The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Brokernomics. Now as you know we have some criticisms of the Conservative Party

00:00:05.100 and you probably picked that up from our election night coverage and much of our other coverage.

00:00:10.180 And of course we did the excellent stream with Apostolic Majesty last week going through the

00:00:13.400 obituary of the Conservative Party and in that Apostolic Majesty made some excellent points that

00:00:18.020 really helped gel my thinking on why the party has got itself into this sort of issue and the

00:00:24.300 sort of factionalism within it. But of course we are both outsiders. I have spent some time in

00:00:28.160 Parliament. I've done a couple of stints working in Parliament and even CCHQ a long time ago when

00:00:32.720 it was a formal draft in Smith Square. But I haven't been a Conservative MP so I haven't been able to see

00:00:38.200 it from the inside. Well in this episode I wanted to talk with somebody who has actually been on the

00:00:44.540 inside of it and as frustrating as it must have been for us on the outside if you are actually

00:00:49.820 inside the party and having Conservative instincts it must have been a somewhat torturous experience.

00:00:56.340 So I thought to myself, who do I know who can talk about that? And then I thought it's got to be

00:01:01.900 Marcus. Marcus Fish, welcome to Brokonomics. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

00:01:07.700 So tell us a little bit about yourself and particularly the turn that your life took in 2015.

00:01:13.040 Well I have a background in business and in fund management. That's what I started out doing.

00:01:19.480 I used to manage money. What mandate did you look after?

00:01:22.140 I did Asia Pacific equities and global equities and I was the Asia point person on our global equities

00:01:28.740 team for Mercury Asset Management that became Merrill Lynch Investment Managers back in the day

00:01:33.680 and then after I left there I went and lived in Asia and Australia and I did sort of venture capital

00:01:39.920 private equity advisory on a boutique sort of a basis and ended up being an entrepreneur starting up a

00:01:47.460 business doing affordable housing in India and that was very interesting. Not a wildly similar background

00:01:53.200 to myself then. Lots of experience of all different places, different politics, different

00:01:59.680 investments, different sectors, different economics. But I wanted to give back and so when I moved back

00:02:09.460 to the UK and met my lovely wife, I decided to get involved first in the local politics and then

00:02:16.660 as I kept winning pretty much unwinnable on paper seats at the local level, I decided to stand for

00:02:25.240 parliament and stood in Yeovil where I was doing my local politics against David Laws who was the

00:02:33.440 minister in the coalition, one of the ministers in the coalition government, but for the liberal

00:02:38.080 democrats who had a big majority and I won it the first time round. I thought it might take more

00:02:45.180 than one go, but I managed to win it the first time round and 2015 was an interesting time. But I guess

00:02:52.960 through that process of being involved in the local level, not liking what the Lib Dems were doing

00:03:00.000 locally because it was a Lib Dem firmament there, I also didn't like at all what was going on in the

00:03:06.040 coalition government. And actually, the thing that got me interested enough to want to do it was in

00:03:12.940 fact, when I remember watching the television when David Cameron announced before the 2010 election

00:03:20.480 that he wasn't going to hold a referendum like he said he would do on the Lisbon Treaty because it

00:03:27.560 had already happened. I thought, you've just lost the election, mate. And what happened? He lost the

00:03:33.760 election. We were in coalition as Conservatives with the Liberal Democrats. And to be honest, a lot of

00:03:41.860 people, I think in the Conservative Party quite liked that because they are probably more of a Liberal

00:03:47.440 Democrat mind than of a true Conservative mind. But that meant that, yeah, 2015 became very interesting

00:03:55.140 because it was a chance to actually be a Conservative government, obviously on their own. We've heard a lot

00:04:02.140 in the recent election campaign about you've had 14 years and all the rest of it. But actually, I don't

00:04:07.680 regard that first term as a Conservative government at all. Well, I suppose it'll arguably be the terms that

00:04:13.420 followed. You could make the case. But so is it because that you had a strong local base? Because my

00:04:19.860 understanding is that one of the first things David Cameron did when he came in as leader was he started to rig the

00:04:24.060 selection process. So the power was effectively taken away from the local constituencies and placed

00:04:29.740 with the party chairman. So is it a result of your strong local base that meant that you got selected

00:04:38.220 while having Conservative opinions? Because I thought you guys had been filtered out by then already.

00:04:42.460 Well, your assessment, I think, is actually correct. And I want to place on record my gratitude to my

00:04:48.060 local association there for supporting me. They indeed saw that I could win things at a local level that

00:04:57.580 weren't supposed to be winnable. So the idea for them of me standing for the parliamentary seat, which

00:05:07.340 should on paper have looked unwinnable, seemed possible to them. And I'm grateful to them for that chance.

00:05:13.260 And yes, I sort of had a local footprint already, and obviously had a bit of a following there.

00:05:23.260 And so that was something that was easy to lean in on. And it was an open primary under which I was

00:05:32.140 selected to fight the seat, which means that anybody can turn up. You don't have to be a Conservative member

00:05:41.020 to be a part of that. And I won that on the first round. So that all worked. Well, but I've,

00:05:48.540 I've always seen myself as a, you know, you know, as a small C Conservative first, rather than a,

00:05:56.540 you know, a really partisan party political person. I haven't been a member of the Conservative Party

00:06:03.100 since I was a teenager, like some, for example. But I've always been a, I've always regarded myself as a

00:06:09.740 Conservative. Because I, because I kind of mentally draw a line at 2010, those members who joined

00:06:15.340 before and after, and perhaps there are some exceptions, such as in your case. But I mean,

00:06:19.980 not naming any names, we're not, you know, we're not going to name Alicia Kearns here, or any of the

00:06:23.900 other sort of ultra liberal Tory MPs that came in, in the sort of more recent years. But was there

00:06:31.260 a genuine distinction that you could pick up on inside the party, inside the parliamentary party,

00:06:36.380 between those sort of pre 2010 MPs, and basically the cohort that came after?

00:06:43.420 It's interesting, I think, I think, I think, to be fair to my ex colleagues, they are, they are a very

00:06:52.940 broad, broad church, there are lots of different types of people in there politically. And that can

00:06:59.100 be a strength. And I think it has in some times been a strength, but it can also be a weakness when

00:07:06.540 when the electorate really wants you to do things. Because it can mean that some of the disagreements

00:07:13.740 are more insurmountable than they might be at other times. And I think the recent experience since 2015

00:07:22.860 has been where those sorts of what would be bridgeable chasms in normal times have turned out to not really

00:07:31.260 be bridgeable. Because there are different principles at work, within people's opinions about

00:07:38.620 and obviously Brexit was a big deal, which we'll probably come on to. But in terms of the differences

00:07:46.220 about how one regards the law, what the law is, what it's supposed to do, what Britain's place is, and

00:07:53.100 what its constitutional arrangements are, these are quite fundamental to some of the technical differences

00:08:01.020 that are there that have caused colleagues to have differences of opinion. But when, you know, when the

00:08:08.860 populace has made a choice, it's going on to the 2019 election, that was clearly a choice that they

00:08:17.820 voted then in the populace generally, again, to uphold for change based on the new constitutional

00:08:24.540 arrangement. And some people were prepared to do that. And other people weren't, as they've proved over

00:08:33.020 the previous years with the fights during Theresa May's time. And in a sense, yeah, just going going

00:08:39.740 back to the, it's a great shame in a way, because I don't think we've had a Conservative government doing

00:08:45.180 normal Conservative things for a long time. Part of that was because we were first in coalition with the

00:08:50.780 Liberals. Second, because we had, we had to spend three years, it turned out, arguing about how to

00:08:58.700 implement the Brexit vote. And that, that took up a lot of time and energy. As we know, it was Boris

00:09:06.140 who unblocked that thing. And then we had various decisions that made that difficult. And then COVID

00:09:14.780 came straight away, and all the rest of the oxygen for the whole parliament. So yeah, I completely

00:09:22.140 understand why people say, well, you've had all this time, you haven't done Conservative things. But there

00:09:28.540 are, there are reasons, there are good reasons why that happened. But that doesn't make it any less

00:09:33.420 frustrating. I wonder if even if it was plain sailing, a very boring new cycle throughout that

00:09:40.780 period, whether the Conservatives would have done Conservative things anyway? I don't think that, I mean,

00:09:45.500 well, let's go through them. I mean, David. I like to think that they would. I, I, I value my ex

00:09:50.060 colleagues. And I think most of them are in it for the right reasons, and they want to do the right thing.

00:09:55.980 And their, their instincts are Conservative. But I think there's just been so much,

00:10:03.180 there's been so much noise and so much principled difference, that it's quite hard for me to see how

00:10:11.100 some of those things go back together and how you can have agreement on a broad set, a broad enough

00:10:16.620 set of small C Conservative principles now. Well, let's dig into those principles.

00:10:20.620 I mean, because, I mean, I, I would no longer identify myself as a Conservative,

00:10:26.700 on the basis of the utter betrayal of the last few years. But if I, if I were going to attach myself to

00:10:33.180 principles that I call Conservative, they would be things like small state, low taxation, national sovereignty,

00:10:38.620 the primalcy of the family over the state, those kinds of things. But I get the impression that even

00:10:43.660 that fairly limited selection of criteria were not universally upheld within the Parliamentary Party.

00:10:50.540 Yeah, that is fair to say, there were, I think, a lot of, yeah, some of the people that are there

00:10:57.420 in the Parliamentary Party do instinctively gravitate more towards a social democratic type model. They

00:11:04.860 try to emulate Blair, you know, George Osborne and David Cameron famously saw themselves as the heirs to

00:11:13.180 Blair and called him the master. And that kind of tells you what you need to know about it, really.

00:11:19.020 So that whole moderniser project within the Conservative Party that they were 100% part of,

00:11:25.340 that's actually been going on for decades. But it is that, that's the, it is the left of centre wing

00:11:32.140 of the Conservative Party that was in control for all those key moments and key, key times. And going back

00:11:41.020 to the personnel issues, the selection of candidates has clearly been of that ilk too. So I would say there

00:11:48.620 is a big, great majority now of Conservative MPs are more on that centre or even centre left Blair

00:11:58.060 territory, perhaps even to the left of Blair. And we can talk about that in a minute too, because

00:12:03.260 I think the new Labour government seems to be wanting to position itself now to the right of where,

00:12:08.940 where in, in some of the economic terms, to the right of where the Conservative Party as currently

00:12:18.060 constituted is. Yeah, I mean, one of the guys here, Carl, he, at a live event, he made the quip that he

00:12:25.420 might vote for Labour because it's the most right wing party available. And I sort of laughed at the time.

00:12:30.220 But actually, as you get closer to the election, it becomes increasingly true.

00:12:33.260 I don't know if they really understand what it is. I think they're, they're a bit of a hodgepodge,

00:12:38.140 right? They are doing some of the right things in terms of thinking about how you get the right

00:12:42.700 homes in the right places. I actually came into politics partly because the, because, because the

00:12:48.220 Lib Dems were planning all the wrong homes in the wrong places. So I know a bit about the whole planning

00:12:53.340 system. But there is no doubt that we need to build more houses in this country. And they're right to

00:12:59.660 focus on that because young people need to be able to see a path to owning their own homes. Part of

00:13:07.100 it's about building more houses. The other parts about enabling them to genuinely grow their incomes

00:13:13.580 by growing their ability to do valuable work that other people want to pay for. That's the only solution,

00:13:19.500 actually, to them being able to afford the higher prices, which are always going to be there, however many

00:13:25.020 homes. The pushback from the right for that would be, well, if you look at the stats, the

00:13:30.220 native-born population is actually declining. The increased demand for home is partially due to

00:13:37.580 the way that people live now, which is more atomised. But a large part of it is also the mass immigration

00:13:44.300 that we've been experiencing. So actually you could solve a lot of those, those sort of things together.

00:13:49.340 Well, so talking about my own ex constituency, that isn't a mass immigration place. However,

00:13:59.820 there is a lot of pressure on housing. There is that atomisation. As you mentioned, the households

00:14:05.500 are getting smaller in size on average. And that is driving demand for more units. But I was always a fan

00:14:12.860 of trying to build on the massive infrastructure investment that we were doing through the A303

00:14:18.300 dueling to actually think about putting a new town in an area that was appropriate for one,

00:14:25.900 up on the A303 there. And that would have been an ideal way of actually doing something

00:14:33.260 that would attract investment, attract people to the region.

00:14:37.900 And it is, it is hard to recruit in our rural areas. It's hard to recruit teachers and medical

00:14:47.980 personnel and dentists and all these things. So that, that was a part of my theory for how you attract

00:14:53.820 people to the area without putting pressure on existing communities. But unless you're going to build

00:14:59.500 the infrastructure for extra people, wherever they come from, then that's always going to be a

00:15:06.380 challenge for any population, because there's competition for those public resources.

00:15:11.420 So give us a flavour of what it's like working inside the Parliamentary Conservative Party over your

00:15:18.300 tenure. Because I sort of imagine that, you know, friendships must form and groups must form and

00:15:23.900 I'm sort of imagining something like a small, disaffected group who actually believe in

00:15:32.780 Conservative things sort of forming like minds and then a much larger sort of socially liberal group,

00:15:38.060 basically a group of people who, if the Liberal Democrats were more electorally successful,

00:15:43.500 if we had a three party system, they wouldn't have joined the Conservatives in the first place,

00:15:47.020 they would have joined the Liberal Democrats to begin with. So how does it shape up actually inside the party?

00:15:54.700 Well, you know, there are, there are different, I think you need to go back to what people actually

00:16:00.300 want to get out of politics in the first place. And I think there are, there are quite a lot of people

00:16:05.900 who seem to work in politics, work as MPs, I'm not going to name any names, but there are people who

00:16:10.620 want to do it because it's a, it's a, in theory, it's a high status type type occupation. It's a thing

00:16:20.060 where you, you can make a difference. But there are lots of people who are there to,

00:16:26.700 you know, because they want to have a career in it, rather than necessarily wanting to

00:16:31.340 do anything to rock the boat or radically change things. It's an institution, like there are other

00:16:38.460 institutions, and there are quite a lot of people who want to join in for that reason and to be part

00:16:44.700 of that. And they find it interesting, they might find the media stuff interesting, they might find all

00:16:48.860 sorts of, they might have very good local community reasons for wanting to change things in their

00:16:55.580 local community. So I'm not saying that that's not valuable. I'm just saying that that that's not

00:17:00.620 necessarily a cadre of people who is going to, which is going to, you know, want to get involved in

00:17:09.660 thinking about issues of principle, or constitutional change, or these sorts of things that are slightly

00:17:16.220 more theoretical at first, but then translate themselves into potentially quite radical mechanisms

00:17:24.860 by which you can change things for people. And I think, I think the Conservative Party, with its name

00:17:31.340 as Conservatives, it has over a long period of time attracted people who are those more establishment

00:17:37.420 types, who essentially don't want things to change very much. And they are, yeah, there are lots

00:17:43.260 of them who essentially want a relatively quiet life, rather than a controversial life or a radical

00:17:50.780 life. And that is what they would see being Conservative as a word is about. And I can understand

00:17:58.620 how they got there, but I don't actually think that is what, that's not what the broad base of

00:18:05.340 small C Conservative Party people in the country actually want from a Conservative Party. They want a

00:18:11.740 centre right block that does and thinks in small C Conservative ways and actions that are going to,

00:18:21.100 that are going to help change people's lives. And that's my concern is that it's moot that establishment

00:18:28.220 hype has totally lost a sense of the fact that there is a, that the vast majority of people in the

00:18:37.180 country are that small C Conservative, which includes people of all classes, and the people who, who want

00:18:45.100 to get on in life, and go up the ladder, they, they really need our help. And when we are essentially

00:18:53.660 saying to them through our policy choices, well, we don't actually care quite so much about that, we're not

00:19:00.700 really going to change things for you. We prefer just to, you know, we prefer to do our own thing

00:19:07.900 that's comfortable for us, they understandably, I think, get angry. And that's what's happened in the

00:19:13.740 last election. Those C2, CDE type, can Conservatives who were there in 2019 for us were there in 2015,

00:19:23.340 I remember it. They, they just didn't come out for us. And, or, or they voted reform.

00:19:29.180 But it's, it's, it's a fundamentally different proposition being Conservative in the sense of

00:19:34.140 conserving the institutions, pre Blair, as opposed to post Blair, because of course, the institutions

00:19:40.060 have been markedly changed. And actually, this is my key criticism of coming back to David Cameron,

00:19:47.260 is you say, yeah, the, the whole air to Blair stuff. The, the point with Blair was that he was

00:19:53.020 coming in and he was taking all of the power out of government and moving it into crangos and then, 0.96

00:19:57.500 and then operating them with his friends and structuring in such a way that they would always

00:20:02.380 be operated by his friends. Yeah. And, and what Cameron came in and did was he copied the veneer of

00:20:09.740 fluff, the messaging that went over the top of Blair without understanding the, what Blair was actually

00:20:14.860 doing. So, so picking up more on David Cameron, of course, the big, the first big failure that I can think

00:20:21.180 of would, would be the Brexit issue. So what was it like being in the Conservative Party and what was

00:20:26.220 the, what was it, what was it like to live through being inside the Parliamentary Conservative Party

00:20:32.540 over that whole Brexit span? Yeah. Well, the, the thing that I remember most about the initial phase

00:20:38.780 of that was David Cameron in the cabinet room with her, our 2015 intake in there. And he was briefing us

00:20:48.220 on what he was trying to do with the renegotiation of our sort of terms of membership with the EU.

00:20:55.020 And he essentially said to us that he was gonna, he was asked, he was gonna ask for just enough

00:21:01.100 for us to be able to win the Brexit referendum of basically persuading the country that that was good

00:21:11.500 enough to stay in. It sounds like he was uncomfortable with that, that he, he was asking for just enough

00:21:17.180 because he had to, because the people were demanding it, but he didn't want to. I think that may be part of it.

00:21:22.380 I can't speak for him on that particularly, but I think for one reason or another, he was not ambitious

00:21:29.260 in that renegotiation and the EU would have sensed that completely. And in life, in business and politics,

00:21:39.740 in everything, I think you have to be very clear and you have to be very bold. You have to say what you want

00:21:45.420 and work back from, from there. Either he didn't know what he wanted or he didn't really want

00:21:52.620 to be very ambitious about it. But I thought at that moment, I thought that doesn't sound like

00:21:58.140 a great starting point for a negotiation. And, you know, people on the other side of any negotiation,

00:22:06.460 they have a level of respect for you in that when you are clear about what you want and saying, look,

00:22:12.140 for these X, Y, and Z perfectly good reasons, we actually need things to change here. And that was his

00:22:21.100 chance actually to positively change the EU. Maybe they would have responded to it, done something

00:22:28.940 more about national populations need to be involved in decision making, etc. And maybe that would have

00:22:37.180 changed history. But is that how communication in the parliamentary Conservative Party always was?

00:22:42.700 It was top down. Was there much? Did you ever get the opportunity to put your views to leadership?

00:22:47.580 Or was it purely, by the way, guys, this is what we're doing, like it or lump it?

00:22:53.100 It's, they call it an elected dictatorship, right? Or something tempered by regicide.

00:23:02.620 I think, you know, there is a very, there is a leader heavy authority path within the Conservative

00:23:12.300 Party within Parliament. It's partly, that's the system, I mean, the, the system of the patronage

00:23:20.220 of being in government and being able to give jobs out, etc, that that tends to be, I guess,

00:23:26.140 it tended in the old days to be run more like a military operation. So the whips would often be ex-military,

00:23:32.060 and they would think of discipline in those sorts of ways where you essentially just followed orders.

00:23:37.260 And that was, it's, I'm not saying that there were not opportunities to make your views known. And

00:23:43.980 of course, Parliament is one of those opportunities itself, to make your views known to the executive,

00:23:49.580 but the... But what really could you have done? Because voters often feel a sense of frustration,

00:23:55.020 that we only, we only ever get to vote once every four years. But what, what power does a

00:24:00.220 parliamentarian actually have over their leadership? Because of course, if you, if you dis, I mean,

00:24:04.300 you can disagree a little bit. Yes. You can even rebel once or twice. If you make yourself too much of

00:24:09.340 a problem, they'll just take, they'll just take the whip away from you and then you'll lose your seat. 0.97

00:24:12.220 I think it's, it's a, um, in order to be constructive, particularly when you're a party in government,

00:24:18.300 you have to do a lot of closed door, uh, and corridor type, you know, and, uh, tea room type,

00:24:26.460 uh, talking to ministers, trying to talk to them about the issues that, that they are trying to

00:24:32.460 deal with and trying to persuade them of your slightly different way of thinking about it,

00:24:38.220 or maybe going about it. To watch the full video, please become a premium member at lotusedus.com.

PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ No Future for the Tory Party

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