Donald Trump is heading back to the White House. Together we can truly make America great again. We are in for an unpredictable but fascinating four years. And we're going to be following every twist and turn for the first 100 days. We'll be bringing you the latest updates and analysis. First thing every morning. So join me, James Matthew. Me, Martha Kallet. And me, Mark Stone. For Trump 100, every weekday at 6am. Wherever you get your podcast.
Hello good morning and welcome to the early morning political podcast from Sky News and Politico that gives you everything you need to know about the day ahead in British politics in under 20 minutes without once threatening you with 50% tariffs if you don't do what we want.
My name's Anne McElwoy, executive editor at Politico, with Sam Coates from Sky News, it is Monday, January the 27th. I'm just back from Davos, Kiyastama has started the week in the country as well, no apparent plans there for foreign travel, and British politics is back to arguing about the shape of the economy over the decade to come. It feels a bit like normality's returned after a good long run of chaos, Sam.
I think that's right. I was reflecting over the weekend and probably from all the way back from 2014 through to last year, if you look at each one of those years, you had a massive, massive destabilising event, referendums, pandemics, deadlocks, elections, governments on the brink.
And for everything that you see in the papers and that we talk about, that's just not true now. We've got a government with a big majority, which is 163 at the moment. And unless the bond markets go haywire, KISS Dharma is here to say. So we are back to a level of low level of political chaos in Westminster.
after years at a tempo that I think many people became addicted to. And it really feels that we sort of rewind in the clock 15 years or so to a sort of earlier time that only veterans of the political scene rather like us, and I did a calculation, I think we've got at least 45 years between us, are used to. And I think it's important to emphasise that sometimes that people realise that it's not quite like it's been for the last few years.
Yes, and this is the week the government gets down to tussling with its core promise of growth, getting more serious about what it's going to take to make that happen. And one consequence is that number 10 are allowing Rachel Reeves to take centre stage with a big speech coming on Wednesday from her. And I think that's going to put cats among the Labour pigeons on the growth topic. Sam, do you want to begin running us through the week ahead?
Now, today, Monday is going to feel odd because there's going to be a complete gear change, a proper sort of vibe shift today, all the way through the day on our screens from about lunchtime through the evening, certainly on Sky News, and I suspect on BBC and elsewhere, they're going to switch to coverage of the 80th anniversary of the liberation.
of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration complex, which marks Holocaust Memorial Day. And obviously, obviously, that has big knock-on effects for our politics. Effectively, politics is on pause today. There were no announcements made by the government into today. There are no government figures on the morning round. Things are pausing understandably and quite rightly for that very, very significant moment.
There's only one other thing that's worth noting in politics today. That's Kemi Badenock is appearing at the Covid inquiry at 10.30. But really it's a day where the public conversation is going to be about what happened 80 years ago. Politics resumes in earnest and tomorrow. Do you want to tell us about that?
Yes, the Treasury is doing something on growth watchdogs. How do the various government body support growth? We don't have much detail on that variety of political canine yet. Chief Medical Officer for England, Chris Sweetie at the Commons Bill Committee looking at assisted dying legislation. Also, the Department for Health has an announcement about the NHS England mandate. But the thing that really leaks out is that Tuesday,
is the day when Angela Rainer's department does something a statutory instrument on council election dates, presumably for the May elections, and given that Reform UK are making a huge fuss about those councils whose elections are delayed because they're changing shape and structure, this could cause a commotion.
Wednesday, arguably the biggest moment of the political week, which is Rachel Reeves' speech. We think in Oxfordshire, according to Politico, to the moment of truth for the Chancellor, there'll also be Prime Minister's questions, and there's big week in select committees. Amanda Pritchard from NHS England is before the Health Select Committee. Andrew Bailey of the Bank of England is before the Treasury Select Committee.
And also it's the inaugural Political Podcast Awards by Inhouse Communications in St. Don Smith Square at Heart of Westminster. And because we've been nominated a couple of times, I'll be there, sadly without Jack. But the Politico team has been nominated. So we'll be there with them as well. So look forward to, will I see you there, Anne?
I'm not missing this one borrowed glory in my case, but I'm definitely going to pop along. And the same night Wednesday, Proffal now going to loss to Jeremy Corbyn in Islington that the general election has now set up the Good Growth Foundation. He's launching that and hoping he can get a big conversation going about the balance between the social and economic aspects of growth launching there on Wednesday. On Thursday, the whole Labour family will be gathering in Hull for John Prescott's funeral.
I look forward to the anecdotes that will be told, including by John Craig, my Sky News colleague, about and celebrating the former Depte Prime Minister's life. On Friday, it's the 5th anniversary of the UK formally leaving the European Union, reforming the UK as having a rally in Kemi Badenach's constituency, Henry Bens, giving a speech as Northern Ireland's secretary, and it's something called the Six Nations, which means awfully little to me, but appears to be interesting quite a lot of people.
But we ought to begin briefly with the overnight news. The announcement by No. 10 that Kia Starmer spoke to Donald Trump yesterday. Main points being it didn't go off track. Starmer can be very pleased with the tone and the duration of the call for 45 minutes as a fair amount of Trump bandwidth. They promised to meet up soon.
Number 10, we'll be happy for that, possibly ahead of other European countries. The two leaders said they wanted to promote a fair bilateral economic relationship. And Starmer highlighted UK efforts, deregulating to boost growth. Trump expressed well wishes for the British royal family. That's definitely the secret source of making this relationship work. And one personal touch, Donald Trump, opened by offering condolences after the recent death of Starmer's brother, Nick.
Look, I think that number 10 are going to be very happy with that. You only have to look at the main headlines in the US papers overnight, which are all about trans foreign policy to know just how much worse things could be going to appreciate actually in fairness. What a good job. The British diplomats, Karen Pierce, who's still the outgoing US.
are ambassador to the US have done. 45 minutes, as you say, is a long time for one of these calls. If you look over in what's happening at Columbia, this is what's happening in split screen. Yesterday, the Trump administration tried to send back two military planes filled with migrants
meant to deport them to Colombia. Initially the Colombian government refused to take them, refused to let the planes land. Washington immediately responded by imposing 25% tariffs on the country's imports from Colombia. And there was a so a trade war began, a war of words on social media began as the as President Trump and his Colombian counterparts sort of swapped blows. And in the end, Colombia backed down. That is foreign policy.
Donald Trump style, it couldn't be more different. And, you know, there are little nuances between the UK reader, which talks about the importance of a close and warm relationship, whereas the US just talk about a fair bilateral relationship. But really, really, really, I think we're spitting hairs. And it comes up on top of what Donald Trump said on the plane on Air Force One to US reporters on Sunday. Do you want to just tell us what happened there?
Yes, Donald Trump applauded Keir Starmer at the weekend saying he was doing a very good job thus far. He said that on Air Force One. He said, I like him a lot. He might not agree with Starmer's philosophy. He's liberal, which is a little bit different from me, but I think he's a very good person. Trump said, well, that's high praise indeed for a liberal. And he talks about the upcoming call.
It's always interesting to think about the things that they didn't talk about, so there was no explicit as far as we know mentioning the readout that we're given about tariffs. Just so you know, these readouts are brief. A 45-minute call cannot be condensed into 250 words, so we know that there were things that they talked about that we're not being told about.
It strikes me that precise language around tariffs will be very important, but we don't know about that. Another topic that isn't mentioned in the readout, but I can't see, didn't come up, and we'll try and find out today, bluntly, is what's going on with Peter Mandelson, Lord Mandelson,
Did Keir Starmer use the call to try and nudge President Trump into accepting Lord Mandelson as the ambassador to Washington from Britain? Those are the kinds of things where there's a bit of a black hole.
Yes, we might know a bit more about that soon because David Lamy, the Foreign Secretary, has a call today with his new counterpart in the US Marco Rubio. So they might get into that because that comes a bit more in their bailiwick, perhaps, than the Prime Minister, President-level.
There's another reason why I think 2025 is going to be a year where foreign policy really has a bigger impact than foreign policy normally would do on a UK government. And that's in another bit that was sort of vaguely referenced in the readouts of the Trump call, and that's to do with defence and joint and shared priorities on defence.
because famously Donald Trump's biggest foreign policy aims is to try and get other countries NATO countries to spend more of their defense bluntly so America doesn't have to spend as much. So you've had Donald Trump call for five percent NATO spending NATO countries spending on defense which is a
a proportion that even America itself doesn't spend on defence. But that's the kind of high bar that the US president is setting. And that comes against a backdrop of a row in Britain over defence spending as we head towards the spending review in June, the spring statement in March and the budget later this year.
All of that ended up in some of the papers overnight. Harry Cole in The Sun, in his column, breaks the news that actually it seems like some in the Treasury are pushing that the government's target of spending half of what Donald Trump wants, 2.5%, is pushed back to 2032.
We know from Playbook last month that some of the MOD wanted that target date, the 2.5% of spending to be 2027. So that's a huge gap. We know from the, because we've talked about this many times, from the Office of Budget Responsibility, it would cost £10.3 billion a year to move from what we spend at the moment, 2.3% to 2.5%. It's a huge chunk of money that Rachel Reeves doesn't have.
but Donald Trump is demanding that everybody, including the UK, says more, will Donald Trump, putting pressure on Keir Starmer, make any difference to this argument? Well, certainly we'll make a big difference to the Trump-Starmer relationship going forward to that theme. And someone else who will be listening carefully to that will be Rachel Reeves. This, of course, is her big week Wednesday
is going to be a decisive speech from her on what is going to be needed to push growth along. The parliamentary Labour Party will also hear Reeves praising individual ministers who've captured the government's deregulatory zeal-sam and Politico playbook is till the Chancellor will name check Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rainer, the Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle
The environment's actually Steve Reed and Lisa Nandi, the culture secretary. I guess what's telling about that list is the ministers who weren't mentioned and the fact that she's co-opting good opinion among senior colleagues for this growth drive and really sort of hanging them on the back of that wagon very prominently.
Rachel Reeves is at the center of everything this week. Her speech on Wednesday is going to be prefigured by more announcements, and I think that there's going to be more Treasury ministers out and about later in the week. Really kissed. I'm sort of handed over the agenda to the Treasury through this week.
And it comes off the back of a sort of very interesting flip in British politics. There has just been a turnaround in sort of political stock and tone in the last couple of weeks. Now, you never turn around fundamentals in politics in two weeks. And the fundamentals remained the same. She still went too close to the wind in the budget last October. She left herself with relatively little wiggle room.
When it comes to how much that she is projected to borrow against herself and pose limit, it still remains the case that her own watchdog the office for budget responsibility could find herself in breach of her fiscal rules in March when they next assess it and it still remains the case. She could be knocking on the doors of cabinet colleagues to ask for a further squeeze in growth in their departments.
come that statement and come the spending review in June. None of those things have changed. But what has changed is that the Treasury in terms of announcements and the government in terms of growth have gone up a gear, all culminating in Wednesday's speech. So ever since Rachelaries came back from China, she has been in fightback mode. And I think the political vibe in Westminster is that more or less that has gone quite well. Don't you think, Anne?
Yes, I think so. And I think she was on the front footer. She put it in sales mode at Davos. And that did capture attention. And I think she got off the very defensive, is this all going wrong, a line that she was fighting last week on really, wasn't she? And I think this speech on Wednesday now fleshes that out. But for me, that's also the moment, this is the moment in the contacts brought.
With her own party with those who when it comes to growth, yes, everybody wants growth, but when it caches with environmental consent, when the relaxation of planning gets people's backs up about what's going to be built at speed close to them. And she said some quite provocative things in the last few days. So she sort of admired the way that China got stuff built.
You know, that's not always the way that you'd want Britain to go about big infrastructure projects that we bulldozing through Samcoated's back garden or something. So there was a bit of that sort of balance of Rachel Reeves being on the front foot, but also I think for the first time for me, really taking on Jeopardy! We've heard of being quite cautious, a bit mechanistic. This is a new guise for the Chancellor.
On Wednesday, what you're going to hear is a wrap-up of the announcements that we've had so far, so a new way of enforcing nature and habitat rules, the chance to ensure that planning projects go ahead because they're going to be required to take part in fewer consultations. There's an overhaul of how judicial review works for some projects. We're going to hear that she will be receptive to another bid by Heathrow for a third runway, which I understand is coming.
In terms of the politics of this, for all the grumbling of figures like Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham, the two mayors who are opposed to the third runway and sort of some discomfort in the labor ranks, absolutely every announcement I am told has gone through or is going through cabinet. So there should be collective cabinet agreement behind everything. That is why whatever the sort of slight private grumblings when Ed Miliband appears this afternoon before a
select committee don't think that he'll be opposing Rachel Reeves plan for a third runway that she'll she'll signal she's in favor for for on Wednesday and nor do I expect any other member of the cabinet to express any opposition because going through cabinet I'm told
was an early decision by the Treasury. They wanted everything to be signed off collectively, so there wasn't the top-level fight about this stuff that you had in the back end of Gordon Brown's government. If you remember where Ed Miliband was signaling his opposition to a third-way runway, then he didn't resign then, and I wouldn't expect him to resign now.
No, neither would I, but I would imagine that Minnesus Ed Miliband is a prime example that probably looked for some reassurances that they get something else in return from the Treasury, from Rachel Reeves, and particularly that green tech agenda and leaning more into the things we think that he can get from the Treasury, from Rachel, which would be spending power perhaps to do
some things that he needs for investment in green technology. But the price of that, as you say, is Cabinet loyalty and effectively their names are going to be signed in in blood behind what Rachel Reeves wants.
final reminder because the alarm's just gone off, uh, signaling we're at 20 minutes. Everything the government is talking about for growth is not going to generate the kind of growth that causes an increase in the amount of money going to the ex-jucker for 10 or 15 years. So none of this helps Rachel Reeves or probably kissed on the time in government at all, but it's a fight that they think are the right thing to do and a signal, uh, to business. And as I said before, the fundamentals
have not changed despite Rachelaries having a good couple of weeks. The fact is that the cost of tenure borrowing for Britain has come down a bit, giving her more political breathing space. It's down off its peak of 4.89%, which was just two weeks ago.
It's now 4.64%. That's what it closed at the end of last week, but that's still above what it was at the time of the budget. The bond market continues to police, Rachel Reeves. The question is, will it be more relaxed in two weeks, a month or three months? Is that what and what she does going to actually dominate her whole time as chancellor? That's all we've got time for today. And I look forward to seeing you again tomorrow morning. See you in the morning.
Donald Trump is heading back to the White House. Together we can truly make America great again. We are in for an unpredictable but fascinating four years. And we're going to be following every twist and turn for the first 100 days. We'll be bringing you the latest updates and analysis. First thing every morning. So join me, James Matthew. Me, Martha Kelly. And me, Mark Stone. For Trump 100, every weekday at 6am. Wherever you get your podcast.