Andy Burnham takes charge in the UK – but does changing leaders midterm ever work?

Alex von Tunzelman

You're listening to the Monocle Daily, first

Andrew Muller

broadcast on 20 July 2026 on Monocle Radio. The UK gets its seventh Prime Minister in just over 10 years. Will this one have time to redecorate the Farnborough Air show and what it tells us about the future of aviation? And why shouldn't elected officials take parental leave if everyone else can? I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily starts. Hello, and welcome to the Monocle Daily. Coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London. I'm Andrew Muller. My guests Alex von Tunzelman and Justin Quirk will discuss the day's big stories. And we'll hear from the author Jack Watling, about his new book, Statecraft, on how to exercise power in an increasingly unruly world. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle Daily. This is the Monocle Daily. I'm Andrew Muller and I'm joined today by Alex Von Tunzelman, historian, author and screenwriter, and by Justin Quirk, journalist, author and creative director. Hello to you both.

Alex von Tunzelman

Hello.

Justin Quirk

Good evening.

Andrew Muller

We will talk first about the World cup final, which I assume you both watched like everybody else was. Alex, first of all, were you wearing your blue and white stripes and shouting viva Argentina at the screen or not?

Alex von Tunzelman

No, I was not. I had actually been supporting France because I'd been in France for the last couple of weeks and it was fun to support France because, of course, they seem to be doing very well and seemed to be possibly winning. That did not go well.

Andrew Muller

So because of that until Right up to a point.

Jack Watling

Yeah.

Alex von Tunzelman

Until it didn't. Yeah. But then I thought, well, you know, what the heck, Spain, we'll do that. And I mean, I'm not really a big football fan. I'm a very fair weather, you know, is it the World Cup? That's quite fun. Let's have a little enjoyment of it. But during the game, I became so furious with Argentina that it turns out I'm a massive Spain fan now, so. So that's how that's gone.

Andrew Muller

I don't think Argentina's antics last night, Justin, will necessarily have done their country a huge amount of favor. Looking ahead to Monacle's next soft power

Justin Quirk

rankings, one would imagine not. And it was a sort of a difficult performance because by any measure, they are a fantastic team. They have probably the, I'd say, greatest player of his generation leading them. As Maradona showed in 86, one brilliant player can drag a fairly mediocre team over the finish line. It all Seemed a bit unnecessary.

Andrew Muller

And just at the end, Justin, I will put to you how much the most predictable aspect, I think of the final spectacle. President Trump refusing to get off the stage while the Spanish team celebrated.

Justin Quirk

Well, not only that, but those. I would like his pockets checking for one of those winners golden rings that they were doling out. The refusal to leave the pocketing of the ring. I'm honestly just grateful that he didn't drive a golf buggy across the penalty area before bringing one of his giant sons on to score the winning goal.

Andrew Muller

Well, we will start here in the United Kingdom, of which Andy Burnham has now been Prime Minister for several hours with no obvious mishap so far. Let's hope he keeps that up, et cetera. Burnham has been engineered into the job by the governing Labour Party, apparently afeared the gargantuan parliamentary majority they won two years ago might survive another three years of Burnham's predecessor, Sir Keir Starmer, who turned out to be of that unfortunate class of politician who many disliked, even if few could say exactly why. Here is some of what Andy Burnham had to say outside 10 Downing street earlier. I know people at home are fed up with politics. I hear you and I want to be honest with you, we have not been good enough and we need to be better. We will be. We will make this moment a circuit breaker for Britain, bringing forward the biggest changes in the last 40 years. The Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, making himself heard over some attention seeking idiot generating a racket in the background.

Alex von Tunzelman

Sorry about that.

Andrew Muller

Yeah. Alex, exciting times again for his historians, what with all these people coming and going. Are you excited for the Andy Burnham era? Even if era may be an optimistic word to apply to this.

Alex von Tunzelman

Yes, that's a slightly sort of Taylor Swift slant on perhaps what is happening, which might be a little less glamorous, I'm afraid, than that. I think Keir Sama had unfortunately really run aground and run out of road at this point and they probably did need to do something. Whether you think Andy Burnham is the most inspirational possible replacement. I mean, this was pretty much a sort of coronation, although of course that does happen midterm with political parties. I mean, otherwise you have to go to some awful membership vote which usually produces a sort of Liz Truss style option. So obviously everybody wanted to avoid that. I think the question is whether you think Burnham has enough of a different image. He is a better communicator and he was very popular as mayor of Manchester. I think those things are true to say I think there's a worry that he has some of the same flaws as Starmer, for instance, being quite reactive rather than proactive to policy. And also possibly being, you know, not particularly having a hugely strong ideology himself. I mean, there's Manchesterism they talk about, which, of course is what he's tried to put forward as mayor of Manchester. I think a lot of people are very unclear on what that is and exactly what he's standing for. So at the moment, I'd say the field's pretty wide open. We're still waiting for all the Cabinet announcements, so we'll see.

Andrew Muller

I mean, it probably does strike, Justin, many of our listeners outside the United Kingdom, and doubtless many within it, as still a pretty strange situation in that you have a Prime Minister who was elected just two years ago with an absolutely thumping majority. It does just appear to be vibes that have brought this situation about. And also the Labour Party somehow collectively deciding that of its 402 other members of Parliament that they had before parachuting Burnham in, not one of them was up to it.

Justin Quirk

Yeah, it's a deeply unserious party in many ways. I mean, there is a habitual problem, I think often on the left, and this has been the case for as long as I have been alive, that with a few brief, exceptional periods, they are often not comfortable being in power. You know, they are better at the. The run up to it and the sort of fighting on themselves. I think there is also the great elephant in the room here, which I don't think any politician is capable of addressing at the moment, is the electorate who have. I'm going to choose my words carefully because obviously I can say this, a politician can't. We now have. When we talk about a country becoming ungovernable, I don't mean in the sense of, you know, riots in the streets and, you know, falling down towers, but the. The way in which the electorate now are voting very clearly for policies which have very predictable cause and effects. So in the case of 14 years of voting for a government whose two key platform policies were slashing spending on all levels of society and a Brexit that was going to make everyone poorer, and then complaining bitterly about the end result of that. And so everything we see that has sort of dogged public life at the moment, it's like, why are there not enough police around? Why is social care still a problem? Why do shoplifters appear to be able to wander around? It's like, well, you did vote for all this stuff repeatedly by landslide numbers for 14 years, and I don't know how you get around that, because it feels, you know, it's. The public is repeatedly asking for things that they then do not like. And as much as you know, I expect Burnham will give Labour something of a bump. I would imagine that will survive contact with the reality of having to tell the electorate anything they don't want to hear. At which point he will go to -90.

Andrew Muller

We return, Alex, to the immortal wisdom of H.L. mencken, who once said that democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. But is it possible, if we're trying to be optimistic here, that Andy Burnham could be one of those lucky Prime Ministers, as in, he becomes Prime Minister at a good time? I mean, this time last week he was doubtless tantalising himself with the thought of becoming Prime Minister the day after England won the World cup, which would have been something he doesn't have, that he does have an improving economy, which always helps. He does also have what would appear to be the beginnings perhaps of reform UK unraveling.

Alex von Tunzelman

Yes, I mean, not everything is as bad as it could be, but that doesn't mean it won't go that way. Of course, we know these things can reverse quite fast. I think there are still some really fundamental issues, such as how on earth you increase the tax base and the kind of, you know, potential for public spending, how you therefore are able to do any of the things that people say they would like, that Labour would like to do. I think Justin's absolutely right that unfortunately what we've had for many, many, and Britain is really hardly the only country in this position, is a situation where politicians have been very either unwilling or unable to explain the trade offs that are actually there, that if you want this thing, this is going to be harder. And it's very obvious on something like immigration, for instance, where a lot of people say how much they'd like to cut immigration, and rather than saying, you do realize that means we're going to have no nurses and be much poorer, people say, well, we have to take them seriously because of their legitimate concerns. And there's sort of no actual pushback coming from politicians because it seems to be a sort of vote for the popularity contest situation. Well, I'm afraid that is going to lead to exactly what Justin said repeatedly. And I think the problem for Burnham is that if none of these sort of underneath calculations change, which many of which, such as the tax base, may be quite seriously beyond his control, because I think to make any changes on that would take A very long time. His hands are tied by the same things that have tied everyone else's.

Justin Quirk

Justin, one huge, to look on the positive, one huge advantage I think Burnham does have. People have made a big thing of, you know, he's a better orator than Starmer, which he is. But more precisely, although he is resoundingly middle class, he codes as working class because we have a weird class fixation in this country. Starmer was genuinely working class and coded as middle class, which left him wide open to the common attack line from the right, which was attacking the bourgeoisie. You know, this is like old Marx's theory of proletariat and the, you know, the capital class attacking, attacking the people in the middle. One thing you notice with politics over the sort of previous period, politicians who code as working class are much harder for them to attack. I think it's one of the reasons they work so hard to get rid of Angela Rayner, because they were clearly. You saw it with Johnson, you saw it with Farage people. It looks like they're punching down when they attack them. It looks like a bloke in a golf club sneering at the barman. And I think for Burnham, this may actually buy him quite a lot. I think it's going to. They're going to have to work harder to work out what the attack line is that sticks on him and it may buy him some much needed breathing space and cover.

Andrew Muller

Well, let's move along somewhat. Among Sir Keir Starmer's first public duties as Prime Minister almost exactly two years ago, was attending the Farnborough Airshow. I saw him there myself. Ask me anything and it would be unsurprising if Andy Burnham drops in on this year's event which opened today. The Farnborough Air show is a biennial aviation, aerospace and defence beano which takes place at and AB Farnborough Airport in Hampshire and is a big whoop for the military and civilian aviation sectors, probably second only to the Paris equivalent. Among the star airborne attractions this year are the F35, the JAS39 Gripen, the Eurofighter Typhoon, a bunch of Airbuses and Embraers, an unsurprising proliferation of drones, and for old times sake, a Spitfire. Well, I'm joined first of all by Richard Sherman, aviation journalist and contributor to Air Insight, who has been at the Farnborough Air show today. Richard, first of all, for listeners who have not experienced Farnborough, what's the first day like? What deals are people doing? What things are people trying to sell?

Richard Sherman

Well, hello, good evening One of the industry analysts, which is Richard Aboulafia from the United States, he used to say air shows are for tourists and the big deals are done inside the holes and inside five or six holes you find all kinds of booths where companies big and small showing their latest on technology AI, but also the nuts and bolts literary. And that's where the deals are done. But you also have many rows of VIP chalets. And that's where the big companies like Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, mitSubishi Heavy Industries, RTX, General Electric, GE, Aerospace, I must say they are presenting and doing their deals. And today was, well, a quiet day, one would say, but nonetheless we have orders for and options for 248 commercial aircraft from Boeing and Airbus. And if you Compare that to two years ago, the entire four day show, 2024 produced 356 commercial aircraft orders and options. So we are on day one and have almost cleared 80% of what we had two years ago, which indicates that the industry is still requiring a lot of new aircraft going into the 2000 and 30s.

Andrew Muller

Are you noticing any trends? Again, it is only day one in terms of. Because that is a lot of orders. But are there any trends in terms of what people are buying?

Richard Sherman

Well, the biggest customer, the biggest buyer today was a Japanese leasing company called SMBC. They placed an order for 100 Boeing Max aircraft, including the Max 8 and for the first time the Max 10, which is the largest version, which still has to be certified in the coming months. And I went to Airbus and announced a similar order for 100 A320neo family aircraft. And as CEO Peter Barrett said, we want these aircraft for the 2000-30s deliveries until 2035, probably because there is huge demand for these popular narrow body aircraft that fly with British Airways, EasyJet Jet2, Lufthansa, many, many airlines, airlines. The US one has one on display here in Farnborough. And it's simply, it's because the market and demand for air travel is still growing. The airframe is Boeing and Embraer and Airbus presented their latest outlooks for the coming 20 years and there is a huge demand that the fleet will more than double to probably around 50,000 commercial airliners and that the world's population, who is in the position to buy a ticket, will increase by over 500 million in countries in especially Asia. So there's a huge demand for aircraft and travel to be expected in the coming decade.

Andrew Muller

Does it strike you that at this year's show, just finally, Richard, that the defence sector is taking something of a backseat to the commercial sector is commercial aviation where all the excitement is this year?

Richard Sherman

Well, I follow commercial more than defense, or actually I only follow commercial. But defense is probably more present, present here in Farnbro, not just the F35 and all the stuff, but there is a war going on. There are wars going on in the world. And you see the defense industry is showcasing and dealing with all kinds of countries and governments. And you see that reflected in this air show. It's probably 50, 50 commercial defense, where it used to be, 60 commercial defence. So that's the difference. So, yeah, my colleagues on the defence side will probably announce more orders and announcements later this week, but expect some big, big deals with many governments.

Andrew Muller

Richard Sherman at Air Insight, thank you both for joining us. Thank you singly for joining us. I was going to say still with me here in the studio are both, because they are Alex von Tzeman and Justin Quirk. Alex, I did ask about the, the military aspect of it because very, very recently the Royal Air Force's chief of air Marshal Sir Harvey Smyth was talking about Europe's sixth generation air force, which is what he wants the RAF to become with new uncrewed systems flying in tandem with established fighter jets. But he also said, and I quote him, a storm is brewing and it is very much heading our way. Is that hyperbole, do you think, or is that a reasonable thing for someone in his position to be saying at the moment?

Alex von Tunzelman

You know, this is the sort of thing that you absolutely always hear from military procurement people, obviously, but also it might be true. I mean, I think anyone who's paying any attention knows that there are, you know, increased threats, particularly from Russia in Europe, and that actually Europe is less able to rely on stable support from the US than it was in the past. And both of those things I think are just inherently widely recognised to be the case. That does mean that Europe needs to think about its own defences. And I think, you know, we've had a lot of talk about that recently about spending. Now the difficult thing is what you spend it on. Of course, now it's all one thing to say, okay, we're going to increase defense spending to this percentage of GDP or whatever. But it's very warfare is changing so incredibly fast, as we've seen with very relevant Farnborough, with all the drone warfare in Ukraine and by Ukraine in Moscow and so on, that actually the question is when you have these quite long timelines on a lot of military tech is sort of how you apportion and spend that money to be still ahead of whatever is going to happen in, you know, five years, seven years, 10 years, it's a very difficult job. I'm quite glad it's not mine.

Andrew Muller

Quick thought from you on this, Justin, because all of this will, well, indeed has already landed in the lap of the new Prime Minister who possibly significantly just flashing now, has appointed as his Chancellor of the Exchequer the very recently resigned Defence Secretary John Healy, who quit over his frustration with Starmer's refusal to fund defence. Does that instant thought from you suggest that maybe Burnham has apprised himself of the need to be serious about this?

Justin Quirk

That would suggest so. I mean, it was interesting, I mean, to Alex's point there, reading the reporting around Farnborough, particularly with things like the Global Combat Air Program, which I was saying is this sort of trilateral defense program, but it's essentially investing in a new breed of fighter jet, which is the jet itself, but also sort of swarms of attendant drones that come around it and really sort of thinking the degree. I know you've reported on this a lot here, but the degree to which we are now almost in sort of the post Ukraine world while the war in Ukraine is still going on and that struggle of the imagination sort of thing, well, this could be as big a leap as we had, going from sort of cavalry to mechanized warfare and trying to think, well, what is the next major conflict going to look like? And it's not going to look like what we've probably envisaged for my entire adult life.

Andrew Muller

Well, to the United States now and the ongoing winching upwards of its drawbridge. The latest cohorts to be made less welcome than previously are students and journalists. Student visas will henceforth be capped at four years and foreign journalists to 240 days, though with the opportunity to apply for an extension. The move comes at the same time as the EU's free trade agreement with India kicks properly into gear, a deal which included enlarged opportunities for Indian students both during and after their studies. Given that CHU tuition fees in Europe tend to be dramatically lower than in the us, to say nothing of what we shall refer to as other contemporary factors. An uptick in interest, rather, is expected. Alex, is this any more or less than the own goal by the United States? It would appear to be.

Alex von Tunzelman

I think it's exactly that. It's just what it looks like. I mean, obviously you can cut yourself off from international students, but it's a crazy thing to do because they tend to be very, you know, high value people with a lot of ambition who come and put a lot of money into the country. I mean American university tuition is famously not cheap. No, and, but you know, particularly coming from outside are bringing in a lot of money. They're also then of course renting somewhere to live, buying food, all sorts of things contributing massively to the economy. Some of them go home, some of them don't. But the ones that stay, as I say, do tend to be ambitious, go getting and you know, contributors to a tax base overall. Unfortunately we've had the same attitude in Britain for many years, which means we're not well positioned to make the best of this. In fact, one thing that Andy Burnham could immediately do without spending any money to improve the economy is stop putting student numbers in the immigration numbers and just allow many more student visas which would bring in huge amounts of money for UK universities and the economy without him spending anything at all.

Andrew Muller

Well, indeed. So Justin, does the UK arguably not have an even bigger advantage than most of Europe here when it comes to attracting Indian students in particular there being obviously over overlapping histories, shared interest, sensibilities, etc. There are 95,000 or so Indian students in the UK now, which is the biggest foreign contingent. But that has declined in the last couple of years due to those visa rules that Alex was mentioning.

Justin Quirk

Yeah, to Alex's point, I mean that would be, you know, a shuffling of the paperwork which would open up that entire market. And particularly given if you've spent any time around people who are in further education, the repeat rumblings that people are seriously concerned a major university is going to fall over at some point in, in the next 12 months. They need all the help they can get to generalize as well with Indian postgrad students in particular. I've worked for, you know, some of the world's biggest tech companies and multinational companies. Possibly the smartest people you will encounter within those companies who are driving the innovation through them are Indians who have been through the American post grad system. They are working on a phenomenal level and the idea that you would cut off that talent pool in your country strikes me as an epic act of self harm is insane.

Andrew Muller

But does this go to what we were talking about earlier, Alex? The unwillingness, for perhaps understandable reasons of politicians to explain the trade offs that sure we can stop immigrants from coming to the country, that is possibly doable, but here are the consequences of that. Or have politicians internalised that the voters simply don't care? I mean it is a syndrome I think we've seen quite commonly from electorates all over the world in the last 10 years. In particular that, you know, okay, so I've sawn off my own foot, but I'm bleeding on your carpet.

Alex von Tunzelman

There's certainly an element of that. I think what frustrates me about this in particular is that actually there was no public call to put student numbers in the immigration numbers. They could simply have defined it as a different thing and said, look, these people all go home afterwards anyway, so it doesn't matter unless they immigrate at that point. You do put them in the numbers, but they don't, you know, you don't have to do it from the start. And actually I think in many ways they're quite uncontroversial. It actually drives me crazy because I've had this conversation with a few politicians, particularly a neighbour, some of whom are very intelligent and respond sensibly, but some of whom sort of say, oh, but universities are also for middle class kids. And it's so frustrating because not only has that really not been the case until they've changed the policies of admission anyway, but also they're actually a really major vector to improvement. But also that universities don't just employ some academics wafting around in ivory towers, not that that's really what they do anyway these days, in fact, they're all massively overwork. They also employ janitors, they employ builders, they employ people at every possible level of society. And for a lot of towns around Britain that are very low on industry anyway, they're massive local employers. So in fact, I just think politicians are just so fixed cold about this. It is deeply frustrating and I really wish some of them would just wake up to go, actually, you know what? We have a massive advantage here that we're basically destroying.

Andrew Muller

Just a quick one. Justin, on the change to journalist visas. This is the I visa, which is is not a fun, easy or quick process to go through in terms of acquiring one. The form you have to fill in is about 3 million pages long and basically demands your entire life history from your first memory to the present day. But does this make it any more or less annoying and sinister than it already was? Because it has struck me more than once in the many years that I've been going back and forth to the United States, that also on the list of countries which have ever asked me for a special visa because I'm a journalist, if I remember correctly, Colonel Gaddafi's Libya, Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the Taliban's Afghanistan.

Justin Quirk

Yeah, it's an auspicious company, I think.

Andrew Muller

Oh, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. I needed a journalist visa for that as well.

Justin Quirk

Great bunch of lads.

Andrew Muller

Exactly.

Justin Quirk

But I think it's the kind of heart of this problem is we talk about, you know, measuring these things obsessively in terms of numbers, economic return on this thing. And then the thing that is not being measured in America's case is, is the absolute bonfire they have undergone of soft cultural power. And you know, as a. This is complete anecdote data, but I was working for one of the world's biggest tech companies until last year. My entire team left. Of the younger mid level creative directors, not a single one of them has gone to America. They have gone to Qatar, to Dubai, to the Far East. And these are the people who in my generation, the one generation part back, would all have gone to New York or la, and not a single one of them has done now, well, to

Andrew Muller

Japan now, specifically the town of Yawata, the mayor of which, Shoko Kawata has prompted an amount of consternation, it says here, by taking maternity leave. Except that she sort of isn't, though. She is having a child circa mid September and the Monocle Daily wishes her well. There is at present no formal framework for maternity leave for elected officials in Japan. So instead she's taking four months off and swapping in her deputy for the duration. She will dial remotely into important meetings. Alex, two leaders of democratic nations have given birth in office. Can you name them?

Alex von Tunzelman

Okay, give them birth. Jacinda Arden is one. Yeah. And. Oh my goodness, you're gonna have to

Andrew Muller

tell me the other one, Justin, I'm drawing a blank. Benazir Bhutto. Oh, both of whom I have in my time interviewed again, ask me anything.

Justin Quirk

Oh God, we're getting the grace.

Alex von Tunzelman

Absolutely.

Andrew Muller

But Alex, should elected office be a special case where parental leave is concerned, or should people in that job be as entitled to it as anybody else? If their country offers it more generally,

Alex von Tunzelman

very straightforwardly, it should be the same as everything else, I think. And if you want politicians who are representative of society, I don't think you can say anyone who's having a kid can't really apply for this job. I mean, that seems to me like a really fundamental thing where in fact we do want people who understand those sorts of trade offs and that part of life. So no, I think it should. And as you say, parental leave, definitely not just maternity leave either. I think it's important to have paternity leave and all parental leave as part of that deal. It seems absolutely bonkers to me that anyone would think anything else.

Andrew Muller

Nevertheless, Justin, there are certain constituents of Yawarta who apparently do think anything else. One is that they're not delighted about apparently continuing to pay her salary while she is taking time off. And also there are some sort suggestion from some grumpsters that this is a decision you should make before seeking elected office. Now granted, I suspect that the town of Yawarta will probably crack on reasonably all right under her deputy. Fine. It's a small town. Should there be any sort of exceptions made for people who are running large serious countries? Should it be permissible for them because you know, it's a time consuming business, the whole having a child and raising it through infancy business. Should they be entitled to take several months off in the middle of the term they were elected to serve?

Justin Quirk

I would feel much happier if they did. I mean I don't want anyone with their hands potentially near a nuclear trigger who has been subsisting on two hours sleep a night and watching Bear in the Big Blue House on repeat. I just, I would feel I would sleep much better knowing that someone else is mining the till and the person who's, you know, going out of their mind for sleep deprivation is nowhere near their desk.

Andrew Muller

Because this is presumably Alex, why we have deputies.

Alex von Tunzelman

Exactly. I mean nobody is indispensable, quite honestly in this world and that does include world leaders. Now they may be.

Andrew Muller

Do you want to tell them that?

Justin Quirk

Sure.

Alex von Tunzelman

But you know, you should have. I mean one responsible aspect of being a world leader which is a very high risk job anyway and there are lots of reasons that you could be invalided out of that or anything at any moment should be that you build a robust enough team that actually if you do need to for whatever reason not turn up for a bit, that that team can carry on without you.

Andrew Muller

Alex von Taman and Justin Quirk, thank you both for joining us. Finally on today's show, it is clear from the briefest survey of any day's news that one, the world is significantly less orderly than it was not so long ago and two, that a great many of the people running it or trying to have not yet adjusted to this reality. They especially if they have just today taken charge of a nuclear armed member of the UN Security Council and the G7 could do worse than. Read the new book the New Rules of Power in a Divided World by Jack Watling, Senior Research Fellow for Applied Military Sciences at rusi. I spoke to Jack earlier and began by asking why with all the information to which nation states now have access, they still get so much wrong in early 2022. In one example cited in the book, Ukraine was insistent that Russia did not plan to invade it.

Jack Watling

Well, I think we have to acknowledge that political decisions are made by, by small numbers of fallible human beings who are under an intense amount of pressure. They are making decisions quickly. They are usually lacking sleep. There are significant forces pressuring them in different directions, and they're heavily burdened by an understanding or an awareness of the consequences of those decisions. And so I think humans in that state tend to fall into heuristics and, and it's precisely that dynamic of having complex problems, unpredictable adversaries, and human fallibility that makes it such an area of fascination for scholars, because these are not problems we are going to overcome entirely. We can get better at it, but we're not going to solve politics.

Andrew Muller

I do want to come to getting better at it. I'm just wondering, can we boil it, do you think, to one, I guess, key mistake, which is that those policymakers you mentioned, when confronted with a difficulty or a crisis, have an understandable, perhaps tendency just to make it want to go away, just to not have to deal with it. What they want is continuity rather than change.

Jack Watling

I think that when people are confronted with something that is going to be painful, pain becomes a point of fixation. And we, we tend to lean away from pain. Right. And experienced politicians often get briefed that calamity is about to hit them, and they learn over time that very often the right thing to do is nothing right. Very often you don't want to knee jerk in your reactions. But when you combine a healthy kind of desire to not be forced into drastic action with a pain aversion, which is, and not wanting to be held accountable for getting things wrong. So there's a, you know, if you don't make a decision, people are less critical of you than if you make the wrong decision. Essentially, I think that that drives an inertia and so people are often slow to grasp the nettle.

Andrew Muller

Is there also an issue with the people who make these decisions often being somewhat divorced from the consequences of them on the ground and the reality on the ground that they're deciding about? Because a lot of your book, to make clear to our listeners, is informed by actually going places and seeing this stuff, do you think more actual policymakers would benefit from much the same?

Jack Watling

I think that there can be a detachment from the consequences which can really shape decision making. I mean, I think you could argue, for example, that Donald Trump is not personally impacted, particularly by the huge economic harm that the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz is causing. And that undoubtedly leads him to be far more prepared to have this protract than a rational assessment of the impact on the US and its partners would suggest is sensible. Right. And similarly with Putin, the fact that he personally doesn't feel the consequences of the war, even though damage that's accumulating to Russian society is very real. So I think that is one element. Another element is that what are the incentives that politicians do feel, particularly in democracies? They feel the jubilation or despair of the voter and who the voter blames. And what my observation when it comes to foreign policy is that if you intervene early and successfully, you tend to be observed to spend the resource, but because the crisis never materializes, you don't actually get a huge boon for having solved it electorally. Whereas if you leave it late, the crisis is often much more damaging, much more worse. But you look decisive because people can very easily tie cause and effect, your action to the consequence, even though the outcome is often worse for having acted late. And so that's another issue is that politicians often are incentivized, devised through the thing that they do feel to delay.

Andrew Muller

We should talk, therefore, about what might actually be done about this. And I know that one obvious remedy that might leap to mind is just making sure or finding ways to put really clever people in charge of things rather than people who are arguably less so. But of course, history shows us, and indeed your book demonstrates repeatedly, that things do go badly wrong with smart people in charge as well. So that's not an answer in itself, is it?

Jack Watling

No, it's not. Although I think there are some maladies that we have allowed to degrade essentially our political processes in the UK in particular. But many countries suffer from similar things. One of them is that information technology, you know, the ability to move data, emails, video calls, WhatsApp messages, etc, dynamically around the world means that no politician has an excuse anymore to mean, say that they, they didn't know, right to say that the decision was made without their knowledge and what that has created is an incentive in government for all decisions to be elevated to a very senior level. Senior leaders only have so much time in their day, and so either they make lots of decisions that are ill informed because they're trying to get through the backlog, or they make a small number of decisions that are well informed, but all of the other things they don't make decisions about get worse by virtue of nothing being done. And so, so having a system where we diffuse decision making and decisions can be taken at a lower level will likely significantly improve both the speed of decision making and the quality of that decision making, because those making decisions suddenly have the capacity to manage the flow. But that becomes a national project because it means that the media and those who are shaping the discourse need to encourage the system to work in that way, rather than demand that the Prime Minister must be personally aware, responsible for all things that happen in government.

Andrew Muller

In the conclusion of the book, this isn't a spoiler, you quote William Somerset Morham saying that reality is a bad storyteller. Is there also a problem that we are, as a species, hopelessly seduced by the promise of a happy ending? That if we do this, this and this, everything will just be all right forever? That the happy ending is possible? And obviously it's easier, I suppose, for political leaders to reinforce that idea than actually say to their public, this is all horrifically complicated. We're just muddling through as best we can. And that's probably as good as it gets.

Jack Watling

I think that the idea of resolution, and as you say, that a problem is solved when a process doesn't necessarily end, can be a very distorting thing when it comes to realistically framing the choices that we face. I mean, I'll give you an example over Ukraine, the policy line from the UK is we support for Ukraine for as long as it takes. What we're actually supporting them getting to is not something that we've clearly defined. And if you did start defining it, then you would lock yourself into a whole series of resource commitments and so on. That could be much more easily measured as to whether they were adequate. And so there is a desire in that case to avoid having a clear narrative because you could suddenly be held to account. So this can cut both ways. On the one hand, narrative is dangerous because it can force the idea of a conclus, which isn't feasible. But equally, very often, politicians will avoid narrative precisely because it very clearly sets out to the public a path against which they can be judged as to whether they have kept on the path or not.

Andrew Muller

That was Jack Watling speaking to me earlier. The New Rules of Power in a Divided World is available now. That is all for this edition of the Daily. Thanks to our panelists today, Alex for the Tonzelman and Justin Quirk, and also to Richard Sherman at Farnborough. Today's show was produced by Chris Chermack and researched by Nkay Martin. Our sound engineer was Elliot Greenfield. I'm Andrew Muller here in London. The Daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks for listening, Sam.