From The Times and The Sunday Times, this is The Story. I'm Luke Jones.
Can we start entirely back to front, Tim? Yeah. Imagine you are a history professor, a hundred years, hence, and you're looking back on this period that you have written these books about sort of 2016 to 24. How do you characterize it for your students? Well, I think the word most commonly used during the period itself was shit show.
We're post omni-shambles and we're into shitshow. I mean, it's kind of a historic period. It'd be interesting in a hundred years to know whether it was the start of a sort of period of British political history or the sort of final knockings of the kind of Eurosceptic moment that had been building for four decades.
Tim Shipman, chief political commentator for the Sunday Times, has just released the final book in his Brexit quartet, going from Boris Johnson. The thing that most deserved him was the idea that the Queen had said some rude things about him. To Liz Truss. One of them sort of said that she almost kind of had a breakdown, not in a kind of depressive sense, but became quite manic. To Rishi Sunak? One of his aides said to me, actually, all criticizes for calling the election too early, actually, we called it far too late.
too well what happened in that 2024 election. The story today, Tim Shipman on how Johnson, Truss and Sunac got out.
We can obviously only hear just a few glimpses of some of the things that you've got in your latest book out. But before we get into those anecdotes and scenes, can we just go inside the sausage factory briefly? In terms of the process of how you write these books, obviously you interview hundreds and hundreds of people. I guess a mix of it is reporting that you've done at the time during these events, but then also a lot of it being after the fact as well. Why do they talk to you?
I think because they know that pretty well everybody else is doing, and if they don't, it'll be somebody else's account of events that will dominate. Whereas if you can speak to everybody who's in a meeting, I can kind of make a judgment call about what's the significant part of it piecing together, lots of different accounts.
I think after the first book, some people who hadn't talked regretted it. And if you look at the difference between the hardback of the first book and the paperback of the first book, there was some significant additions and changes based on people going, I'm not a minute, what about this? I really ought to have picked up the phone. And from that point onwards, it's been a process of, you know, as you say, some of it is from reporting at the time. And there's some stuff you can only get, you know, the week something happens. But then people
go back and reflect and are prepared to say more for a book. There's a sort of sweet spot about three months after the events happen, where people can still remember fairly clearly what took place, but are now a bit more relaxed about speaking about it. Some people will say in a given week when something's kicking off, they'll say you can put this in the paper and save this bit for the book.
They'll actually be that clear about it. That's what comes from a big ego, doesn't it, on the part of those sources? I guess, but there's things that would be more awkward if revealed immediately at the time. People often ask, how easy is that? For me to cope with, and it's like, it was pretty straightforward because they wouldn't have told me any of it. If I start putting stuff in the paper that's only intended for the book,
Then those people stop talking to me and it all ends up in the paper eventually anyway. If we start with Boris Johnson, did the Queen hate him? I don't think that's the right word and those who've seen the serialization will know that there's some pretty fruity quotes from the Queen.
I think the quote that actually sums up her view probably most accurately was once she gave to a minister towards the end of 2019 when that minister was doing impersonations of Boris and the Queen was doing impersonations of Gordon Brown, which was one of her party tricks. And at the end of it, she said, no, he was perhaps more suited to the stage.
You know, she beautifully done. I think she, she had a sort of affection for him. I'm told she enjoyed speaking to him, speaking to Boris as a normally an entertaining experience. I don't think she respected him quite as much as he hoped that she did. And if you read Boris Johnson's memoir, there's a lot of stuff in there about making the case that he and the Queen were bezies. But a couple of days before she died, she had a very jolly session with a bunch of her closest aides, one of whom confided this in the cabinet minister after she died that
There was a sense at the time that she'd sort of clung on to be there for the changing of the guard between Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. I think there's some truth in that. She then came out with this line that, well, at least that idiot won't be organising my funeral. And lots of people turn around and say, well, the funeral was already organised. It was clearly said with a modicum of jest.
A large part of this book is on Boris Johnson, and a good sort of 200 pages of it is on that second half of 2019 where he's stretching the constitution to its limits in order to get Brexit done, as he would put it, preroging parliament for five weeks. I think the Queen took that in her stride, as I understand it. These things happen was the general approach. But Prince Charles, as he then was, was absolutely furious, thought Johnson had lied to his mother. Prince William was furious. So the family as a whole, I think, thought that he kind of
not really behaved in the way that was appropriate with, you know, this great beloved monarch. And also on the issue of proroguing one for the people with their Brexit bingo cards listening along. It seems like the machine of government as well seemed quite flabbergasted by what Boris Johnson and then Prime Minister was asking the Queen to do in this sort of extra sort of long break in Parliament so he could crack on with some Brexit business.
That's right. I mean, civil servants sent the clerk of the Privy Council up to Balmoral to just kind of have a quiet word with the Queen and go, you do understand that this is pretty controversial, what he's doing. So your understanding is that that whole business, the Queen wasn't miffed about it, even though people were offended almost on her behalf, like I think most of the courtiers were furious. And I think a lot of the other senior members of the family were furious on her behalf. She's seen a lot of stuff over the years. I mean, there's a quote in there from someone saying that her approach was kind of these things happen.
And as you say, one of the people who took a fence on her behalf was her son, the now king. And there's an interesting bit where it sort of seems like quite a row between Johnson and then Prince Charles at, is it the Commonwealth Head of Government? That's right. In Rwanda. So once Johnson was pushing this scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there were some quotes in the media that Prince Charles thought the thing was appalling.
And Johnson kind of confronted him about this in Kigali at Chilgum. Which is extraordinary. It sounds like a sort of almost finger poking on chest kind of dressing down. Well, I mean, you know, the relationship between Prime Minister's and Senior Royals, it can be an awkward one. And he put him on the spot and basically said, did you say this in Charles? I think that's something along the lines of we're like, you know,
I might have inadvertently sort of let something slip. They put on a sort of public display of, you know, shaking hands on the stage and all the rest of it, but they were both due to make speeches, and Johnson wanted to make, you know, one of his classic, bravura, optimistic speeches about trade and all the rest of it. And Charles, by this point, was sort of tortured post-Black Lives Matter by this sort of anti-colonial movement that was beginning to gather steam, and he wanted to sort of say something about slavery and its ills.
Johnson basically snapped at him, well, you know, if you do that, people will come for the duchy of Lancaster and the duchy of Cornwall and ask, where all your money came from? And was that from slavery and all the rest of it? You know, he said to one of his aides, he was there when he came out of the room, I went in pretty hard and they clearly had something resembling a stand-up row about it. Charles, of course, ignored him and made some comments about, you know, the terrible burdens of slavery. And the duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster remain intact. The previous editions of the Sunday Times were details on that.
In terms of how Boris Johnson's time in office came to an end, if Nadine Doris was sitting here, she would have read your book and gone, aha, I told you all, there was a plot to oust him.
Was there? In short, yes. I think there were probably several plots. Lots of people had an interest in getting rid of him. Partygate, which is ultimately the thing that set the scene for the downfall of Johnson, was engineered to a degree by Dominic Cummings and some of his associates had fallen out with Boris Johnson.
There was the famous video of Allegra Stratton, his communications director, doing a mock press conference where they talked about having parties in Downing Street, which was the first kind of big thing that made everybody realise that this was something that was going to be a big problem for Johnson.
ITV will leaked that video, not by Cummings, but they couldn't get it on air because their lawyers were very queasy about it. So at this point, no one knew anything about party gate. ITV have this video of Allegra Stratton, but saying we can't. We can't do it. Somebody at ITV then showed that video to Cummings and one of his close allies. And they thought, well, what do we do about this? And they thought the clever thing to do was to show it to Pippa Crow, who was then the police club to the mirror and out the Guardian.
she had broken the Barnard Castle story about Dominic Cummings. So she had formed for doing big stuff and doing it professionally and efficiently. And she was summoned to a house in South East London and shown this video. So Cummings thought process was, well, she dispatched me pretty effectively. So I'll go to him. Yeah. And it just shows how kind of non... I mean, he's renowned as a sort of ventral and vindictive character, but he was being more ventral and vindictive to Boris Johnson than he was to Pippa Crowe.
She gets shown this. Now, Pippa had been tipped off about parties months before and had tried to get the story over the line and had not. But seeing the video, the sort of concrete proof that gave her and her editors more confidence, she then went back, talked to another half a dozen sources. And to be fair, it took her another four or five weeks to get the story over the line.
Coming certainly gave it a helping hand at the start and I think he and people around him would say they had a grid of stories that they were leaking and they were desperately causing trouble to Boris Johnson. I think where I would contest what some of what Nadine has written. A lot of the things she says are accurate. I think she puts it together into a sort of vast conspiracy in a way that's unrealistic. I mean anyone who spent any time in Westminster knows that.
A lot more of it is cock up than conspiracy. Clearly, there were other people who wanted Boris Johnson gone. Dougie Smith, who's this sort of fixer character, who's changed sides a lot. He was one of them. There were people around Rishi Sunak who wanted him to have the job and certainly he was the obvious person likely to benefit if Boris Johnson fell. But of course, that wasn't ultimately why Boris Johnson fell. The final moment came when
Chris Pincher was caught allegedly touching up men in the Carlton Club. And again, Downing Street's response was to obfuscate, not get to the bottom of the facts and put out a false record of what had occurred, much the same has happened during Partigay. And this was Cummings's insight. He thought, if we plant this story,
There's every chance that Johnson will obfuscate, or as he would put it, lie about it. And then we've got him. And the problem for Boris Johnson was that his Downing Street kept following this pattern of putting one line out, sending ministers out to defend the indefensible, then changing their minds, then realizing there was a problem.
And by the time we got to the Chris Pincher episode, a lot of the Conservative party had enough of this. So was there a plot? Yes. Was it as extensive as Nadine Doris says? I don't think so. But was it ultimately Boris Johnson's fault? I think most people would say that it was. I mean, there's a quote which I actually got the week he fell, which is still one of my favourite quotes in the book where someone said, you know, Boris Johnson is the third Prime Minister in a row brought down by Boris Johnson.
And I wonder, just finally on this, how he responds to all of this. Have you been able to put all this to him? I mean, even just as a sort of writer applied, this is what I'm writing, what do you have any comment? Well, I'm not taught to him extensively about it. And certainly in the run up to the publication of the book, you know, I've heard from him several times where he'll sort of phone up and say, well,
I'm not covering this in my book, but what about this insight into events that have happened? His take is that he didn't really know what was going on. Yes, he was complacent about the degree to which MPs disliked him and he underestimated that, didn't understand how important that was, admits that he should have done more to
sort of keep the party on side, given that those were ultimately the people who could sack him before the voters had an opportunity to do so. That was his sort of big failure of insight, I think. And he now acknowledges that. But in terms of party gate itself, he doesn't really think that he did anything wrong. He's one of those people where there are different layers to Boris Johnson. If you have 10 minutes with him, you get a very different Boris Johnson to the one you get after two and a half hours. And I think it's fair to say, when I was interviewing him for the book,
There was a sort of, you know, you're barely through the door and he's saying, this is all nonsense. I didn't do anything wrong. And after sort of an hour, he's admitting some of the stuff that he then put in his book about complacency and some of the sort of procedural mistakes that he might have made. And then after about two and a half hours, he asked me what I thought. And I sort of said, well, I don't understand why you didn't say all this and gave him a kind of
statement where you sort of say, well, I didn't know what was going on. I'm shocked to discover all this. We've got to the bottom of it. Here's the truth. We're sending it to the police. These people have now been fired and I'm terribly sorry. And if he'd stuck to that, I think there's every chance he might have survived all the way to the election. It's possible even he would have won it, but he didn't do all that. And in those moments, you get a sort of slightly sad Boris Johnson, who admits that your account might have something
going for it. But then within 10 minutes, he's back to saying it's all nonsense and needn't do anything wrong. So I've seen all of these Boris Johnson's both in the run up to the publication of the book and subsequent to some of the extracts that we've run in the newspaper. I mean, I don't think I'm betraying any confidence is to say that the thing that most disturbed him was the idea that the Queen had said some rude things about him far more than anything about party gate or about prerogation or all of that stuff, far more concerned about.
Elizabeth the Great, as he saw that. Boris Johnson, of course, after that, Chris Pintra Fair was famously out, the herd moved, and the moving people of Downing Street had no idea how busy they would be over the next few years. We'll get to that in a moment. All those podiums as well. Every Prime Minister has a different podium, so they had to sort of, you know, rustle them up.
Coming up, why some of those around Liz Truss told Tim they thought she was psychologically unfit to be Prime Minister. And is there a world where Rishi Suna made slightly different choices and didn't lose the 2024 election? More from Tim in a moment.
Tim shipment we're discussing your final book in your massive literary series hopefully final book hopefully final book well you're leaving the door open now it's first of all you say that we've dispatched Boris Johnson Liz trust and then obviously rishi soon at on Liz trust thinking about how all of that came to an end. What did you learn about.
why ended so quickly. I think there was an account previously that Liz Truss, very ideological, knew exactly what she wanted to do, got stuck in and realised she was short of time and thought, well, I need to do everything now, and that she was enabled by
the sort of passive failure of the civil service to resist and a kind of intellectual fellow travelers in quasi-quarting the Chancellor and some of the other senior figures in her Cabinet who were egging her on to do all this. I think what I've discovered from talking to pretty well everybody who was around this situation, both in her Downing Street and in the Cabinet,
I think it's fair to say that pretty well everybody sought to resist elements of what she wanted to do, including Quarteng, including his chief secretary, Chris Felt, including Simon Clark, who was very much a sort of ideological fellow traveler, who was part of her kind of in a circle. About halfway through the leadership contest, sort of mid-August of 2022, she took them all off to Chivning, and they sat there and had a kind of intellectual think tank where they planned what they were going to do with the budget.
And it all began there really.
And she just got more and more carried away. And was it ideological as you keep saying? Because in a previous life, she did vote remain. So I wonder how deep did that go? I think it's the zeal of the convert to a degree. But she was certainly always radical on the economic matters. I think she voted remain because she was worried about the economy and was worried about losing the patronage of David Cameron and George Osborne at the time. But having made that choice and by her light, Scott, it wrong. But she then became overzealous in the other direction.
and was pushing for no deal in for a lot of 2019 when she was in both the Mayan Johnson cabinet. So she'd got more ideological, but I think it wasn't just about belief. I mean, one of her aides said to me that early in the leadership contest, when she wasn't sure she was going to win, don't forget, she had quite a difficult time getting past Penny Morden to get into the runoff with Richard Zunach.
But one of her aides said to me, look, early on when she wasn't sure she was going to win, she was taking advice and doing what she was told by sort of political operators by people who wanted to train her up to be better at debates by some of her comms team. But once she was convinced she was going to be prime minister, she kind of lost control. I mean, one of them sort of said that she almost kind of had a breakdown, not in a kind of depressive sense, but in a kind of
became quite manic about the need to just do everything at once. She kept running around saying to me, if I've only got two years, I've only got two years, I've got to do it all now. And gradually going, these are the things I've always wanted to do. This is my big moment. And the interesting thing is, you know, the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, tried to stop her, called her economically illiterate behind her back and said she was completely mad. Senior of Mandarin's at the Treasury said, we're not sure about all this Prime Minister, what's going on here? Quatang said, we've got to slow down.
We've got to offset these tax cuts with some spending cuts as well. Chris Phillips said the same. Simon Clark said the same. They all wanted cuts, spending cuts to balance some of the tax cuts she refused. When it came to the energy package, they had to decide whether they were going to cap people's energy bills at two and a half or three thousand pounds. The difference between those is a ten billion pound decision. There was literally no discussion and she just went, no, due two and a half thousand.
When they were drawing up investment zones for the budget, the Treasury wanted to cap the numbers because they didn't want limitless amounts of tax-free areas around the country. Simon Clark, who was in charge of overseeing that, kind of understood that. And she just didn't want to do that. There was some sort of slightly sinister flirting with Clark, and she just fluttered her eyelashes and said, you've just got to live a little.
So the economy of Britain was basically in the hands of someone for whom the shackles had just come off, this was her moment, and she went through it. And so you said that it's a monstrous consequence. But are you saying that it's purely, or not purely down to, but largely down to the ticking clock that she had, and that had she been an incoming Prime Minister with a full five years ahead of her, it might have gone differently. Or is it, as people close to have said to you, that she was just
Unfit as a person to be prime minister in any context. Well, I think it's very difficult when you're short of time and you're that zealous about doing big stuff. The combination of the two is a pretty heady cocktail and a lot of
the people who were big beasts were not in her cabinet. People like Michael Gove, who'd been around, were banished from Truss's cabinet. She didn't have a lot of the old stages, and frankly, she didn't tell a lot of people what was going on. The whole way she set up her Downing Street, the whole way she behaved,
It's always difficult with a new Prime Minister that the system wants to try and help and facilitate, not just block. But her economists, the Cabinet Secretary, the Treasury Mandarin, her Chancellor and the members of the Cabinet that knew anything about all this all tried to say, do less, and she ignored them all.
And as you say, we know how all of that ended. And then Rishi Sunat came in, promising a bit more of a sensible Susan approach, him and Jeremy Hunt, his chancellor, trying to write the ship. He didn't spend too long in office, as we can all remember from recent history. Was it always going to be that way with Rishi Sunat, do you think? Was the weight of all those previous years of Tory governments, of Johnson, of Truss, and maybe even Cameron Osborne before that, just too much for him to overcome?
or could it have been different in the end? Look, I mean, it could have been different. I think the result could have looked very different. But was it likely that the Conservative Party was going to be got rid of by the public? I think there's every chance of that after 14 years in power and pushing eight years of chaos. It's quite difficult to get past that. But where Liz Truss refused to listen to advice and did too much, I think arguably, Richie Cinek refused to listen to advice and did too little.
The story of Sunak is that he set himself up as the great technocrat who was going to deliver things and wasn't very interested in the politics, the narrative, the story to tell the nation, the vision thing, to the frustration of a lot of his aides. He didn't want to do any of that. But in the end, he didn't deliver either. So he kind of alienated
people who want big ideological politics on the right, but also the public who just wanted some quite delivery. And for the first part of Sunak's reign, he did quite well, he did calm everything down, the budget that he and Hunt did kind of did settle the markets and settle nerves generally. And then he did the Windsor deal in Northern Ireland, the sort of next Brexit deal.
in January, February of 2023. And one of his aides said to me, actually, all criticisms for calling the election too early. Actually, we called it far too late. It would have been better off to go then in the spring of 2023. And I think, you know, it's possible to say that you might have got a hung Parliament had he gone then with a bit of sort of following wind. But I don't think he would have won. He would still have been surrendering a majority of 80. And I don't think he'd have been thanked by the Conservative Party for that. And at that point, Sunak was trying to
keep the show on the road. But he was so resistant to trying to have a good, forward-looking vision that the public could buy into.
There's an account of a meeting at Checkers where his aides were desperately trying to get him to focus on this. And he wanted sort of two days with a whiteboard and a lot of big ideas and some strategy and some polling and all the rest of it. They got a brief presentation from Isaac Levito on the numbers. And then soon I said, well, thanks very much for coming off you go. They'd all given aside their weekends for this. And he sent them home at lunchtime. And this did not go down well with some of his more
Trenchmen-style aides who were like, you're not even going to feed us at this point. And at which point, the RAF staff, we weren't expected to fit. And they wrestled up some soup, some undefinable soup, which came to be a sort of light-made teeth amongst a lot of Sunac's aides for a slightly shambolic operation. And a PM who wasn't that interested in political strategy.
So actually had he called the election much later and had himself more time to maybe enjoy more strategy conversations over soup, you don't think it would have actually been massively. Look, I mean, I've talked to most of the people involved in that 2024 general election, the people who
In the end, sided with Sunak in calling the election. We're worried about stuff that was going to happen over the summer. They were worried about more boats coming. They were worried about public sector pay deals, which were colossal, even with labor in charge. Those unions would have pushed even harder with a conservative government. There'd been a lot of strikes, I suspect, if Sunak had tried to resist the pay deals. But Isaac Levito, who ran the election, he said, no, please wait. We've got far more options for how we run a campaign and far more chance of
Talking a good game on the economy if we wait until the autumn and he wrote a memo in early April to that effect which is quoted fairly extensively in the book. I think the Tories on the night lost something like 47 seats by less than 1500 votes so small changes could have made quite a big difference to whether this was a massive labor majority or not.
So are you saying now, then, five months into this new Labour government that all those noises off around the time of the election results saying, well, this is the Tories out for a generation now. They've had 14 years. Actually, they've screwed up so much. People aren't going to vote Tory again at the next election. And maybe they can fight the one after that, possibly. Are you saying actually it's all to play for?
seem to me think. Well, look, I think there are a lot of voters who will judge this government on its results, and they didn't get the leveling up they hoped for out of Boris Johnson, and if they don't get it out of Keir Starmer, they might well look to Nigel Farage or to a different Conservative leader, and it's not wholly
impossible that that conservative leader would be Boris Johnson again, because if reform do really well in the local elections and in the Welsh elections next year where they're very confident of winning sort of 20 odd seats, you can easily see the Tories having a sort of another meltdown. And at that point,
The most likely leaders are two of them, aren't even in the house of commons at the moment, but James Cleverley is kind of the king over the water who's not in the shadow cabinet. Penny Morden's desperate to get a seat back and would surely have another crack. And if the party thinks our only hope is this bloke who's won four big election campaigns, there is a non-zero chance that Boris Johnson leads them into the general election. I would say fodder for book five, perhaps. However, when we last spoke, you were very firm saying no, no more. I'm doubling in fiction.
How's that going? Well, I've started working on a sort of political espionage novel. Do we have a title? Not yet. I've sketched it out. I've sketched it out. I've written the first sort of 4,000 words of it and I've had some conversations with publishers. We've got a bit of interest. So, yeah, that's what I'm going to work on next. Do you think it's any good?
I mean, one would hope so. I read a lot of spy novels, so I kind of know the genre. I've got one unpublished novel, so I've kind of had a crack at it before, and I know the sort of rhythms of a book. And I've always tried to write my non-fiction in a little bit like it's... I try and tell you about the characters and get inside their heads a bit, as well as just saying who called who, what in a meeting.
So we'll see. It's a different craft, but it's one I've always wanted to have a go at. So certainly for the next couple of years, that's my plan. And if someone could keep Boris Johnson locked in a cage, so I don't have to write a fifth book, that would be splendid. Tim Shippen, thank you very much. Thank you.
Tim Shipman, chief political commentator for the Sunday Times, with an appetizer, a can of a taste of what is inside his latest book. It is called Out, and it is out right now. We'll put a link to where you can buy that in the show notes of the episode. Thetimes.com, with a subscription, is where you'll find Tim's weekly dispatches on the inner workings and mishaps of the current government.
The producer today was Edward Drummond, funeral each was the executive producer, sound design and theme composition was by Marilyn Seto and I'm Luke Jones, see you soon.
