How to Handle Elon Musk (And The Farmers)

We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly. But it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients.

Mike Allward is a dairy farmer from Cheshire who supplies organic milk to McDonald's in the UK for its teas, coffees and porridge through Arla. We're involved in a network which has been set up by Arla to look at the possibilities for farming regeneratively. One of the things we're doing here is moving our cattle and giving them a fresh piece of grass every day to help regenerate the soil.

We're very lucky that we've had a long-term relationship with McDonald's. And I think often people don't realise how seriously McDonald's take their relationships with farmers. Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's plan for change on the McDonald's website.

Hello, I'm Holly Mead and with me is Lucy Andrews and we are both from the money team at The Times and Sunday Times. And our new podcast is called Feel Better About Money. It's a safe place to talk positively about money and personal finance. Each week we will tackle a specific financial topic from managing debt, saving for a pension, buying a house or deciding whether to ensure you're cat or dog or goldfish. Feel Better About Money is sponsored by Lloyd's ready-made investments.

Well, should I say his excellency? I thought I was just going to get a stony silence there. One piece of you might get stony occasionally, but never silence. Ooh. I do love it when the grown-up's in the room bigger. That's what this podcast is about. Welcome back, one and all, to how to win an election. Good to have you all here. I'm Hugo Rifkin and I'm joined as ever by the new Labour architect, Rarely Silence, sternly or otherwise Peter Mambelson. Hello, Peter. Okay.

I'm not a grown-up, but very bickory today. Don't correct me. Tory Pier, Time's columnist, and occasionally bickering Danny Fingalstein. Hello. Yeah, any bickers, anyone planning a bicker? Anyone got a bicker in their back pocket that they're going to... People are still not saying anything. I worry that he's just going to be like this for the whole hour. No, just me worried.

Do get in touch with your questions. For us, you can email us on howtowin at thetimes.co.uk. You can WhatsApp, also know triple three, double three, two, three, five, three, use the words how to win. We're going to talk about protests today and what is the right political response to people waving placards as we record this.

On Tuesday, farmers are gathering in London for a rally against the planned changes to inheritance tax rules for farms. Somebody who is getting in on the act early is Elon Musk, having previously predicted civil war in the UK after the Southport stabbings. He's now posted on X to say that Britain is going full-starlin, apparently comparing the changes to the tax rules to a brutal program of farm collectivisation. Polly, the government so far, has just pretty much ignored the world's richest man.

Is that going to become harder now he's got a role in Donald Trump's administration? I think it will become harder. But it's tricky because these are not serious comments. There's plenty of reasons why you might oppose what the government is doing around inheritance tax, around farms. But it's obviously ludicrous. And so how do you engage with a non-serious statement like that from somebody who has serious amounts of power and influence?

Do you think he knows it's a non-serious statement? I think that's what it's a puzzle with Elon Musk, right? It's possible that he was incredibly lucky with his kind of financial and business decisions and is the world's richest man despite being really quite stupid. And it's also possible probably more likely that some of this is play acting because outrage drives attention, which drives

power support for Donald Trump, you know, it's actually part of quite a complicated and sophisticated game that he can in fact see through. I mean, I don't think it's possible to know, right? Like he's not somebody who has close intimate friends who he talks to in depth because a bit like Dominic Cummings, I think he just generally thinks that everyone else is a non-playing character. Peter, how would a completely theoretical British ambassador to the United States deal with this man's apparent intense dislike of the United Kingdom?

engage with him rapidly, directly, personally. Look, I don't know what explains all this sort of hyperbole, but the point about the hyperbole is that he does get noticed as a result of it. Here we are having a discussion about him, and if he hadn't compared Kiyastama to Stalin and the famine that Stalin inflicted on people who lived in,

in rural areas, then he wouldn't have cut through in the way that he has. So he's got a wonderful, Trump-like way of communicating, being noticed. He exaggerates to make a point, but he's entitled to his view. I'm not sort of going to get all sort of tied up and wound up over the hyperbole. I'm much more interested in what he's done, what he's done,

with Tesla, with all the rockets, the satellite system, which is fairly unique. He is a phenomenon. He is a technological, industrial, commercial phenomenon.

And it would be unwise, in my view, for Britain, to ignore him. I don't think that is the purpose of the government, by the way. I mean, all this feud sort of kicked off in the election, didn't it? I can't quite remember why away. It was supporting the protests. He got on board with the two-tier critique, quite strongly. It was the protests in South Korea. No, he hooked up with Rishi Sunak. Rishi Sunak invited him to what was a quite successful AI summit that he organised.

So the two of them formed a sort of bond and I think it all went from there. But look, you cannot pursue these feuds. You can't afford to do it. We can't afford to do it. We should try and kick it into touch as soon as possible. Look, he's also a media entrepreneur. So first of all, on the substance bit, as you possibly go, my father was, when he was 10 years old, was

deported to Kazakhstan to work on a collective farm. And hundreds of thousands of Poles, possibly more than a million, suffered that fate. My grandfather was a woodcutter on another one. I remember we've spoken about it often because of our family histories with this. So clearly, the comparison will seem to us not only ridiculous, but a bit offensive.

It was in response to an article by Will Hutton rather than to the government's policy and Will Hutton's argument in his article was that this inheritance policy of the government was a good thing because it would redistribute land away from the aristocracy and from farmers. So it certainly was amenable to a strong political argument.

and Elon Musk chose to use this particular phrase. Now why did he use this phrase? It's not because I think he's making us serious or expects us to make a serious comparison with Stalin. What he's doing is utilizing his own media platform in the way that it's designed to be utilized and where

Elon Musk and Donald Trump are both showing themselves expert at creating engagement, which Elon Musk uses both for political power and valentially. And in Donald Trump's case, political supporters come from it. And they've used it in the way that FDR used, you know, Roosevelt used the radio. Kennedy was able to use the television. Obama was brilliant at the internet meme. And

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are both expert at Twitter. So calling Will Hutton's column in the Guardian, Stalin, is a form of communication. It's sort of an it's an idiom. And I think it's at the same time as responding to whether or not it's a serious comment and what it means in diplomatic terms. It's worthwhile us thinking, as we're all thinking about political strategy,

what this is about in terms of political communication. This is a means Twitter and X and other social media of communicating that's very politically potent and lends itself to flip comments, jokes, exaggerations. But it also relates to how they talk when not on Twitter. And there's something about the Trump administration, the Trump team, the whole Trump philosophy, the British political point of view.

It's just so seethingly unprofessional and you kind of wonder how a government can engage with it while retaining dignity. So I think this is totally to misunderstand how politics works and in fact it's been a subject of a lot of discussion below three of us.

which is what is it that actually shifts the dial and what Trump has discovered and by the way the other person who discovers in a different way was Dominic Cummings is that an awful lot of the things that we think move the political dial are actually irrelevant and don't change anything and he has got a fairly good grasp on what it is that moves people emotionally

and leads them to vote for things. And so we need to pay attention to it as a means of political communication and as an understanding of how politics works. Even if it's a little bit dispiriting, it means that politics is not a socratic debate or a discussion about whether or not this is a reasonable description of Labour's inheritance types policy. So what that means, and Peter, from Tienes, what that means is basically

for, for, for mosque and potentially one day for Trump as well. Keir Starmer's government has become emblematic of everything he dislikes. He portrays it as such at least. He portrays it as the epitome of kind of sort of weak liberal workism and progressivism and all, all that kind of stuff. And he's probably going to keep doing it. That does ultimately at some point, I mean, does it invite a response or does it, does it mean, does the strategy have to be

befriend him and hope he stops doing it. I'm not sure that Trump is doing that. He's a Trump and Musk portraying Britain characterizing the government and its approach. Now, we're not sure that Trump is. I don't really detect that. Musk, to an extent, yes, he is. And I suspect that he absorbs quite a lot of this from the people around him, people he makes us with.

Who are on the right of British politics? And so they're bound to want to portray the government in a negative way. I mean that's just politics. The only thing you can do to overcome it is by exposing him to the genuine article.

He's got to meet Starmer. He's got to talk to the government. He's got to understand. He's got to be stolen. That is more challenging. That would be harder. Yeah, that would be harder. But honestly, I wouldn't underestimate Mark's company.

But I'm getting reincarnate stung. As you said, Rishi Sunak and Elon Musk had that sort of bit of a bromance last year, the year before, with the AI summit. Do you think that did Rishi Sunak any good? Because he came across as looking a bit subservient, I thought.

No, I don't think it did, though. I'm sure Danny would say was not the thing that moved the needle fundamentally. You know, where she's seen I could lost that election before he called it. And the reality is that the sort of the outrage farming, which Danny's right connects with lots of people's emotions in a way that sort of technocratic and bureaucratic

dialogue and sort of delivery cannot. But it only works if you're the person doing it. Being the meat little person sitting next to the outrageous Elon Musk doesn't make you look like the good guy. Nigel Farage gets some sort of that sort of, I guess, glow.

from Donald Trump and potentially Elon Musk as well, but because he is also involved in the tactic of outrage farming to drive a kind of populist agenda. I think we need to have pause actually about this and how we might manage it because from a political strategy perspective,

it is true that these tactics work. And some of the things that we held to, you know, the idea, the disciplines of professionalism that you might call them, maybe weren't important for politics, but they were important for governance. We're talking last week about the book, you know, why nations fail. And actually that sense of institutional rigour, the importance of democracy are critical.

to a successful rising economic growth to managing how a society might hold together. And populism, the problem with it, is that it does work. I mean, it wouldn't even exist if it didn't work. But what it does is it turns the dial on the worst of people's instincts. It makes elections winnable and government impossible. Exactly that.

If I were the government here, I'd be asking the embassy in Washington, DC to find out who is either for other British friends. Who are they all? And that they've got to be used, I think, as a bridge to Musk. And so that's what I would do.

You know, sort of your pride, find out who his friends are and try and get into those networks. You cannot just continue this feud indefinitely. You've got to get over it. You've got to be reintroduced to the British government. And one good way of doing that might be through some of his British friends, even if they are not, as I'd say, you know, bright red supporters of the Labour government. Including Nigel Farage then.

Yes, I would include Nigel Farage. I mean, you can't ignore him. I mean, he's an elected member of Parliament. He's a public figure. He's a bridgehead, both to President Trump and to Elon Musk and others. You've got to be pragmatic, practical about this. You've got to work in the national interest in

And that national interest is served in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways. But there are different sort of time horizons, aren't there? Everything that you've said, Peter, feels basically correct because, as bless us, power is power. And you need to find a way to be able to talk to this government, incoming government in the United States. However,

the more you give a platform to Nigel Farage, the more you are eating away at something that is really quite critical about the future of British governance. Nigel Farage was obviously a critical actor in us severing the link between the United Kingdom and the European Union, which

isolates us from our closest friends, neighbors and allies in a way that is, you know, incredibly risky. We don't know how Trump will engage with Ukraine, for example. We know that in Sweden and Estonia, they are preparing very much for the possibility of Russian escalation.

in a intra dialogue seek to influence talk. The Ukraine situation is incredibly challenging and worrying. You're not going to do that by boycotting either President Trump, obviously, but also the people close to him who you've got to try and find ways

through to President Trump. Of course you do, but you also have to think about how do you also insulate the United Kingdom from that incredibly toxic information ecosystem, which is driving alienation between the power of the state and the people, which Elon Musk absolutely wants

because he's much more interested in his own kind of personal wealth than he is. It's a beating up of the system, beating up of the government. And a lot of powerful people, it's true in the private sector, Rupert Murdoch was like this. Why was Rupert Murdoch so anti-European? He's basically anti-government. He didn't want government standing in the way of his aims, his objectives, his commercial interests. And he rather saw the European Union as a dirty great barrier to allowing him to do whatever he wanted to do.

They don't want, they want less government, they want a smaller state, less regulation, they want to get on with doing what they do. If you're the Labour Party and you believe that in fact government can be a force for good, you actually need to think, and that's not about just boycotts or being rude, of course not, but actually have to think about how do you reinforce at the social, economic and political level a sense among our people that government in fact can be a force for good.

So one thing you might focus on is making the government and the state more efficient, more effective, more pro-growth and all together, more acceptable. I think the lesson of Donald Trump's victory is it's literally the only thing that you can do that stands a chance of working. Although I was very struck last week, you talked about

the way in which Trump had failed, and even that didn't actually prevent him from getting re-elected, which was a very resting comment on my eye, I admit, but I think still success and emotional, as you put it last week, emotional attachment is both very important to deal with, and we've got to look at both those things.

Let's turn this back to farmers and protest, which is where we've gone, because they are massing in Westminster today. Danny, British farmers aren't as quick to rush the barricaders, their counterparts on the continent. Does that mean that when they do, it's more worth taking them seriously? Well, look, there are two things that

people have a view on in this dispute, one is farmers and the other is inheritance tax. And they do like farmers, they don't like inheritance tax. That is the political issue for labor with this. One of the things the farmers have got to be incredibly careful to do is not undermine one of those, in other words, behave in a way that people find so annoying that they then turn against the whole cause. Because at the moment,

Politically, they certainly, you've got the wind behind them. And I'm surprised the judgment was made that this amount of money was worth the problems it was almost bound politically to bring.

Do you think the judgement was made or do you think it's just a ball being dropped? So I think it was made but probably within sufficient political consideration. So having been in the room and one of the early discussions that led to the pasty tax, I know that when you, which was all about discriminating between different kinds of takeaway food,

And when you looked at it as a tax issue, it totally made sense to do this maneuver. It wouldn't raise much money, but it would level the playing field. It meant that takeaway outlets would stop complaining about supermarkets selling there.

take away food in certain kinds of ways. So it was definitely, you know, attacks, rationalization. And there was a bit of political consideration given to it, but insufficient considering the fuss that was going to be created. And I think it looks to me like there was insufficient consideration, the moment I heard it. And in fact, somebody that I know immediately what's at me saying,

That's a political era. So within a second of it. I don't really agree with Danny on this. I think, although I am instinctively pro farmer, because I live on a farm in Wiltshire, I live on a house, not on a farm. I don't have pigs. What colour are your wellies?

Goodness saying, you know, fully well that they're green. And so I see how hard it is to fall. And I see the all hours, all days, all week.

the way in which people work. And I know that farms don't have a great margin of profit. They're pretty near the edge. But the reason I don't agree with Danny on this is because although, yes, people are instinctively pro-farmer and against inheritance tanks.

They are also of the view, in my opinion, that if you're going to have an inheritance tax, then wealthy farmers and richer states shouldn't be able to sidestep it. I mean, I've looked at the polling this morning. You could pause it. It's like people thought people would think inheritance was on rich people, and they do want to have tax on rich people, but funnily enough,

though they do want tax-on-rich people, they don't think of farmers as rich and they don't think of inheritance taxes as the sort of tax they like. That's what the polls show. Because people have frankly limited knowledge of what goes on in farming in this country, that we are an overwhelmingly urban metropolitan population. They just don't understand one thing, which is that you're seeing an enormous number of very large scale

business farming businesses backed by hugely wealthy investors who are attracted to this market because they're not going to be paying inheritance tax coming in and buying up smaller farms all over the country. Now that is also a phenomenon and I don't agree with Danny on this also that the government didn't think about it politically. If they had not thought about it,

then they wouldn't have made sure that only 500 farms a year were affected by it. They wouldn't have made sure that smaller farms could pass on 3 million towns tax-free. If they were facing inheritance tax, they wouldn't have cut it by half. And if they weren't thinking about it, they wouldn't have made the payment of that inheritance tax.

spread over 10 years. So I think they did think about it politically. I think they have been sensitive, but nobody likes bolts out of the blue like this. And nobody likes suddenly to wake up one day and find that they're going to be paying tax. But let's just be realistic about this. The bulk of the people will be paying the overwhelming mass of the tax that arises from this are very wealthy, well-off investors who operate very big

business farms, who've had a very, very good and easy run of it for a long time. We're going to talk about this a bit more, and we're also going to move on to talking about the impact of protests and how governments generally deal with them in some examples from recent history. All that's coming up here on how to win an election.

We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly. But it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients.

Mike Allward is a dairy farmer from Cheshire who supplies organic milk to McDonald's in the UK for its teas, coffees and porridge through Arla. We're involved in a network which has been set up by Arla to look at the possibilities for farming regeneratively. One of the things we're doing here is moving our cattle and giving them a fresh piece of grass every day to help regenerate the soil.

We're very lucky that we've had a long-term relationship with McDonald's. And I think often people don't realise how seriously McDonald's take their relationships with farmers. Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's plan for change on the McDonald's website. G'day, Tim Williams here from Playbook 11. If you're interested in Dream 11 and want help picking your squad with expert Aussie insights, we've got you covered.

Form New Zealand International Returns Superstar Indian Premier League commentator Simon Dole joins me to preview all five Australia V India tests this summer to boost your chances of winning your dream 11 contest. Can Virat wholly bounce back to form down under or will the paste duo of Cummins and Start prove too fast to handle? With a history of fantasy cricket success, listen to the Playbook 11 podcast or watch our previews on YouTube via our Playbook 11 channel.

This is how to win an election with Peter Mandelson, Polly Mackenzie, Danny Finklstein and me, Hugo Rifkind. We have been talking about protests, particularly with an eye on the farm of protests that were unfolding in London this week. Before we come on to talk about protests more generally, Polly, I'm interested to know whether you think this is a policy inheritance tax for farmers in this way, on which the government has dropped the ball. Danny thinks it might be citing the pasty tax.

Peter with his green wellies feels not. I know how you love talking about the past attacks. I've learned that in a short amount of time. Could this be... I was talking about farms. I spent quite a lot of my teenage years living on a farm with a large number of sheep. What colour were your wellies? Sort of blue with pink spots. Really? Yeah. It sounds very cotswolds.

No, we're a whale. Proper, proper hill farming. So I think this is a brave and important policy change, actually, and I hope that it is part of a wider set of reforms to inheritance tax because of all the things to tax. Frankly, dead people are the best. In comparison with taxing things like working hard and earning money and creating capital gains even.

So, but it is one of those things, it's politically very, very difficult because just as Danny says, people have paradoxical sets of opinions, it's that they worry about the transfer of wealth and privilege between generations and they really hate the idea of inheritance tax because it feels like double taxation.

When I was running Demos, one of the last things I did actually was secure some funding for a major research program that I haven't touched because I left, but they've done a huge amount of work looking at how you might manage that paradox. How do you build a way to tackle the intergenerational transfer of wealth, which is profoundly distortionary to anything that, you know, you've sent to write people as well would agree on, which is that you ought to have a more meritocratic society in which it's not.

your parents' wealth, but your hard work that leads you to thrive. Actually, these farming changes are one of the things that is a relatively easy win in comparison to other changes. How might you find ways to get the public to accept that in order to have a fairer society and the ability to potentially tax work less? You should be taxing the transfer of wealth. It's actually the best moment to impose any kind of wealth tax.

because it is at a moment when assets are liquid. So I'm actually really positive about this and I think it is worth weathering that storm. So the fascinating thing is people just really don't think it's fair. And I understand because I've had a lot, I sort of went on a journey when I first understood this myself to kind of understand it. Do you mean specifically?

with farms or inheritance generally. So when this first came up, which was actually around the time when George Osborne made that first announcement on inheritance tax up, before which I hadn't really thought about it, my initial instinct was people are bound to think that it's fair, along for the reasons that you suggested. And it really led me into a much richer understanding of what people think fairness is.

And they don't think of it as fair, because they think being able to pass on things to their children is important. And even when it turns out, even when you say to people, you are unlikely to face this tax. And this tax only catches a very small number of people, even then they're against it. People really just don't like it.

That's why I think the Demos work is really interesting because it's starting to look at alternative ways to encourage people, because for example, if older people give away their assets to not the next generation, people in their 60s, but the generation below or the generation beyond that actually has a much more redistribution effect because not everybody

is likely to have the same wealth as their parents, right? And you can also give people a kind of leg up early in life rather than help them with a more comfortable retirement. So economically it plays out much better and still follows the kind of the trend of people's belief, which is actually protecting money for your family is a good thing. So there are ways that you could construct a different way of thinking about both inheritance and wealth.

that would have better distribution impacts without just as Danny says kind of running into something that feels unfundamentally unfair. Let's move on to talk about the protests themselves and protests generally. Danny, can protest generally shift the dial? I know you and I have been discussing protests for many years. You used to be very hostile to the concept of protests. You seem to be less so these days.

So what were my views that complicated? So first of all, I do think by and large, we better as a society, we're able to process things through a political system in which people argue for outcomes, compromise with each other. Most problems are pretty complicated. However, people do have to have the right to insert themselves into that discussion. So let's take, for example, two big protest movements.

the civil rights movement in the United States and the suffragettes in Britain. Well, it turns out that both the civil rights where Martin Luther King was far more effective than Malcolm X and were both women where the suffragettes were far less effective than the suffragists.

the actual change took place through the political system. It was much better that it should be so. And lots of the individual actions, both of Malcolm X and of the suffragettes, were in themselves, not ones you'd want to approve of. However, it's hard to look at it and think they weren't morally. They didn't have some justification. So there are some instances, and I would say the suffragettes were an example. They were within their rights to do the things that they did. However, it wasn't very effective.

So I think it's a more complicated issue than it looks. First of all, you've got to ask whether this will be effective, then you're affected to achieve what? Is it something that could be achieved reasonably through the political system? So for example, the debate that we're having about climate change,

There are lots and lots of ways in which you can get us off elected to Parliament and change the law on climate change. You do not have to throw super Van Gogh. And people have that instinctive feeling. But when it came to the suffragettes, they couldn't do that because they weren't allowed to insert themselves into the system.

Peter, the new Labour period, the beginning of it. So actually, I remember seeing quite a lot of protests going on during those years. There were the Iraq protests, there were the countryside alliance protests, which were very relevant today. The first, and perhaps most relevant to this, was the fuel protests indeed, in 2000. Did that sort of take the government by surprise then? It sort of changed the narrative around an incoming government, the fact that there was suddenly these huge protests, didn't it? Oh my god, yes.

Government was looking down its nose at the French and saying, oh God, there they go again. These people never stop, always out on the streets protesting and the farmers, French farmers were complaining about the soaring oil price and the impact it was having on their livelihoods. And then all of a sudden it sort of transmitted itself across the channel. And before we blink of an eye, it was happening on our doorstep and it was the courtly government.

You know, quite unprepared, they were very flat-footed at first. They recovered quickly, but only after the home office and a lot of other people had just been running around Whitehall like a bunch of keystone cops, not knowing what to do. But the reason why it just fired up in Hawaii was so incendiary is because it wasn't just the road haulers, the lorry drivers and farmers, by the way, at the time.

who were affected by the rising price of fuel as a result of the old price going up. There was also this fuel duty escalator, lethal sort of thing which combined with the rising old price had a tremendous impact. And what happened was that the Holiers turned themselves overnight by some miracle of organisation, where did that come from?

into Arthur Scargill-type flying pickets, who threw cordon around the few large oil refineries we have in this country.

And in a very aggressive way, stop those refineries, or stop the petrol leaving the refineries to go to garages so that people could fill up their cars on the garage for courts, and very quickly panic set in amongst the public, inevitably.

And, of course, what's important here is not only how the public are affected, and they were affected by rising petrol prices, and they were really scared by the panic buying. But, of course, the media, certainly the conservative supporting Tory-facing media, kicked in.

Don't the fire like nobody's business. I mean, normally you would expect the daily telegraph from the daily mail to sort of a sample over a bunch of flying pickets, Arthur Skargill type people who were just sort of creating mayhem. Normally the mail from the telegraph wouldn't celebrate these people, but they certainly did on this occasion. And there became quite a

It's sort of quite sinister, seeming-looking conspiracy surrounding all these... Well, when you said that, when you said where did that come from about the organisation? It sounded a bit like you've got an idea about where that came from. After a few days, there was

There was an intelligence that suggested that perhaps all this was being orchestrated by forces who were not apparent to the naked eye. I'm not going to go into... Domestic forces? Domestic forces. How fascinating. Yes. And this actually... Could you rationally tell us more? Anyway. No. You're going to get one of my stonies here.

But what happened was that after the initial chaos, and the government was flat-footed, it was unprepared, and Blair himself, who was on a tour of the north of England, found himself in Hull to finish office visit in a Chinese restaurant to celebrate some decades of service by John Prescott as a whole member of Parliament. He couldn't get out of the city hall because of the protesters, let alone make his

make his way to the Chinese restaurant and he had to abandon the celebration and come back to London. He got back to London and my word did he kick in and not only did he really shake up Whitehall's response but he summoned all the police chiefs as well.

whose approach hitherto had been, well, let's just all sort of be friends and not, you know, let's try and keep everything peaceful. They weren't actually doing anything to keep the refineries open to get the petrol out into the foregoals so that people could fill their cars. And Blair certainly turned around that attitude, PTQ. Now, but what really changed this, and this is significant, this is really significant.

people suddenly saw the impact of these protests and what these flying pickets were doing on the NHS, on hospitals, on care for homes. And when nurses started coming out and confronting the protesters and the picketers, then public opinion started to move. And that's where

the opposition was then called flat-footed. What happened was that the opposition, William Haig was the leader then, basically endorsed the protests and the big people. And they, as good as Dammit said, you've got right on your side.

Peter has told us the story of the fuel protests as a story of Blair's victory. In the sort of narrow political terms, I think that that's true. He did manage to get a grip on the protests. William Hague was in a difficult position. But actually, if you zoom out from that and think about the policy impact, that fuel duty escalator remains a sort of conceptual fiction that goes in every budget document. And every time the chancellor stands up and says, oh, well, I'm cutting fuel duty by not continuing

with the fuel duty escalator. It's a very good point. And so actually they won. And any attempt to introduce say a road tax or a per mile tax or anything to deal with the fact that fundamentally petrol taxes are going to diminish as we move from petrol to

electric vehicles and the politics of taxing electricity are very difficult as well. And so there's a structural underpinning issue and protest can mobilize to create fear and even just nervousness among government about addressing kind of deep, deep issues. And Danny I think is a bit sort of sweeping through the political science of this by just saying, oh well definitely it's the moderates who win.

Actually, I think the political science is much more contested and debated around that in that even highly controversial, even very disruptive, protests that themselves are condemned by public opinion can have an impact on shifting both the topics of debate that are covered, the mood of political leaders who often feel, and we saw this with the riots in the summer, where the behavior of those

I'm calling them rioters, not protesters, to literally set fire to hotels in which asylum seekers were living, were both condemned directly by most political actors, but nevertheless, there was a strong undercurrent of, but you have to understand that they've got real concerns. Climate protesters who have both thrown super vangoths and also blocked motorways leading to ambulances being prevented from getting to hospital with sick patients, prevented people from being at the deathbed of their loved ones,

Nevertheless, have shifted the debate about what's permissible, what's being discussed. And there is political science evidence suggesting that that ability to shift the topic of public discourse does in the long term have an impact, even often actually when the protests themselves are alienating disruptive. You stretch the extreme and the position of moderation. Well, I think they do show. So I think it's no point me denying you're obviously correct and gave a very good example with the fuel.

due to so you're obviously correct you can have an effect and let's use the example that i used which was the suffragettes clearly suffragettes did reinsert the issuance of the public debate at a time when it was when it was going lower however is also and i think it's hard to deny that the suffragettes also

delayed the introduction of hate for women because asked within particular was absolutely determined who although he was opposed to it anyway he was absolutely determined not to give in and he had quite a lot of support for people who were in favor of the policy but didn't want to give in to what they felt was actually often described as terrorism.

whether that's an appropriate term to use or not. So I think it basically has a dual effect and I admit that I'm layering on another level which is, I think it's a way of engaging in political discourse to be sort of fundamentally disapproved of.

It is led, it may possibly, for example, led us to position on fuel, which is incredibly irrational, given all our other policy objectives. And part of that is because in protest, you have all this theatre, but you can't, no nuance is possible. And nobody, you know, there'll be nobody today at the farmers rally standing up for fiscal responsibility, for example, which is the other half of this political protest.

So Danny, I mean, if we accept the premise that the William Hague ended up being a bit flat-footed by the wrong footed rather by the the fuel protests, having sort of supported them along the way, what's the lesson there today? So if I can be beaten off and have you engaged with farmers' protests? First of all, I don't recall it as being the public opinion moved on the issue itself. But I did think, I did think people looked to the opposition to be a future party of government and I think they

they thought the Conservative body was bandwagon-jumping and not being there for a fifth party of government and that's what damaged the Conservative Party at that point rather than the position itself. So I think if the Conservative Party understand the strategy of parts of the left, for instance, they will realise how mistaken it is

to support the idea of public debate being settled by protests or even advanced by protests. Fundamentally, it undermines a conservative settlement. If the Conservative Party doesn't get that, I think it'll struggle.

It's why Kemi Badenock so seriously wrong-footed herself for Prime Minister's questions last week. She's against all these tax increases, against inheritance, insurance, national insurance, employers, charges and everything.

Right. Well, how are you going to get us out of the fiscal plight predicament we're in? If all you're going to do is to refuse to say what you want to see cut in public spending without any increase in any tax. And that was what I'm afraid.

That's what I promised. That's what characterized her performance. And I'm afraid she's just fell flat on her face because the public are not idiots. They know there has to be a fiscal adjustment of fiscal correction. And it's bound to be painful. She's pressing on something that Labor did at the election, which was come to... No, I understand why she's doing that. They claim they weren't going to put up taxes and then we're going to fund public spending for growth. And now they're not doing that.

They're not yet turning around economic growth, but heaven knows they've only been there. So I'm afraid that doesn't excuse her. She's falling into the classic opposition trap. You take any stick to beat the government with, which when applied to yourself, you can't give a satisfactory answer or explanation for.

Thank you very much indeed to Peter Mandelson, Polly Mackenzie and Danny Finkelstein for joining me on how to win an election. We will of course be back next week.

We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly, but it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients. Sophie Bambridge grows quality potatoes for McDonald's iconic fries in Norfolk.

I think McDonald's are one of the biggest supporters of British farming. They have a real commitment to British potatoes. The Sustainable Fries Fund is a collaborative investment by McCain and McDonald's to help us understand and try different growing techniques.

for potatoes so that we can understand what we can do to help reduce our impact on the environment but still produce a good quality potato. It helps enable us to try things without having the risk and cost of potentially it going wrong. The support from McCain and McDonald's is really useful to us. Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's plan for change on the McDonald's website.

G'day, Tim Williams here from Playbook 11. If you're interested in Dream 11 and want help picking your squads with expert Aussie insights, we've got you covered. Form New Zealand international returns superstar Indian Premier League commentator Simon Dole joins me to preview all five Australia V-India tests this summer to boost your chances of winning your Dream 11 contest. Can Virat wholly bounce back to form down under? Or will the Paste duo of Cummins and Start prove too fast to handle? With a history of fantasy cricket success,

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