This is the Guardian. Who's done a very good job thus far? He's very new in the job but he's represented his country in terms of his philosophy. I may not agree with his philosophy but I have a very good relationship with him.
We've now stabilised the public finances which means we can go further and faster on that bedrock of stability to grow our economy. I'm Pippa Carrera and I'm Kieran Stacey. You're listening to Politics Weekly Westminster for The Guardian.
And here we are back in the broom cupboards at Westminster Kieran. I think it's actually now known as the dungeon. Although we're not below ground. Just give our listeners an idea of the glamorous surroundings that we're in. Very crazy for four of us crammed in here. Obviously we have our producers Frankie and Zoey in here with us as well. But before we get into what's going on in the world of politics this week, what have you been up to over this weekend? You know what I've been up to.
because you were with me on Saturday night and at a kind of a political heavy party, I would say, on Saturday night at a place I've never heard of before called Eel Pie Island, which is an island in the middle of the River Thames, which felt like stepping into the 1950s, a quite incredible place in a rowing club overlooking the river. And it was great fun, but I hope I'm not betraying any confidence as to say you outlasted me by several
I'm afraid that my husband and I went on to the pub afterwards and I'm ashamed to admit and probably shouldn't do so publicly. But my last drink of the night were raspberries and buccas. Never had those before. I have to say they were as horrendous as they sound. But I was actually good to say I'd been doing something much more wholesome this weekend, which was
which was get my daughter's suffragette costume ready or work with my daughter to get her suffragette costume ready for a theatre project they've got on at school today. So we've been having a great time like raiding my wardrobe and trying to find sashes and hats and things so she could be a suffragette. Far too much time spent on sorting out her hair this morning though which I didn't think was really sort of like would have been the priority for
for the feminists trying to get the vote back in the day, but it was good fun to do. And she went off with her courage calls to courage everywhere sign looking forward to her days. So that was not just not just her mummy having a political day to day. But I didn't just have to prepare a suffragette outfit for today. I was also writing a piece pulling together a piece after lots of phone calls I had at the end of last week.
about the relationship between Kiyostama's Downing Street and Donald Trump's White House. And there was some developments over the weekend. First of all, Donald Trump was asked about Kiyostama. There'll be a big sigh of relief in Downing Street because he was actually for the praise for Kiyostama. He said, he's represented his country in terms of philosophy. I may not agree with his philosophy, describe him as a liberal.
but I have a very good relationship with him. And then that was shortly followed by 45-minute call, which by Trump standards is pretty long to get that amount of time in his diary suggests they not just had lots to talk about, but that Trump was willing to remain on the line. Given what we know is likely to be a rocky relationship between the two countries going forward,
Just feel like they've kind of got off to an all right start, doesn't it? Yeah, I think Downing Street would be absolutely delighted as you say the length of the phone call. And then if you look at the readout that was provided by Downing Street, these readouts tend to be pretty curt. You don't really get any detail as to what two leaders might have talked about on any given phone call. But actually, this one I thought was reasonably long and reasonably detailed and included many of the policy points, which I think the Brits would have wanted to talk about.
There was no mention of tariffs in the readout. So let's see, I don't know. We don't know whether they discussed them or not. There was no mention of the Chagos Islands or Peter Mandelson either. All very sensitive issues. They did talk about trade. Maybe that's you for missing for tariffs. They also talked about the economy. They talked about Gaza and security in the Middle East.
There was time for President Trump to talk about the royal family, one of his favorite subjects. But it does seem to have been a relatively positive call. I was having a look over some previous readouts of phone calls between Donald Trump and former prime ministers, Theresa May and Boris Johnson. And they tended to be much shorter, much blunter, more to the point. Usually the calls would not last more than 30 minutes. So on all of those counts, I think Danny Street could be pretty happy.
I imagine one of the reasons that it might have been 45 minutes is Donald Trump does have a tendency to ramble on these calls and go completely off topic. So for example, when he was talking to Theresa May, I think it was he spent a long time talking about wind farms and his hatred of wind farms. And we don't know whether he did the same to Keir Starmer, but apparently what former officials say is that Donald Trump likes these phone calls to be quite transactional and to the point. So he likes to get down to business.
And while Kiestammer and he might not necessarily warm to each other in terms of personality or philosophy, as he says, Kiestammer is someone who can just get down to basic details quite quickly. So maybe that's what he liked and that's what he appreciated in the call. The call reminded me of a former colleague of mine who had interviewed Donald Trump. I wouldn't say who they were.
when he was president last time round and they were given a 10 minute slot which isn't long for an interview. They went into the room and Trump basically spent the first seven minutes of this interview talking about golf and this former colleague was getting increasingly panicked when they were going to be able to get a decent line out of him and amazingly managed to get a few lines out of him in that sort of three or maybe they pushed it to five minutes afterwards but you can imagine what it must be like for world leaders on the other end of the call.
But your piece was really interesting as well, because it was incredibly well timed, given the call. But you had some really interesting details about how that meeting had gone, that now famous meeting in Trump Tower, and why it was that Don Trump and Keir Starmer and David Lamay, the Foreign Secretary, do seem to have been able to get along during that. What were people telling you?
So I think underlying at all is that Labour had prepared for Trump and expected him to win the election. And it all goes back to David Lamy, the Foreign Secretary, then shadow Foreign Secretary going out to the States five or six times in opposition. And on his sixth visit back in May last year, he met a whole swathe of US political politicians, think tanks,
and the two campaign teams, the Dems and the Republican campaigns team. And he was very impressed by the focus and the discipline of the Trump campaign. And I was told that when he got back to the UK, he wrote a note to Kiyostama to update him on the visit and the top of the page of the words, the Democrats are in trouble.
And since then, they've been working on this relationship, including that meeting at Trump Tower that you mentioned when Trump apparently dimmed the lights so that his guests could see the really quite stunning Manhattan skyline of his showing off his view from that penthouse apartment. But there's been plenty of conversations as well on the phone between the two leaders.
I'm told that Downing Street was hoping to emulate the more pragmatic approach of the former of the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. He overcame years of hostility from the US President before going into politics towards Japan, and they formed a really strong personal relationship.
often over rounds of golf. Now, well, I'm told that Qistamra doesn't play golf and there's no plans to take it up. He both wants to sort of have his arm round metaphorically round Donald Trump's shoulder and make it clear that, you know, he's a friend and he's an ally and he can be relied on and trusted, but also managed to be very clear about Britain's national interest, which is what Abe did so well. In fact, even at the end of that term got a limited trade deal between Japan and the US,
Downing Street says that they want to approach the relationship with calmness. It's very easy to get freaked out by what Donald Trump says, and sometimes the rhetoric isn't matched by the reality, and they want to focus on the issues which they actually got in front of them at any given time, rather than being freaked out by it all ahead of time, and feeling they have to comment on things. They thought very hard about this approach, at the heart of which, of course, are trade and defense, and how
what the UK can offer to the US in return for a strong economic relationship. But it's also built on personal relationships and Summers said this about relationships as world leaders across the board, that there has to be a strong personal relationship there first and everything else will then follow.
Yeah, although I think that they need to make sure they don't overplay that. I was also looking back at exactly how Theresa May and Boris Johnson had tried to approach their relationships with Trump. Theresa May, I think her advice has said she was essentially blindsided by him. And you can imagine that. She's a very straight down the line person, not used to the bluster and the meandering that came from the
U.S. president, and was essentially apparently steamrolled by him on more than one occasion because he tends to talk a lot and she wasn't able to get her points out. I remember there was one advisor who said there was more than a whiff of misogyny about the way in which Donald Trump approached talking to her.
Boris Johnson, completely different, tried to meet Trump in terms of his bluff persona, apparently really desperate to butter him up, kept praising him and telling him how wonderful everything he was doing was, which I think at the time, Danny Street was absolutely thrilled about and thought that this was working, but the fact is that
There was a big row between the two countries at the time, particularly over the Chinese company Huawei, and when Donald Trump wanted the Brits to rip out Huawei equipment, or at least to ban Huawei from putting more equipment into our telecoms network, Danny Street essentially had to roll over. So all of that hard work that had been put into buttering up the US president didn't actually seem to have worked when serious substantive issues had to be discussed. It's great to get these comments on Air Force One that I think he's a great guy, but
If Trump wants to do something and Trump wants Britain to do something, he's just going to demand it. And the thing that Trump really wants to do, that everybody I spoke to last week suggested was to push for a trade deal. But on this side, and I spoke to ministers, I spoke to officials, I spoke to people inside Downing Street, and I spoke to US experts. They all talked down the prospects of what we call a full fat trade deal, not least because there's public concern over things like chlorine washed chicken, about unleashing US farmer giants on the NHS.
And instead Brits would prefer to go for sexual deals in areas like science and technology and AI and so on. But they do know that the US would want something in return and think that's where the defence piece comes into it, that the UK has a strong story to tell on security. Any European nation which is prepared to step up and not just step up itself, but also encourage its European elite allies to do so puts it in quite a strong position. They also say, though, and you mentioned Huawei there,
that there might be attempts by the states to try and, you know, get assurances around the UK's trading relationship with China and with the EU, both of which, obviously, we saw rich revives in China a couple of weeks ago and coming back, saying, do you want to do more business?
And we know that, Kirsten, I want to close a trading relationship with the EU and there's been this whole sort of like, you know, either or thing. And people I spoke to inside side government said, no, no, not only does it not have to be either it or it shouldn't be either or, because if we're in negotiations with the states, it actually gives us leverage if they think that we have other options available and we're not desperate for some sort of deal with them. So there's room for maneuver for the UK there. It's not all about just waiting to see what the US does to us on the economy.
Before we see any of that, we'll find out more immediately, or at least we'll get a sign more immediately of what Trump's attitude towards the UK is by what he does with the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US. We've talked about this before, but I was speaking to sources in Washington last week and just trying to test
the temperature of the Trump administration and how serious are the concerns there that Peter Mandelson might be too close to China and might not be the right person to represent Britain in DC. One person said, well, the thing is in Trump world, there are broadly three tiers of people. There's the inner circle, you know, mainly the family who really are influential and when they say something, you've got to pay attention.
Then there's the kind of closer team that's tier two, who might be campaign chiefs or, you know, White House staff who do have the presidency, but then he tends to change his mind a lot. And it's, you know, depends who he last talked to. And then there's this enormous tier three, which is just these assorted hangers on characters like Steve Bannon or, I mean, until recently Elon Musk, maybe he's maybe he's closer now. But just people in that kind of what we call Trump world who have a lot of opinions and talk to a lot of people.
I'm not necessarily that influential on what the president thinks, and I said to one person, so where exactly is the concern right now in the White House about Peter Madison, they said, well, it's edge of tier three and tier two. So they were saying, essentially, there's a lot of people in tier three people in think tanks and.
or who have podcasts who are talking about this. And it's reached a level where people, I think, in the White House are now paying attention to it, but it's not reached Trump and the innocent. And that's really interesting because I spoke to friends of Peter Madison last week who said exactly the same thing. They thought a lot of this was mischief-making.
from people around Brits, some of them in the States who are on the periphery of the Trump administration rather than at its heart. Although it should be said, there is also some concern we've picked up amongst his former business links with China. Obviously, it's a very hawkish administration. And also, nobody that I spoke to thought that Mandelson would be blocked by Trump ultimately, but they do acknowledge that maybe they could have done more, the Brits could have done more to square off the appointment in the first place.
And one senior diplomat suggested that Donald Trump has actually requested that Karen Pierce, the existing ambassador, stay in place. So it could have probably been handled better. I think it'll probably go ahead. And let's not forget that when Lord Peter Munderson walks into the Department of State in the US and hands over his credentials, it's not Kia Starmer and the Labour Party's name on them. It is the King's name. And he is, of course, the King's envoy to Washington. And we all know how Donald Trump feels about the British royal family.
And you were talking as well about defence spending, and it was felt to be a plus on the British side that we spend more than most of our European counterparts on defence. We already meet the NATO targets of spending 2% of GDP on our defence. We have promised to get to 2.5%, but there's now we hear something of a split.
I think we might be able to call it in government about when exactly that target should be met. We know that the armed forces want to meet the 2.5% target by 2027. The previous government promised to do so by 2030, paying for that with very steep cuts to the civil service.
Now we read in this morning's papers that Kierstammer maybe wants to push that back to 2032 or even perhaps even later. At the moment, treasury sources are at as complete nonsense. That's not true. But that 2032 date to me sounded quite specific. And I just wonder whether if we do, if Kierstammer at some point does say, well, I'm going to push back our deadline to meet that 2.5% target, whether that might be noticed in the White House as well.
But it is also more realistic domestically, isn't it? I think, given that there was so much criticism at the time of the 2030 date, 2032 does seem a bit more realistic. But like you say, it will be noticed in Washington. And so there's a very difficult balancing act, which Kia Starmer and Richard Reeves' Chancellor have to do. The key way that Richard Reeves and the government said that they're going to try and balance the books
is through growth. She is going to lay out her new vision for growth on Wednesday this week, promising to start a house building revolution and to prioritise growth over every other policy area. And it's not without controversy. Over the last week, we've had a sort of a trickle of pro-growth announcements with heavy hints that we could see third runway Heathrow Airport finally being given the green light.
And of course that she's tweaking the non-dom regime for wealth creators in the UK, plus we've had announcements on changes to the planning regime and what that could mean for people opposing some of these big energy projects, for example, infrastructure projects on environmental grounds. So I think there's going to be some fights ahead on this, isn't it? What's changed for me since she got back from Davos?
I mean, she spent the last two weeks in fightback mode, I would say. And after that very rocky week where suddenly, UK bond yields went above the level that they were at after the mini budget, she's kind of decided to get out there on the front foot. And I think the beginning of that fightback was that common appearance that we talked about a couple of weeks ago, where she was reasonably robust and I think was pleased with
her performance and also how weak she thought the Conservatives were. And then she's had this backdrop of actually bond yields coming right back down again by about 0.2 percentage points over the last couple of weeks. So that's really helped take some of the heat off.
And then she's done a few things. She's taken a few risks, which so far haven't blown up, which I imagine we give her confidence, one of which is interfering in the management of the competitions and markets authority, where she, we are told, intervened to remove the chair, whom she was not impressed with.
Another one, as you've said, is this kind of rumoured announcement that she's going to back any prospective move to build a third runway at Heathrow. A risk because this was the issue that Ed Miliband threatened to resign over from Gordon Brown's cabinet. But again, we're told that Ed Miliband is not planning to do that this time. So there's just a couple of moves where she's been willing to do something controversial. And so far, people seem to have accepted it. And that's a real sign of her power and her confidence, I think.
But other fundamentals any different though, because yes, she said two weeks of signaling to the international investment community that Britain's open for business and that she's going to go for growth. But the actual growth figures are pretty anemia. It will stem from the budget, big blows to business confidence. We had expected to have potentially five or six interest rates cuts this year. And now it's looking like we might only get a couple. So it is just spin, isn't it, so far?
I mean, the announcements that she is planning to make, I think, are more than spit. I mean, if you look at what she's saying on planning in particular, it's really, really interesting. She's now talking about having some kind of zoning regime whereby there's a default acceptance of new building in certain areas, particularly around stations, for example. And when you add that to a list of other things that they're doing on planning, make it easier to build on the green belt, et cetera, et cetera, I think those are substantive changes. The problem is they take a lot of time.
You know, the immediate outlook is not good still. Most recent quarter for which we have figures, third quarter of last year, we had 0.1% GDP growth. As you say, the market is expecting much shallower cuts.
to interest rates this year, which will make things feel more expensive than they otherwise would have done, especially for mortgage holders. If you look at some of what businesses have been saying at the beginning of this year, as they are adjusting for the tax increases to come, you know, putting hiring on pause, apparently there was some comments I saw this morning from retailers saying that business has not picked up after Christmas. They had an absolutely dismal run up to Christmas and that it's not really picked up since.
All of that backdrop is still quite negative. However, I think what the government and what Rachel Reeves is hoping is that, at least by talking about positive plans, things they really want to do, and by showing they're willing to take controversial decisions.
to boost growth. It's a signal to the market. It's not necessarily going to change other things immediately, but it's just saying, look, we are open for business. Sorry about those massive, great tax rises we had to work you with. But now, if you want to come and invest, we are going to regard that as a positive and we'll do everything to welcome that money in. And if every single one of your messages says that, then hopefully, from the government's point of view, then business confidence starts to turn as well.
and should be relieved, I should think, to have a bit of breathing space on the front pages, which obviously have been very critical of her in recent weeks. And it'd be interesting to watch not just how the Labour Party responds, the backbenches, but also some of the cabinet to those controversial measures. You mentioned a middle band, but there are, of course, other ministers who privately have some anxieties over the drive for growth at all costs, because obviously there'll be fallout in other areas as well. So there'll be definitely one to watch.
So just another couple of things that we should keep our eye on this week. Our colleague, Eleni Curia reported that China's foreign minister Wang Yi is going to visit the UK next month. More signs that Labour is throwing its relationship with China. I'm sure they'll be keeping a close eye on that in the White House as well as in the markets. And then domestically, we have the first set of evidence coming before the Sisted Dying Committee. Obviously, the big vote isn't until April, but they'll be getting into the weeds of all the arguments on this. We'll be keeping a close eye on that too.
I think that's going to be really interesting and I've been talking to a couple of bill committee members who say they are expecting some reasonably significant amendments to be passed and they're expecting, for example, some kind of change to the regime about who gets to sign off on any particular case of assisted dying.
Should it just be judges or should there be more of a panel perhaps with doctors and other experts on there? That's something the judiciary is keen on because they don't like judges having to take these decisions or by themselves. That will be a really interesting one to watch, I think.
That's all from us, but we'd love to hear from you, so keep sending us any thoughts or questions about today's episode or anything else you'd like us to discuss on the podcast to PoliticsWeeklyUK at TheGuardian.com That's PoliticsWeeklyUK at TheGuardian.com
And some exciting news for you, Pepe. You're going to be hosting an in-conversation event with the Health Secretary, where's Streetin? On Tuesday the 25th of March in London. So, if you listeners have any questions you'd like people to ask the Health Secretary, then please email them to us at that address. And anybody who'd like to buy tickets in person or sign up for the live stream should go to the link, theguardian.com slash, where's Streetin? event. That's theguardian.com slash, where's Streetin? event. We'll put that in the show notes for this episode as well.
Well, and we'll be back with another episode next week, but in the meantime, please like and follow Politics Weekly UK to make sure you keep hitting our episodes in your feed. John Harris is back on Thursday. This episode was produced by Frankie Toby, music by Axel Kukutie, and the executive producer is Zoe Hitch. Goodbye. Bye-bye. This is The Guardian.