rooms.

1:00:20And then we would go and meet William in the place he lived in, North Yorkshire, for several days and hammer out these speeches. And then, you know, the sort of midnight would come and we'd be dropped back at the British Inn, just as the fights were kicking off.

1:00:38Ed Balls: Well, I'm going to, so for my personal kind of time in the cabinet and the Shadow Chancellor doing conference speeches, I never wanted to get to early September without something down. I wanted the arc of the argument. I wanted something which I thought was good and I wanted a joke. And most of that I would have written on holiday around a pool on a Blackberry. Well, I mean, rather than wasting your time listening to a podcast. Rather than wasting your time listening to a podcast. Right now, in August, there'll be lots of politicians trying to relax on holiday, but knowing they've got a party conference in three weeks and thinking, if I can just bang something out on my phone now, then I've got something to work from.

1:01:25Ed Balls: And so I would say, of course, they improve and people put stuff into them. But I didn't want to get to the end of August and not feel as though I had something to work from. I mean the no time for a novice speech from Brown did secure his premiership for another two years didn't it I mean it saw off not it saw off at David Miliband essentially because although the novice was looked like it was aimed at David Cameron it was sort of aimed at David Miliband and um and I was thinking you know Cameron's speech when he was auditioning to be leader over David Davis you know was the decisive thing and arguably his speech without notes when Brown was going to call that early election, which we did on Inside the Room, was also decisive.

1:02:08So these conference speeches can be really important. Neil Kinnock's great speech with Derek Hatton in the room when I was a teenager. 1985. You know, I mean, these... But Theresa May's speech, that didn't go well. That was very unfortunate for her because of the cough. You know, she had that terrible cough. But, you know, these moments are mattering.

1:02:28Ed Balls: Neil Kinnock's 92 Sheffield rally didn't go well. I think, you know. Don't you think that's always a rule? They really matter these speeches. I think that's a bit after the event, isn't it? I wonder whether. They felt strongly at the time. Neil was so cross with himself. Right. So cross with himself. Oh, gosh. Anyway, you've prompted a load of what ifs, which we're also discussing this summer. Very good. Well, we are done for our chat about speech writing on this special summer edition of Political Currency. I don't think we had the peroration we required for this segment. we've stumbled into the finish we should have had a rousing preparation to others that's right political speech writing i know but i mean to quote tony blair i think we should go forward not back and um and we are we are i don't think you need a good slogan anyway yes best george best when we're together yes best when we're bold best when we're at labor oh such a mistake or Gordon Brown.

1:03:26Left Tony Blair as the national leader on the party. Anyway, we're back with EMQs on Monday and if you are a gold or kitchen cabinet member, you can listen early and ad-free from tomorrow and you can find the link to subscribe in our show notes.

1:03:40Ed Balls: So keep listening throughout the summer to Political Currency. We're on YouTube, all our episodes and of course, you can get us wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to review the show that helps us reach more listeners and remember, you can contact us with voice notes or questions at questions at politicalcurrency.co.uk. Have a wonderful summer. See you soon.

1:04:06Thanks for listening to Political Currency. This has been a Persephoneca production.

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