Starmer hangs Reeves out to dry again — is the Chancellor toast?

0:02The Telegraph.

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1:44School's back and the government has launched a reset that might leave Rachel Reeves in tears because Keir Starmer has stolen Darren Jones, her right-hand man, to help him with his own delivery. Plus, asylum, tax, has things already started on a bad note? Three homes, Rainer, and now the Chancellor's job once again in jeopardy. I went to a reform conference on pensions, but ended up speaking to Zia Youssef about whether the Chancellor can go the distance at the Treasury. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley. And me, Camilla Tominy.

2:26Tim, it's the first day back of the Westminster school term, 2025 to 26. And it's raining. You're looking dapper, by the way. Yes. You're in your own journalistic uniform there. That's very kind of you. It is the second jacket of the day because I got caught in a downpour this morning when I left the house. I had to actually turn around and go back and change. Did you look like Rishi Sunak announced in the election last year? We still need to find out what happened to that suit. Let's call it a reset. You've had a reset. What I did, it wasn't a disaster, it was a reset. That's what the Prime Minister is saying.

2:54Speaking of which. Yes. Is it a reset, though? I feel like he's unplugged the telly and then plugged it back in and actually the picture's still the same, right? Yes, yes. Well, OK, the context of all of this is we are looking ahead to a budget that's probably going to be even worse than the last one. So it's all about setting us up for that. But what has he actually done in this mini reshuffle, which some backbenchers were expecting to be a proper reshuffle and are a bit disappointed about? Instead, it's very much an insider staffing one. The key thing is that Darren Jones, the former chief secretary of the Treasury, has been moved to a new role as chief secretary to the prime minister, focused on the delivery of the government's policy agenda, which will require an awkward conversation because he's now going to have to sit down with Starmer and say, what is the policy agenda?

3:41Those who are asking, so who was the previous chief secretary to the prime minister, may well do so because it has never existed before. Oh, it's a made up role. It's a new role. It's a delivery role. It's a delivery role. It's Minister for Delivery. Yeah. Not to be confused with the person that deals with the post office at whatever department that is. What's interesting about this is that Rachel Reeves is briefing that she was fully behind this move. Of course she was, yes. But I think we can safely conclude that having her deputy and actually the only sort of competent voice in the Treasury be taken from her at number 11 and installed at number 10 is a slight.

4:20Yes. It comes after Crygate. She's been in tears in the Commons. We know there are internal rows going on, rumours of rows with the Prime Minister, rumours of rows with Angela Rayner, the deputy, who, by the way, we'll get on to Three Homes Rayner a little later in this. and now it's almost like she's had a limb cut off. The person who has been promoted to become the new Darren Jones and that's a man called James Murray. Now, I feel cruel but don't get me wrong because I actually really quite like this man on a personal level. He's a very sweet man. Yes. He isn't the strongest media performer.

5:00I have found myself sort of carving him up a bit on my GB News show. I think at one point Spad almost brought a stretcher into the studio to carry him away as I was asking him about tax and spend. This is just a tax and spend government and he couldn't. This isn't the strongest appointment they could make and I mean no disrespect, but we've got this narrative around the current cabinet not quite being up to scratch and I think if you were going to send a message that you were really supporting Rachel Reeves, you'd put an old timer in there or maybe you'd move Pat McFadden in you would bolster the operation I think installing him and then the relatively unknown Dan Tomlinson who did once do this daily tea but I'm not sure he'd be recognised in his own constituency says to me, we're hanging the Chancellor out to dry you know, they've left her there metaphorically speaking with a sort of, you know, revolver and a glass of whiskey in her office plotting her own downward spiral I would suggest Well, and I learned on, I just did BBC Politics Live, which is where I also learned that this is the first Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister in history.

6:06I also learned that James Murray is a protégé of Emily Thornberry. Right. Yes, and she's very proud of him, and rightly so. Of course, she would like to be in government too. Instead, she's heading the Foreign Affairs Committee, and I think she's actually doing quite a good job of it. Do you know how she came unstuck? How did she come unstuck? She came unstuck when she acknowledged to me that the assault on private school fees and the VAT on private school fees could mean that state class sizes go up. And to her credit, Thornberry was the only minister at the time in opposition, shadow minister in opposition, to admit that the exodus would cause problems.

6:42And as soon as she made that admission, she was culled. I think it's indicative of the poor way Starmer runs things that she's not in the government. I actually think she's a very competent person when she's on air. And I think it says something that she's not in the government. I think that's a very silly decision. But you're right. Poaching Jones from Treasury to number 10 looks bad for Reeves. But also, let's ask, what does it say about the prime minister that he needs to create this special role for delivery? He has been through, I believe, in the last five years, four different communications directors.

7:16Yes. So he needs someone to come in to do delivery. he needs a new person to come in to do communications. I infer from that that the Prime Minister has not been doing very well on either. And the man, let's be honest, when it comes to communications, he couldn't communicate a letter into a post box, right? There is something. The idea that it's the fault of an underling that this Prime Minister has been failing to connect with the public. Yes. It's absurd. So they're bringing in former Blairite, a spin doctor called Tim Allen, to try and shake things up on the comms front. I agree that it's problematic that unfortunately the Prime Minister does lack charisma.

7:57And also, having just come from yet another reform press conference where not Nigel Farage, but in this case his deputy Richard Tice, has taken a whole list of journalists. And, OK, mainstream broadcasters and newspapers and then blogs, people like Unheard got a question, Politico, we got a question, which we'll listen to in a bit. everybody who was on the list asked a question and it was fielded by Tice perfectly comfortably. Compared to how the Prime Minister reacts to any press scrutiny at all, he is going to absolutely have to up his game because you've got Farage channelling his inner Trump and Starmer basically invisible for the whole of the summer, really.

8:36I mean, I wrote this in my column last week. What have you been doing for the summer apart from firing your third aid? We've got him now. So he's got rid of Sue Gray. As you say, Matthew Doyle, who was head of comms, Nin Pandit, that's the last one he's fired, all gone from Downing Street. I can tell you a funny story about that. Go on. When it came to Nin Pandit, as far as I'm aware, most of Fleet Street was trying to find a photo. We didn't know who this person was, if they were male or female. It didn't appear to be a photo even in existence. Who is Nin Pandit? And it made me think of that moment in Arrested Development where there's a character who's infamously bland and they show briefly an excerpt from the high school yearbook that has a photo of her and beneath it it says not pictured.

9:20And that to me is ninpanded. But they have been doing things over the summer, which is floating ideas that they then drop. So this comes on the back of two huge U-turns before the summer, welfare reform of pips and winter fuel. So they're running out of money. So what we've had over the summer, we've had various ideas floated. They were looking at reform to certificates for SEND kids. They have floated the idea they may tax sale of properties. They're basically inviting people to put it, to send in, the audience to send in their ideas. Yes. Ways to make. What else could we tax? To raise money.

9:55Thin air. Precisely. And so all this is gearing up to, they're going to have a second really, really bad budget. And I think that's the thing that this is all really about. Yes. This is about both creating distance from the Treasury so that the Prime Minister's office is better strengthened so that they're ready to hang her out to dry, while also preparing a communications strategy for what is going to be a really ugly winter. I think we were waiting before the summer for this to be a summer of discontent. And actually, it wasn't. I know there were flags, but there were no riots. And things have just kind of bubbled along during the summer.

10:31I think actually winter with the budget, I think that's going to be the thing which could really kick things off in Westminster. And we've got serious rhetoric around a possible IMF bailout. We've got reports that actually the Chancellor's shortfall is now£41 billion. A think tank has come up with that figure saying that government spending has hit a record high. It's the highest level that it has been in, I think, since 1993. That then goes against all of her claims to maintain fiscal discipline. She hasn't seemed to be a credible figure, I'm sorry, since the tears in the Commons. No, and now she's about 20 % less credible because she's just had Darren Jones taken off her.

11:09And I think the Prime Minister is hoping that somebody, probably her sister Ellie Reeves, will tap her on the shoulder and say, I think you need to go. You cannot possibly fire her because then he's almost firing himself. This is what happened to Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. We can make that comparison, by the way, because of this whole guilt yields thing that, Let's be honest, you and I don't quite understand, but they're high. No idea. They're higher than they were under trust. High as bad. She broke the bank. High is bad. And therefore, if there is some kind of market rebellion against anything that Rachel Reeves announces, we could be in another market turmoil situation that puts so much pressure on the Chancellor.

11:46She has nowhere else to go but walk. And then in a way, it solves a problem for Keir Starmer, but it creates another one because she's been the resident sort of SHIT sponge for him, hasn't she? At all turns, he can blame Rachel. Well, it's the treasury. Yes. And what's interesting is he has now got this triumvirate of women, Yvette Cooper, Angela Rayner and indeed Rachel Reeves, who are all struggling in their role. Any one of them could go. Well, but then is the threat from Angela Rayner greater or lesser than it was in light of the three-home scandal. I think it's quite a bit less. You know, the Labour attitude is it is not a story.

12:28Of course it's a story. We're still reporting on it. The readers are incensed. It's totally a story. It's like the story to me. She is the great Gatsby of her generation. She's the Enron of her generation. I think it's a story which says so much about the Labour Party and the governing class in Britain. They have raised taxes. They are talking about raising taxes further. They have, in the last 15 years, really hit against tax avoidance, often equating it with evasion, making it seem evil. And we have former tweets with Angela that say things like tax avoidance costs lives, attacking Jeremy Hunt for the various things that he allegedly did.

13:07And then it turns out that if given a chance, Labour ministers will find a way to avoid paying tax too. And that is plainly what she has done. Do as I say, not as I do. It's on a par, isn't it, with two Jags Prescott, Diane Abbott privately educating her son. It speaks to double standards. Legally, she hasn't apparently done anything wrong. We had Bridget Phillips and the Education Secretary being very sisterly and saying she can spend her money how she likes, speaking like a true capitalist. When middle class people avoid tax in some way, like buying an ISA or handing their house to their kids before they die, they've done nothing wrong either.

13:44But the left gives the impression that they're committing some great immoral sin. So then when she does exactly the same thing, to be clear about what she is accused of doing, that she saved£40 ,000 in stamp duty on a new flat in Hove after telling tax authorities that that was her main home. But she also told Tameside Council in Manchester that her constituency house in Ashton-under-Lyne remains her primary residence and informed Brighton and Hove Council that her apartment there was a second home for council tax purposes. And we should add that she, of course, also enjoys a grace and favour flat in Admiralty House in central London.

14:21And we've reported today that she is registered to vote in both the Manchester property and the Hove property. Right. Which doesn't seem quite right to me. We need a clarification. Which is your main residence? So you represent Ashton. You work in London. But your main residence is a seaside town on the south coast. And to make matters worth, of course, we should also mention the photograph. Yes. Taken presumably very nearby her new£800 ,000 seaside property. Vaping on the beach. It's not the best look. Again, I did my column. It's Ed Miliband and his bacon sandwich. It's Prescott throwing the punch.

15:04No, I tweeted that day that she was the Prime Minister of People's Hearts. I think vaping on the breach of Brighton, I don't judge her for. It's declaring that you live there as your primary residence when you're an MP representing somewhere hundreds of miles away. And I think there is a debate now raging about people commenting on her appearance in the dinghy and whether it's body shaming, although we used to have a huge amount of rhetoric around Jeremy Corbyn wearing anoraks to the cenotaph and all the rest of it, and apparently that was acceptable, but this isn't because she's a woman, but then she's a woman in her own private time.

15:35Should she be papped at all when she's out on the beach trying to have fun? So it is a bit of a difficult one. Are we applying double standards here? Because Boris Johnson was photographed. And we used to laugh at him and say, oh, my God, look at this guy. He looks like a complete fool. But we would always say it didn't matter because he's going to do what we want. And the left feels the same about Anne. OK, she smokes vapes, whatever, but she's going to do what we want. The question is, is she going to do what we want or what the left wants? Is she going to have the kind of redistributive agenda that they stand for when she herself is making the most of tax avoidance?

16:09But do you remain an old Labour darling if you've got three homes? Oh, absolutely you do. And I think in the past you especially could when people saw you as a working class hero who had done good. Like Bob Crow. Right. Who famously had a quite expensive apartment somewhere in central London and he bought it off the council. The thing is, I think Labour ideologically and in class terms has changed. It isn't the party of the aspirational working class anymore. It's really the party of the pink-haired eco-loon. And I don't think those people would see it as aspirational. I don't think they would say, good for you, Ange.

16:44I think they probably would say she's a hypocrite because they're totally ideologically sold on everyone must give every penny in their income to the government. Well, and also they'll be increasingly likely to either vote for Corbyn or indeed the Greens who are relaunching on Tuesday, I believe. Something we may or may not cover. But to go back to this point, the sackings, which will continue until morale improves, The sackings have thus far been internal. The question is at what point do the sackings become external? And you are right to name those three, Cooper, Rayner, Reeves. I don't think Rayner would go.

17:18If nothing else, Holmes feels like one of the few things Labour's doing something on. So Reeves versus Cooper, who's going to go? And today, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, has told the Commons that Labour plans are cracked down on the number of dependents refugees who are granted asylum to live in the UK can bring over from their home countries. So in our asylum policy statement later this year, we will set out a new system for family migration, including looking at contribution requirements, longer periods before newly granted refugees can apply, and dedicated controlled arrangements for unaccompanied children and for those fleeing persecution who have family in the UK.

17:54And we aim to have some of those changes in place for the spring. But in the meantime, we do need to address the immediate pressures on local authorities and the risks from criminal gangs using family reunion as a pull factor to encourage more people onto dangerous boats. Therefore, we are bringing forward new immigration rules this week to temporarily suspend new applications under the existing dedicated refugee family reunion route. Until the new framework is introduced, refugees will be covered by the same family migration rules and conditions as everyone else. The figures on this are quite eye-watering.

18:33They've risen the number of refugees' family members who are granted visas to come to Britain from 4 ,300 in 2023 to 20 ,600 in the year to this March. And we have reported on cases where refugees to this country have literally brought dozens of relatives over. Yeah. And I actually put this to Richard Tice today. Reform had a press conference, which we'll get onto, about pensions. It was a bit dry, but I thought, let's ask him what reform would do about refugees and their dependents. Last, but most definitely not least, Camilla Tomini from The Telegraph. Thank you very much. If you've been granted asylum to live in the UK, how many dependents does reform think people should be able to bring over?

19:16Yeah, really good question. We know that this system, and we've heard of some families who are bringing over double figures, even more than 20. This is outrageous. This is an abuse of our generosity. We need to completely re-look at it. Have I got a specific answer for you here and today? No. We need to dig into what actually has really gone on, look at all the data, and come to a view as to what is appropriate at FAIR. If I take us back to credit where credit's due, Back in the early 2000s, we were accepting about 20 ,000 asylum seekers every year. And it was about 20 % of those who applied. So we can look back at what level of dependencies came across then.

20:01It sort of worked then. Some people say it's a bit much, a bit too. If it worked then, sometimes if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The system currently is broke. It does need fixing. But we should learn lessons from where things worked decades ago. So have I got a specific number? No. Will we dig into the detail and come up with a sensible number? Yes, absolutely. This continues to morph into the most right-wing government of my lifetime. And this is a classic example of where one mistake then leads to policies to correct that, which may be an overcorrection. So the mistake is allowing people to bring such a large number of dependents to the country.

20:39But what the government is applying at the same time is saying that the dependents who come over must also have good English language skills and also relative income, which is not unlike legal migration, right? If you want to legally migrate to this country, you have to prove how much income you've got so you won't be dependent upon the state. And I just think if you think about that in principle, if someone is fleeing from Iran, right, and they come to this country and they've been approved, it's been proven they are under threat of death. So they're allowed to stay in the country. They of course want a child or a wife to join them in this country.

21:09And I think the idea of saying to them, but can they speak English and how much money do they make? To me, it just is an inversion of the principle of asylum. So are they supposed to wait in Iran themselves, potentially under the threat of death until they've completed an English language course? But then maybe you're just saying then you can bring a spouse and your children, but that's it, not granny, grandpa, aunt and uncle. This is my point. I don't understand why Tice can't give that answer. This is the trouble with reform. You sort of try and drill into the detail and then they're like, oh, well, we haven't, You know, it's too soon to say.

21:40Yes. They're not making commitments. They're not making commitments in part because they don't want to get caught out, but also because they think they're going to enter government at some point and they don't want to have overextended themselves. I understand that. Cooper, of course, is having to channel her own inner Nigel Farage because, let's be honest... It's a very unconvincing drag act. It is, isn't it? This is a woman who had a right go at Liam Byrne, her own Labour colleague, when he invented the term hostile environment for illegal immigrants. Illegal, because it's always been blamed on the Tories.

22:12This was Liam Byrne's invention as immigration minister back in the Blair Brown years. He said we must create a hostile environment for illegal immigrants. And a load of lefties, do you remember this? We forget these things happen. A load of lefties went, this is completely unacceptable. And he was saying, but no, I'm talking about people who are coming in here criminally. Yes. Anyway, I digress. And also Darren Jones, who we were discussing earlier, got in trouble on Question Time for talking about children and women on the boats, when in fact that's a very small number. The vast majority are women and children.

22:43Precisely. But I think Cooper is now going to struggle to recover from this decision in court last week, this admission from the Home Office, that actually we believe that the rights of asylum seekers trump those of the people of Epping. The taxpaying public of Epping are further down the chain. and we've had loads of responses to that, haven't we, on the Telegraph website, to our own writing online and all the rest of it. I almost think that's kind of like quite the kind of moment, the watershed moment for this Labour government because it absolutely plays into Farage and the reform narrative that this Labour government cares more about people coming here illegally than it does people who pay their way.

23:23And it's not even about British Bourne, by the way. I don't think people are saying that either. They're perfectly happy to have people come here from other countries legally, to integrate, to work, to pay tax. They just cannot get their head around this idea that the Home Office is basically saying that it will prioritise people who arrive here by boat over those who have done all the right things throughout their life to try and make a contribution to this country. I think the paradox is that the left would say the government's actually moved really right wing on asylum. I mean, for instance, another part of her package is to tweak the laws so the ECHR cannot be used to prevent deportations.

24:01That's interesting. If that could be done, then do we need to leave the ECHR? That might have consequences for Kemi Badenock and her famous review, which we're all desperately waiting to hear from. But every time the government does something right-wing, in inverted commas, on asylum, it's usually because the public has forced it to. It's usually two or three steps behind where the public are. So, for instance, the government actually plans to end the use of hotels. We should say the government does not want people in hotels. It's planning to get them out by processing them faster and deporting them.

24:34That's probably a good idea. But in the meantime, what's it going to do with them while they're in the hotels? Because if it kicked them out, they were going to private accommodation and then people would be completing with them for homes. So this is the problem the government's in. It's come to the argument late and it probably doesn't believe in it in principle. So it's not convincing people that it's taking the steps that need to be taken. But don't worry, because they now have a minister for delivery. Darren Jones, you can deal with all of this stuff. Now, we mentioned earlier the reform press conference.

25:04It was quite dry. It was quite numerical, Tim. I did at one point feel that I was in that math section of Countdown, scribbling down numbers, but we did get to speak to Zia Yusuf, who was very eloquent on the subject of saving money in local councils, but also he had an opinion on whether there's going to be an early general election and whether Rachel Reeves really can go the distance.

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27:50I was down at the Royal Horse Guards Hotel again, Tim. It's Reform's chosen press conference venue in London, just near Embankment, where they were announcing something which Richard Tice had previously promised me was going to be quite sexy, but turned out to be not very sexy at all. It was a presentation on how they could save money in local government pensions. I couldn't be there. I was listening to it on my iPhone on Oxford Street. But what I picked up was that reform, the 13 reform councils have discovered that there is massive waste in the way that pension funds are invested, that they're overpaying on the fees that they pay to a tune of£265 million.

28:31And also that they're investing in very woke things like renewables. There's quite a funny bit where he went through a list of it was every variation on green investment fund. Yes. The fund for green investment, the investing greenly fund. It's very amusing, that bit. And that these funds are providing very poor returns, having underperformed by an average of£1.24 billion over the last five years. He says that this mismanagement is costing taxpayers£10 billion a year. And he was asked how you then would spend it. And someone pushed him on what would it go back to the taxpayers. And I thought that was very interesting, that rather than an old Thatcherite thing of saying, and this is money, we'll be handing back to people, which he might do.

29:16Instead, he said, well, there are pressures on social care. And this is a consequence of reform actually running something. Indeed so. So that was the question that I initially put to Zia Youssef, who was there supporting Richard Tice. and you're right to say that, I mean, it's not particularly Thatcherite, is it, for reform MPs to stand up and say that pension fund managers are creaming too much off the top and they really must mind their P's and Q's. I mean, it was a bit of a kind of socialist offering in a way. Look at these fat cats in the city making millions from badly managed pension schemes.

29:52On the other hand, of course, we would like pensioners to get as much money as they like. But is the whole reform agenda about bringing down council tax? Zia Youssef joins me now from Reform. You're in charge of the Doge Project. You're obviously looking to find savings in local councils. You've run 10 already. Richard Tice has just identified where you think you've already found£100 million that you could save. What is the end game? Because he's talking about pension savings here, then going into adult social care. Many Telegraph readers will support that and agree with that. But ultimately, isn't the aim to bring council tax bills down for reform constituents?

30:30Well, two things can be true at the same time, Camilla. So you've got to look at the fact that councils have now for a long time had no ability to influence any of the legislation that drives these social care bills up. We talked about the provision of special educational needs, children in each council. Councils have no ability to move any of the parameters. I've sat in these rooms with these disconsulate people, councillors and indeed civil servants, many of whom are just trying to do the best job they can. One of the councillors we're in is seeing the population of SEND diagnosed kids, special educational needs children, growing at 12 to 15 percent per year, compounding at that from a big base.

31:11People watching this who are good at numbers will know that drives catastrophe. and so when I said how is this happening because there's no way that the actual population is growing that quickly so there's clearly an overdiagnosis problem in that particular council the councils can't do anything about it so they just shrug their shoulders and fair play to them so the problem at the moment is you have a huge democratic deficit a disconnect between the people inside the cabinet room and this awful Labour government it was the Tories before that who have made these awful decisions and then the councils and I'll tell you what happens Camilla what they then have to do is they cut funding for parks.

31:46There's no money for potholes. A lot of people watching this will not realise one of the reasons why potholes anger people so much, their sense of the road quality is awful, and yet they keep seeing millions of pounds apparently being spent on potholes. Well, it's not spent on potholes, Camilla. That money's not ring-fenced. It's not ring-fenced. So a huge amount of that money just gets diverted away to pay for these social care things. So we know, look, clearly this country has an issue with rising social care costs. We understand that. But we have to get real, as Richard said. Look, if everybody, if every kid is a special educational needs kid, then no kid will actually get the support that they need.

32:20It's not actually fair on the kids who need it. So that's one point I want to make. The second point, though, is, of course, we have to look at where there is waste. It's just like in your household budget. You know, so if you say, look, I'm going to stop wasting money on buying stuff in the supermarket that the kids don't eat, that we end up chucking away and all of these other savings. Once you've made those savings, you can then decide how you want to reallocate that spending. You know, maybe you have an extra day out, maybe you go on a holiday, maybe you work a bit less. So that's the approach that we have to take to these budgets, Camilla.

32:48And one of the big challenges we have at reforming, our commitment has always been, we will heave on those levers of power as hard as we can. But at council level, they're extremely limited in power. You know what the best evidence of that? The ruling on Epping, which is won by the Court of Appeal. The Home Office, the Home Secretary has an enormous big red button that pretty much trumps everything that a council can do. So it's enormously important work that reform is doing right now inside these councils. When was the last time you heard a presentation like this where a serious, credible person like Richard was laying out how we can save enormous amounts of money?

33:22And I want to stress this while making constituents richer. I mean, the point he's making is that pension money is being allocated into these active funds where a large percentage of it is spent on these ESG green funds. And they are massively outperforming the index funds that charge less. And so normally you would say pay performance, right? So if there's a fund manager making lots of money for pensioners, great. They earn a lot of money. What's happening now is that they're making their performances way below, way below where it should be. and they're making hay, as Richard said. So in summary, yes, we're going to reduce waste.

34:01We've got to attack the waste. But then we also have to have serious conversations about who are the people who really need that assistance and that support from the taxpayer and make sure it is them and only them that get it. But you're still not asking the question about the end game because I know that reform are quite reluctant to ever talk about bringing council tax bills down. And I think there's an acceptance that actually a lot of councils are in very dire financial straits. And this is about a reallocation of funding. This is about not wasting money and then ploughing it into the areas that are needed.

34:32But why are you consciously not saying you're going to bring council tax bills down? Because people will think, if reform are running more efficient councils, then I should be saving. And let's be honest, most people have seen their council tax rise exponentially over the last decade. And actually, they've seen service delivery go down. Yeah, look, I understand that question. But number one, And so here's the point. Firstly, as you said, council tax has been rising. Everyone watching this program knows that council tax, depending on the council, has been growing enormously. In some cases, 15, 20 percent.

35:03Right. Because at council level, you can bankrupt your council and that allows you to increase it by far more than statutory limit. And there's no real consequence of the council. Now, again, what we're saying is it's going to be up to councils to make those calls. I would say this, though. A lot of people watching this at home, their biggest issue is not just where the council taxes are. It's the fact that they see no benefit from it. They see their libraries being closed. They see their parks being closed. Their roads are not being repaired. So we're not going to sit here and tell local residents in Lincolnshire or Leicestershire or any of these places how their local council should spend the savings.

35:36But I will tell you this. If we find the savings, Camilla, then that means the parks can stay open. They'll be nicer. It means that the roads can be repaired so that your kid doesn't fall off his bicycle when he goes outside. So local councils do important stuff for the local community. It's not for us to tell them how to find the savings. It is for us. It is for us to identify, as we have done today, how we can save enormous amounts of money. And I will say this too. One of the issues we have at the moment and why it's difficult to make these commitments is because the most powerful levers on council tax, I want to reiterate this, are not in the hands of councils.

36:08There's a huge democratic deficit. So until Nigel's prime minister, ask us again going into the next general election. We'll have a crystal clear answer for you because our prediction is that Nigel will be the prime minister and if the British people will, we'll have a big majority of reform MPs and then we can make the changes we want to make so we can commit to those things. On that note, are you somebody that believes there may be an early election? I think the chances of an early general election now are no longer negligible and I think they are increasing. I still think it's unlikely because of the nature of our system.

36:38How many prime ministers did the Tories go through without changing? I think Rachel Reeves is probably not going to be a chancellor for much longer. Once she goes, it's going to be very difficult for Starmer to hold on. I tweeted the other day, hold on to your hats, though, if you're hoping for a general election, because what comes next will not be better. It'll be Angela Rayner. You know, we're talking, there's rumours that Ed Miliband is going to be the chancellor. It's going to be horrific. What will be the undoing of this Labour government? You know, we've had talk of IMF bailouts. We've got talk of the markets reacting very badly to the pitch rolling that's being done ahead of the budget.

37:11You know, tax rises left, right and centre. We've got think tanks saying that there's now a£41 billion deficit in the Treasury's forecast. And we've got governance spending up to the highest level since 1993. I mean, are you saying that we're going to have some kind of Liz Trust mini budget reaction from the markets? And that could upend the Chancellor and Prime Minister? I think we are seeing already markets. So if you look at our borrowing costs and gilt yields, they're way above where it was, even at the peak of the trust crisis. And it just keeps inching upwards and inching upwards. We now have higher borrowing costs than America and we have higher borrowing costs than Greece.

37:47The cost of the interest payments alone annually are almost bigger than our defence and our school's budget combined. So I think what's going to happen now is there's a big question whether the IMF could even afford to bail the United Kingdom out. But the people who are now using the words IMF bailout and the UK in the same sentence are not partisan hacks, right? These are well-respected economists. And I think what they're really worried about, what they're really worried about is, number one, a total inability for this prime minister to find any savings in the budget at all. Couldn't even save 1.2 % of the total welfare budget.

38:20Couldn't get that past his walloping majority of MPs. And I'll give you another signal of what's in store and where I think things can get exponential very quickly, which is what happens in markets. It's what brings companies down and it can bring governments down. Do you remember when Rachel Reeves started crying on the front bench? Whatever you think about that, there was a massive gap down in British guilts. And the reason there was a gap down is because they perceived there was now a real risk that Reeves would go. So what that was is a signal, a signal of what markets, how they will react to Rachel Reeves' successor, which sadly will not be, you know, a very smart, practical person who understands markets.

38:57it will be an Ed Miliband or one of the lunatics inside this clown cart of a government. And once that starts to happen and our bond yields start going out to 6%, 7%, 8%, 9%, I think at that point, coupled with the fact that sadly, Camilla, this country feels like a powder keg at the moment. And I say that with no joy whatsoever. I'm extremely concerned, as is everyone at Reform, about the fact that British people are sick and tired of not being listened to. You combine those things, and so I'd say it's still not probable that there will be an early general election, but I think it is much more likely than it was even three or four months ago.

39:31And the first reform chancellor, if Nigel Farage becomes PM, is that you or is it Richard Tice? Look, even if there was an early general election, I still don't think it's happening in a couple of months' time. I will say this, and I had good visibility of this when I was chairman, the calibre of people wanting to come forward and help reform, turn the country around is incredible. So who knows? Who knows who that person is going to be? I'm very confident of this. The calibre of the people that will sit around the Cabinet table with Prime Minister Nigel Farage will be on a totally different level to anything this country's seen in decades.

40:06We look forward to seeing you at the Reform Conference on Friday. Looking forward to it. Thank you. Zia Youssef, thank you very much. The thing about it is the tone of the whole press conference, Tim, was this is reform at work. We are not a protest party because we've been looking at the sums. And by the way, in this brochure, which I thumbed through and then I stopped at page, look at this chart. Look, detailed performance data. This has been put together. It's a spreadsheet on council pension fund accounts and websites. No journalist in their right mind is going to read that. And therefore, it's quite clever positioning because reform is saying, look, nobody's ever looked at this because it's frankly too complicated and boring.

40:47At least we're going into the weeds. OK, it's not sexy, but we're doing some of the hard graft here on a local level. And then we'll apply that to Whitehall when we get into power, because we know that they're squandering even more of our hard earned taxpayers' cash. Yeah. The question is, does it scale up? Do these savings, which reform are finding, translate into enough money saved nationally to match whatever their ambitions will be? And we don't know what they are for the NHS or defence, etc. I mean, even these figures,£10 billion a year, which could be spent on social care, that is a drop in the ocean.

41:24NHS England annual budget is what, over£100 billion? Yeah. I mean, to be fair, they're saying that the savings that could be made across all councils, they've only done their calculations on the ones that reform runs, run to more than£60 billion, which is the whole of the defence budget. Yes. And to be fair, he says that so far, and we spoke to George Finch last week about this in Warwickshire, didn't we? So far, reform councillors have identified 100 million in savings just by having a look at things. And then I spoke to somebody at the end of the presser who was the only reform representative in the London Assembly.

41:57Bless him. And he says, I've lost count of how many meetings I've been in where both the chief executive and other executives and officials and the councillors, the elected members, all agree that what's been negotiated isn't fit for purpose. It's not value for money. But everyone just starts hand-wringing and going, oh, there's not much we can do. I think what reform are trying to do is kind of break this status quo, which is, it's a bit like, you know, continuing with HS2. There are loads of tiny little examples of HS2 across the whole of the country. People paying over the odds for pothole repairs, people signing 30-year contracts for, I don't know, paperclips and light bulbs.

42:34just terrible procurement deals, which they're only just scratching the surface of. And to discover things like overspend on pensions and just a lack of value for money is probably quite a valuable thing. If you're able to, as you say, upscale it, apply it to all councils and say, are we really, what's been going on here? There's been a gravy train in local government. It's the same in national government. Money's just been wasted left, right and centre and enough's enough. Yes. Farage has taken a big gamble here, which I think is worthy of respect, which is that he could have just bagged the win in those 13 reform councils and just gone, there you go, on to the general election now.

43:10Don't look at what they're actually doing. Instead, they said, no, this will be the laboratory for how we would then run the country. Do look at what they're doing, because we want to run them well enough that people in four years' time will say, well, they could run my local council, so perhaps they could actually run the country. And the risk he's running then is, well, what if they don't run it well? We met George Finch last week, 19 years old, running Warwickshire County Council. What did you think of him? I quite liked him. I mean, he was refreshingly straightforward in his answers to our questions.

43:44There's always that element of why as a 19 year old involved in local politics, what's wrong with him? And actually, I kind of concluded that he was a good man from good working stock. I sort of looked at him and thought, well, you would make a very good campaigning constituency MP because he was so passionate about Warwickshire, wasn't he? He was. He was so passionate about his constituents. And that's good. But he runs a council with a budget of over£400 million. He looks after 5 ,000 employees. And as a 19-year-old, he can never have run anything like that before. A number of people said, but William Pitt, the younger, was prime minister.

44:21And he was only, what, about 25 or something? I suspect that running Britain in the 18th century was easier than running Warwickshire County Council in 2025. Although we did leave with the impression that although he is the council leader. I'm not sure he's actually in charge. No. Because as we left, he committed a rookie mistake and said to us, you are my last meeting of the day. And we left at about 2. We left at about 2pm. now you never say that to journalists because we infer that you've got nothing else to do for the rest of the day whether that's true or not he may have had paperwork to do but it came across as this was my big thing of the day and now I'm done and we weren't sure that the computer was plugged in in that office I noticed the office was bare when you've been in somewhere for a few weeks you put a photo of your family and you have a few pens you have a stapler but that office looked unused and look, I may be completely wrong.

45:19Maybe, again, he's working so hard he hasn't had time to put a page three up on the wall or something like that. I don't know. But it... And in fact, maybe he doesn't run things and I think he shouldn't run things because he's 19. I don't think any 19 should run anything. I agree, but I think what's happening here is that a whole team of people are running the council and what he's changed is that he has brought some straight-talking honesty on behalf of constituents to the table. Yes, I do suspect he is the face of Warwickshire County Council, but not actually doing it. Let's see who proves more competent at delivery, 19-year-old George Finch in Warwickshire or Darren Jones, Keir Starmer's new right-hand man.

46:01We'll be back tomorrow, 5pm.

46:15Thank you.

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