Simon Kuper
Appearances
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
It's something I'm getting used to, yes. I just dived into corruption when I began researching this book. I was astounded how much there was that everybody just seems to live with. And now I talk about it.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
Sleaze is a British euphemism because British people don't want to say that there's corruption in Britain because corruption obviously only you have in Brazil or Russia and bad countries. In Britain, we can't have that. So sleaze is a way of making it sound sort of titillating, tabloid headlines. Corruption is, I'm using the World Bank definition, abuse of public office for private gain.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
So if you're an MP or a civil servant or you could be a doctor or a police officer, you'd use that office to make money for yourself. And that can be completely legal. So we have ex-prime ministers who go off and work for Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, try and go into business with China, etc. It's legal, but they're still monetizing their office. So to me, that's corrupt.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
I think it's incredibly stupid. That would be my sense. It is a form of corruption in that, you know, because you have office, you're leader of the opposition, you get some free clothes. But it's not such a big deal. I mean, he could have bought the clothes. He could have paid Arsenal for the box.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
And so instead of drawing a sharp contrast between a conservative government where there were terrible cases of corruption, most of all the COVID VIP lane, then you could come in and say, we don't do that. And somebody wants to give you free clothes. And you say, no, we don't accept free clothes. I'd like them, but can't do it.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
It would just have been so easy and it's incredibly stupid to have lost that moral lead and to have set a tone that people are going to remember for years.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
Pretty much, yeah. That's the British system. You phrase it very well. Anything goes as long as you declare it. That sounds like The Purge. Yeah. You know, this phrase that transparency is the best disinfectant, which is nonsense because you'd be completely transparent. You took a donation from some crook. You put it on the register. You hope that nobody will check it.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
You know, there's fewer and fewer sort of local journalists if you're an MP in the Northeast, say, who will go through that. So mostly anything goes as long as you can declare it is right. And they didn't even declare some of this, which is also odd. Right.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
I think he has a point that when I was researching corruption under the conservatives, there was so much of it that each scandal would displace the next one. So Sunak got helicopter rides from a donor who later got into legal problems. And, you know, this lives and dies a couple of days in the newspaper. And then there's some other terrible scandal.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
Boris Johnson goes and meets the Venezuelan dictator paid by a hedge fund manager. So the main Tory donor, Frank Hester, who I think is the largest donor to any political party in the history of British policies, gave the Conservatives about 15 million, comes out that he said the terribly racist and misogynistic things about Diane Abbott, Labour MP.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
And, you know, it's a story for a few days and then it's completely faded. So it's true. I mean, I think Steve Bannon coined the phrase, you flood the zone with shit. I don't think the Tories were deliberately doing that. but it works very well as a distraction tactic. You say they had a sort of conveniently timed bout of diarrhoea?
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
I think by the end of the Conservative government, they didn't have a shared project anymore. They didn't believe in the same thing. They didn't really try to pass any laws and they knew they were going to lose. So it was each person for themselves. Just grab all you can.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
Yeah, that's Bannon's. Yeah, it applies to media strategy. So if there's a bad scandal about you, you just create another scandal or five others, five other stories. And the problem with Labour is that this story has stuck for a week, 10 days, and people dig further and then there's a new item of clothing
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
It's impossible to measure corruption exactly because by definition, most of it is hidden.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
You don't go out and declare, well, I, you know, I stole various things from government this week. So the best approach is a transparency international corruption perceptions index where they ask people who are exposed in particular countries, you know, how much corruption do you think there is in that country? You also get surveys of people, have you paid bribes?
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
To which in Britain the answer is almost invariably no. I mean, there's almost nobody in Britain who's ever paid a bribe. You don't have to bribe a nurse or a police officer in Britain. And so Britain was with a cohort of Northern European countries.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
I think about a decade ago it would have been considered one of the better ones in this Northern European cohort, now considered one of the worst in that particular cohort. So it's not going to be Nigeria, it's not going to be Russia, but it doesn't really compare with, say, Denmark anymore, which is a very clean country.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
It's fallen quite sharply in just a few years down the Transparency International Rankings.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
Yeah, bad governance. And if you feel... well, I don't want to buy the bonds of a country where the government is giving contracts to people who are donors to the ruling party. I mean, it's very much, you know, the COVID VIP line scandal is very much like how Sierra Leone handed Ebola where all the Ebola contracts went to friends of the president.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
So, yeah, I mean, when you're thinking of lending to Britain, and Liz Truss tested the proposition that people were still willing to lend to Britain, which they said, maybe not so much. Yeah. this does become a factor. But generally, I mean, more directly, government money goes missing to the tune of billions in some cases through corruption.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
I would say it starts... With Margaret Thatcher, who herself was not corrupt, she was sort of restrained from stealing from government by a very strong Christian ethic. She thought it was wrong. And so even when her ministers would meet to discuss Tory party business, they had to pay for their own sandwiches because you're not discussing government work. It's party business.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
So everyone pays for their own food. And however, she kind of didn't really believe in public service. It was weird because she was a public servant, but she was always dissing it. People who worked in the public sector were sort of losers and leeches on the state and the real heroes of Britain were business people.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
She had this idea that to get rich is glorious and she'd bring in business people to advise government because business is obviously better than government. And I think that's when you start on the right to get this waning of the public service ethos.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
Because if you think of conservative politicians of previous generation like Harold Macmillan or Anthony Eden, Churchill, I mean, they spent their whole lives in public service starting with World War I because they had gone out to fight and if necessary, die for Britain in World War I. They believed that the highest thing you could do with your life was to serve the state.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
And, you know, business was a bit vulgar and grubby and it was very much not where it was happening. And so this public service ethos starts to disintegrate with Thatcher. And then what you get from the 80s and 90s is you get a lot of money coming into London. For a start, the city grows enormously after Thatcher's big bang of 1986.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
So suddenly you have people in banks and hedge funds who are earning millions. And the other thing is you get a lot of people from the former communist countries, especially the former USSR, coming to park their ill-gotten money here. So Roman Abramovich is a very spectacular example. But there's lots and lots of them. I think Moscow, you know, you could be...
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
hurting a drive-by shooting in your favorite restaurant.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
In Kensington, not so much. So you moved to Kensington.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
Yeah, later Putin came to get them. But for a while, London seemed a very safe haven, expensive schools, good tailors. And so a lot of money came here. And those people had learned from their home countries, not just the former Soviet Union, but also, say... Egypt, they'd learn in their home countries that you protect your money by being friendly with people in government.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
And the people in government, they also want a bit of money. And let's see if that proposition works in the UK. I'll donate to the ruling party. So you get a surge of money. These people very quickly get UK passports because there's a fast track of golden visas for rich people. So suddenly you're a UK citizen.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
You have all this money that you've taken out of Russia and you start giving it to a political party. So the ruling party, because you'd be an idiot to give to the opposition. And so a lot of conservative donations in the years between about 2010 and 2022 come from Russians, former Russians.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
There are some people who just genuinely believe in the party. And sometimes they want something, but mostly they just want that party to do well. And the key examples I cite from the past are the Sainsbury cousins. So you have David Sainsbury who gives Labour, I mean, probably the biggest Labour donor over time. in the several millions, and his cousin John Sainsbury gives to the Tories.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
And I don't think either, none of them were involved in the business anymore. They kind of left the family business, the supermarket, decades earlier. Both David and John just wanted their party to win. They're not asking for anything back. So you get that kind of donor.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
And I think Lord Ali, who is the figure who was involved in the current Labour scandal, he's actually a mini Sainsbury in that way. He gives much smaller amounts to Labour, But he's been a Labour peer. He's been inside for 30 years. I think he just wants Labour to win and he feels, well, if they have nice clothes on TV, they're more likely to win.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
I think what I would look at if I were doing investigative journalism is he is the chief fundraiser for the party. So I'm not so much worried about the money that Lord Ali gives because I think he gives because he's a supporter. I'm worried about the people who come to Lord Ali and say, you know, I'd like to give some money to Labour.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
No, I don't think he's particularly looking for a quid pro quo. And also, you know, if you're a rich person and you like politics and you're kind of a lord, you like hanging around the political scene, you have a pastor down in the street, often you just want to be involved. Yeah. And the people who run the show think, well, Why are we going to bring you in?
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
You're not a major figure in the Labour Party. And then you say, oh, well, I can give you some money. So a lot of the donations are a little bit idiosyncratic. I'm not saying that what has happened with Labour now is okay at all. I think it's a disgrace. But I don't think it's, as you say, it's not big money. And I don't think the Lord Ali donations themselves are dangerous.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
I think his position as gatekeeper is dangerous.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
You don't. So a lot of what political parties do is try to screw the donors. So often with the Conservative Party, you have this cohort of libertarian blokes in the city. Think of Crispin Odie or Paul Marshall. And these people, they genuinely want low tax, they hate the EU, they want no regulations, and they don't like any rules because they think rules don't apply to people like me.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
So when COVID happens... The Tory donors are saying, just, you know, open it all up. Don't lock us down. Just let it all hang out. And they're very anti-lockdown. And the Tories have to be nice to these people and listen to them because they give you money. But the Tories are thinking, yeah, but our voters are pensioners. They like having an NHS. They often rely on pensions, other state benefits.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
They're a vulnerable group.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
Yeah, they want lockdowns. So the Tories have to say to the donors, yeah, yeah, you know, man, I hear you on these lockdowns, but they also have to keep the lockdowns. So it's a lot of the job of the party is disappointing donors, letting down donors.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
I think it's now £15 million.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
You can't. I mean, if it's so much, you can't return it. Like if somebody gives you 10 grand and then they turn out to have done something bad, you say, oh, I'm going to be very moral, give the 10 grand back. If somebody gives you 15 million pounds, that's your whole party organisation. I don't think anyone in the history of British politics had ever donated 15 million pounds in a single year.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
What's someone like Frank Hester hoping to get out of that relationship? I mean, he says he talked a lot to Sunak about AI and how that would revolutionize healthcare. And I think that he feels, you know, I'm at the cutting edge of healthcare. That's the main field he's an entrepreneur in. Obviously, there's going to be, the government's going to want to regulate stuff.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
I need a hotline to government. And I think he also thinks, you know, the Tories are much better than Labour. The Tories are a good party for the country. Labour are a bad party for the country. So to some degree, it's genuine belief. But also, I mean, the man is running a serious business that can be regulated by government.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
So he has an interest in getting in the way or influencing what that regulation could be.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
Well, it's getting close to that. But the Labour donors, the three main ones, so David Sainsbury doesn't really have a business. Gary Lubner was Autoglass and he's kind of, he's stepped out of that. And then there's Dale Vince, who's a green entrepreneur. Those are the three big ones.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
It's deliberate. So there's, I think, a three-month window in which you have to declare donations. So you discuss with the donor. you know, donate before the election so we can spend the money, but donate at a time where three months later it's going to be August or something, nobody's going to care, everyone will have won the election anyway.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
So you time the donations for the best possible moment. And, you know, you declare it at 7pm on a Friday when the news desks are empty. So, yeah, all this is thought through beforehand.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
It is now true. So these parties, Labour and the Tories, used to be mass member organisations. Paul McCartney's first gig when he was about 15 is at, he says, a place called the Conservative Club in some suburb of Liverpool, because there were millions and millions of members of Conservative clubs all over the UK.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
And they'd go there on a Saturday night to listen to music, to play billiards, to have cheese parties. And They, you know, they paid membership fees and that funded the party. And Labour had a version of that, which was more through trade union members giving money to Labour. And as that wanes, you know, obviously all those conservative clubs are now shuttered. They don't exist anymore.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
You then start to need donations. And so that from the 80s, 90s becomes the big story. Now you could do it differently. So in other countries, like in France, where I live, there are significant government money going to fund parties. And in the UK, there's virtually none. The opposition gets a bit of short money, it's called.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
I think other parties also get it, but mostly it's what keeps the opposition alive. But it's very small. And obviously, if you said to British people, look, I reckon if we had 130 million quid, a year, so that's £2 per brick more or less, we could get rid of political donations. Then the parties could have organisations, they could have think tanks like German parties do.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
But if you were to try and pass a law saying... The taxpayer is going to give 130 million quid to political parties. I think it would not be very popular right now.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
Dogs are a problem. I'm not sure I would allow them anyway. That might be the most unpopular policy in British history.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
I don't think I would dare go there.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
It would save an enormous amount of money. So with the COVID inquiry, they're going to come to the COVID VIP lane scandal, which is March 2020. COVID's reached the UK. We need loads of protective kit, masks, gowns in a hurry, just millions and millions of masks. And where are you going to get them? It's just a crisis. It's a nightmare.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
And what happens is a lot of conservative donors, like Michelle Moan, kind of WhatsApp ministers who they're mating with. Because if you're a donor, you meet politicians a lot at dinners because you get to be at the dinner. And they say, oh, well, I have a PPE company. I can supply you with kit. And the minister WhatsApps back saying, yeah, brilliant. I'll tell the civil servants too.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
I'll tell the civil servants to wave you through. And so they have this, what the civil servants start to call the VIP lane, where if you've been referred by a minister, then the civil servants are terrified of saying no. And the civil servants internally have this conversation, yeah, but this person, minister's mate, has never made or acquired masks. Why are we... Forget about it.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
Don't worry about it. Push it through. And then you have people whose job it is to make and supply medical masks. They can't get through on the line. They don't know who to call because they're not conservative donors. They don't have the WhatsApp numbers. And so what happens in these weeks is that billions of pounds are wasted. And we end up with PPE mountain.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
I think part of the new forest, there's this thing. Literally, there's this landfill where we have all these unused and often unusable because bad, crappy masks and gowns supplied by donors. And just storing them costs billions. So you have a bad mask. You can't do anything with it. You have to store it. And so by some estimates, we spent more on the masks than... than we paid in the first place.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
So it's just a nightmare running into the billions. And if you didn't have political party donors, I think this would never have happened because ministers are afraid to say no to donors. And, you know, one corruption expert I spoke to said this is the biggest case of state capture in British history. Now, versions of this happen all the time in smaller ways.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
You know, if you're a company selling to government, you want to find a way to funnel money to the ruling party so they'll pick up the phone to you. You say, you know what, we're making a new helicopter. I think it would be great for the UK Armed Forces. Can I come in and have a chat? And your call is taken because you're a donor. I have developed a new piece of healthcare technology.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
I think it would be great for the NHS. I could see every hospital working with it, improve outcomes. Oh, and I gave you guys a million pounds last year. Oh, sure, come on in.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
I mean, sadly, our community organizations have all kind of collapsed in recent decades. So few people go to church or other religious services anymore. They don't belong to trade unions and pubs, which were a form of British community, has also shrunk massively. So we used to have churches turning into pubs, and now the pub is turning into something else.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
So I just don't see that you could get millions of people. I mean, it happened briefly under Labour with Corbyn, the kind of three-pound members who brought Corbyn to power. I don't see it as a durable thing. So I think that we just need to go to a system of massive rules... which we have never had in British politics, limiting what you as a politician or civil servant can do.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
So, for example, if you work for the Ministry of Defence, you can't three months later be working for an arms company that sells to the Ministry of Defence.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
Well, I mean, I live in Paris. I've been there 20 years. A decade ago, I'd have said France is a significantly more politically corrupt country than the UK. And that, you know, French people get very angry about political corruption. And so then in 2017, when Macron is elected, he sees this and does what Starmer hasn't yet done.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
And he says, we're going to have massive rules on what he calls the moralization of politics. And so, for example, you never used to have to have receipts. You say, oh, I spent 100 euros on this, and they would refund it to you. There was no limit for what you could spend for lunch. So you'd go for massive, you know, five-course lunches.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
And then you'd have elderly male politician bringing along 22-year-old female intern for five-course lunch. And it was all the way it worked. It was done with impunity. And you, I mean, the famous case is François Fillon, who was prime minister in France for several years. He supposedly employed his wife, a Welsh woman actually, Penelope, as an employee. And all the MPs in France were doing this.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
You employ a spouse, the spouse doesn't really have to turn up to work, but you ascribe some massive salary to her. So Penelope Fillon got, I think, into the millions of euros over many, many years for work she never did. Wow. And so all this is reformed. There's stricter rules. The politicians whine about it. I spoke to a restaurateur who works near the Assemblée Nationale.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
And he says, yeah, politicians don't have any money anymore. So I now have this set price lunch for 49 euros because he said they could only charge 50 euros on expenses. So it kind of wiped out a lot of the luxury industry that had accrued around it. And I mean, French people still whine and complain about their politicians all the time, but it has actually cleaned things up a bit.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
Nobody's willing to admit it, but French politics is a bit cleaner.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
It's true that in the last couple of years, I mean, of course, ahead of an election, amounts have spiralled to levels that we've never seen before. But if you say £130 million a year, that is similar to what the parties combined probably bring in in a good year when there's not an election. So I don't think they would have much cause to whine too much about that.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
Well, I think the MP salary is now £91,000. Yeah. So that's about two and a half times the average wage. So if you say that to the average Briton and someone like Walsall or Nunez and where I was before the election covering what was supposed to be the election campaign, they'll say 91 grand. You're kidding me. Most people in Britain think MPs are just minting it. It's incredible amounts of money.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
The problem is we have two economies. We have the London economy, especially the high-end London economy for educated people, where 91 grand isn't that much money. And especially if you're a conservative, they tend to have richer friends, private school friends who are making millions as lawyers or hedge funders. They think, 91 grand, I can't possibly live on that.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
Sir Johnson, in Downing Street, is complaining without irony that on the Prime Minister's salary of about 150 grand, he can't afford to live.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
And he doesn't seem to understand, although, of course, he's a very good communicator, he doesn't seem to understand that to average British people, this is an unfathomable amount. And the thing is, he's comparing himself not to average British people. You compare yourself to Notting Hill. So... The 91 grand means completely different things inside the Beltway, as it were, and outside.
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Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
That's what happened to London. London became the city in Europe with the most rich people, while our political and public realm decayed and became poorer.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
It's now relatively low compared to MPs in rich countries. We have a lot of MPs, but I do think it's relatively low. I think the worst thing for the MPs is the public abuse. So it's become a very low-status job. And, of course, now they can easily be reached and they're also afraid of being attacked. And so a lot of it is just misery. And we still have lots of people who want to be MPs.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
It's still somehow a sexy job, but the reality of it is brutal and miserable. I mean, I would like to create a climate where people are quite positive about politicians. And unfortunately, with these labor donations, that immediately wipes out the idea that, you know, they might be good people who want the best for the country.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
I think on both sides, most people go into politics thinking that they're good people who want the best for the country.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
So I was offered Taylor Swift tickets by a public relations firm in Paris.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
And the Financial Times rules on taking, I write for the FT, on taking gifts have become very strict.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
And I thought, I can't even really be bothered. I have to go all the way across Paris, see this concert. And I asked my daughter, who's something of an expert, and she said, you would not enjoy it. As for football, I've, as a journalist, covered hundreds and hundreds of football matches, so it would be a bit of a busman's holiday. So, you know, I'd say no thank you to both.
Pod Save the UK
Can Starmer’s upbeat note drown out the donation scandal? w/ Zoë Grünewald and Simon Kuper
Thanks, both of you. Thank you.