Boris Johnson's endorsement of Brexit in 2016 was a pivotal moment.
It led to a slump in the British pound, highlighting market anxieties.
Transcript:
Lewis Goodall
I will be advocating vote leave.
Jon Sopel
That was the bombshell moment that Boris Johnson came out against the government of David Cameron as a backer, a supporter of Brexit. And in the words of David Cameron, later became an ambassador for the expert-trashing, truth-twisting age of populism. What would have happened if of those two speeches now so famous, Boris Johnson had chosen the column that backed Remain. Where would we be now? Welcome to The News Agents.
Emily Maitlis
The News Agents. It's John. It's Emily. It's Lewis.
Lewis Goodall
And this is our New Year's What If. Happy New Year. Festive What If. And also, have you noticed, Maitlis? Ties. Ties. Well, because it's New Year.
Emily Maitlis
Very nice. It's very formal. Hang on. But we're not going to carry on this throughout 2025. I'm going to get more formal as the year goes on. I'm going to end up in a rough.
Jon Sopel
Ties are back. Ties for 2025. Ties are back. Garters.
Emily Maitlis
Yep.
Lewis Goodall
Garters. Velvet. All the rest of it. Smoking jacket. So you're going to become Oscar Wilde, really. Already there, John. Way ahead of you, mate. So we've got to start with that moment that Boris Johnson comes out of the House. He has written two columns for the Daily Telegraph, one arguing the case for why we should remain in the European Union, the other why we should leave. And he goes, ip, dip, droppity bit, you are not ip. Well, he doesn't. He says, well, i kind of came to the conclusion that you know the most intellectually rigorous argument was that we should leave the european union but how would history have been different If boris johnson had gone the other way and said no britain's future is best served by remaining in the European Union.
Emily Maitlis
And we should say that this, I mean, it seems now when we look back, because Johnson became so sort of like a talisman of Brexit, sort of talismanic of it and an embodiment of it. So it seems inevitable that he would do so. It didn't feel inevitable at the time. And indeed, because it was generally thought, although, of course, Boris Johnson had a long pedigree as a Eurosceptic, had made his name in the 1990s as a young political reporter based In Brussels writing bullshit stories. Doing stories, I was trying to find a word for it, doing certain stories that lots of people in Brussels would not have recognised about the European Union, but he made his name with all The bendy bananas and all this sort of stuff, sort of writing quite comically about the excesses of EU regulation. So he had a long pedigree on that. But it was generally thought by David Cameron and Number 10 that although he would lean into Euroscepticism when it suited him, that he was a Remainer, that he didn't actually think We should leave the EU. He had a very cosmopolitan, European-type background, lots of different reasons.
Jon Sopel
And Cameron... And it had been like that during his two terms as London Mayor. Yes, Mr Liberal. When he'd been very welcoming of immigration.
Emily Maitlis
I mean, when he actually made that intervention, he was still at the very tail end of his mayoralty. So he had been this sort of more liberal conservative figure, often criticising the government for being insufficiently liberal on all sorts of matters. So it felt like a very live question. And indeed, David Cameron, he's since talked about this, David Cameron put enormous amounts of effort and political capital trying to persuade him, including over apparently lots Of games of tennis, which he says he let Johnson win, trying to persuade him to back Remain because they thought it would be so damaging for the Remain campaign if Johnson backed leave,
Jon Sopel
Which of course he did. It was in February of 2016. And you'll remember that the whole year started with David Cameron having gone off to petition Merkel and other EU leaders, please, please give us something that we can take back as A government to the British people. Can I sell them our remaining status in the EU because you've allowed us, you know, particular priorities, particular concessions to the UK? And Merkel and others had said at the time, we can't move on freedom of movement. We can't give you any more concessions. Britain's already got this very favourable, very privileged position inside the EU. And so David Cameron came back with a sort of pitiful offering of change. And it was pretty much a month later, it was February of 2016, that Johnson endorsed the Vote Leave, the out campaign. And what happened at that point was the financial markets then realised that this whole shift would make Brexit more probable, and the pound slumped nearly 2% against the US dollar. (Time 0:00:16)
Johnson's Impact
Johnson's support legitimized the Leave campaign, differentiating it from the 1975 referendum.
Without him, the campaign may have been perceived as a fringe movement.
Transcript:
Jon Sopel
So interesting, when you look back to think there was something that the markets saw then, that we could only sort of feel in the political waters. They thought it was already going to be more probable and a more probable Brexit made the pound instantly weaker.
Lewis Goodall
The other thing about it was, of course, that Johnson was this unique figure in British politics and he was sort of more Trumpian than anyone else in British politics. Before there was a Trump on the scene. Before there was a Trump on the scene. I mean, Trump was kind of going for the Republican nomination at roughly the same sort of time. Boris Johnson reached the parts of the British electorate, the old Heineken ad, that other politicians could not reach. And I think that that was the realisation of the markets, that if you've got Boris Johnson against you, David Cameron had a big problem. And I think it was a really significant moment in the whole Brexit debate. Now, you could argue that maybe people would have come back to a referendum again and again, and if people had voted to remain, but it probably did make the difference.
Emily Maitlis
Well, I think it did a few things, partly because Johnson was at that time a more popular figure than he later became, a less controversial figure. I think Cameron and Osborne who as I say desperately tried to persuade him not to do it, correctly intuited that if Johnson and also Michael Gove, we shouldn't forget Gove role in this As well because he was the other sort of big person who came out in favour of it. If they had persuaded both of them or even just one or other but especially both of them as they desperately try to do to back remain and even if they didn't campaign very much for it what Would it have left what it would have left on the leave side would be a situation that was very similar to the referendum in 1975 because in the referendum of 1975 which we had which was Not called remain leave but it was yes no it was basically the Leave side was bereft of mainstream political figures who could lead them. Who were the leaders in 1975? It was Enoch Powell and Tony Benn. Two figures, although they were charismatic and towering figures in lots of ways, were very eccentric figures in British politics. What we had in 2016 was a situation where you had two leading mainstream figures who came out and legitimised the Leave campaign. It could not be said, as it was in 75, and as Cameron hoped to repeat the trick as Wilson pulled off in 75, it could not be said that this was a kind of out there fringe pursuit, because it would Have been led. Who would it have been led by in 16? It would have been led by Farage. And Farage, although we know politically skillful in lots of ways, is a far more marmite figure and would have repelled as many (Time 0:04:40)
Cameron's Perspective
David Cameron felt betrayed by Johnson and Gove's support for Brexit, viewing it as driven by personal ambition.
He believed Johnson aimed to prevent Gove from leading the Conservative Party.
Transcript:
Jon Sopel
As he attracted. Or Gove. I mean, I was reading back through David Cameron's memoirs actually at the time, and he is so vitriolic about that moment. He is so clear-sighted about it. He calls Gove a foam-flecked faragist. And he says, one quality shone through, disloyalty. Disloyalty to me, and later disloyalty to Boris. That's the prism, obviously, through which the UK Prime Minister would see all this, which is two senior members of your Cabinet and pretty personable figures, and actually, one of Them had been a very close friend of David Cameron's. We know there was a sort of godparent sort of link between the Goves and the Camerons. And I think at that point, he saw what Boris Johnson was doing, which was nothing to do with the politics of the time, nothing to do with the Remain or Leave arguments of the time, all to Do with Boris Johnson's personal ambition. Now, the question, I guess, is if Boris Johnson hadn't come out for leave, but Gove had, and Gove has intellectual heft in this argument, could he have swayed it anyway? In which case it wouldn't have been. I mean, that's that's the argument that that Cameron makes is that he thinks Boris did it to stop Gove getting the Conservative crown. In other words, one or other of them would have gone on to lead the Conservative Party under Leave and it would either have been Boris or it would have been Gove.
Emily Maitlis
George Osborne has said that since as well. He says that the actual real seminal moment was Gove because Gove came out first. It was clear that Gove was going to do it and therefore that made Johnson suspicious and believed that Gove would try and angle to be the sort of Eurosceptic over the water. Which has nothing to do with Leave or Remain.
Jon Sopel
It's all to do with the crown of the Conservative Party.
Emily Maitlis
Although, to be fair to Gove, I think he had had a far longer, really established pedigree as a Eurosceptic. I mean, that's why I could never understand Cameron. I mean, I suppose it's because he was closer to Gove, so he felt it more personally. But to be fair, clearly Johnson is a chameleon. I don't think he was surprised by Gove.
Jon Sopel
Thing that shocked him about Gove and later about Johnson was how quickly they adopted the lies of the Farage's.
Emily Maitlis
Well, they started to attack Cameron personally.
Jon Sopel
And they talked about Turkey joining the EU. They talked about the open borders that would mean that, you know, five million Turks came in, which was complete rubbish. Penny Mordent later repeated it on the Sunday morning show with Andrew Marr. And I think that was the point where if you can sort of pinpoint the sliding away of truth, the sort of erosion of what we came to think of as fact based argument, and it was replaced by emotion Based fear mongering, it was then. (Time 0:07:14)
Contrasting Campaigns
The Brexit Leave campaign effectively used the simple slogan "Take Back Control".
The Remain campaign relied on "Project Fear," attempting to scare voters.
Transcript:
Jon Sopel
We talked on one of the other What If episodes about if Scotland had voted for independence.
Lewis Goodall
And we talked there about how the SNP manifesto for independence was thoroughly costed, utterly detailed. It works according to if we get this as the oil price and that. And here you had the Brexiteers doing the complete opposite that say as little as possible make up numbers about how much extra would go into the health service or what benefits would Be brought or we'd be able to enjoy all the benefits nobody can test you on that we don't know we don't know it's hypothetical we'll be able to join all the benefits in the single market Without any of the drawbacks yeah yeah well really and i i think they got away with an enormous lie and boris johnson was the perfect vehicle for telling that so i do believe that he made A huge difference on this what if question well i mean look the margin was 1.3 million votes right so you only need 650 000 to go the other way to switch and you've got a remain result so it
Emily Maitlis
Doesn't seem incredible at all to believe that if johnson who did become he was a salesman he was the kind of the person who ended up leading it it doesn't seem inconceivable at all that That he could have swayed it but then again when it's that close you can say any number of things might have swayed it i mean i think cam thing is about what cameron says about gove and johnson I think there is a bit of displacement activity there to be honest because i don't i think cameron was pretty naive to believe that a referendum like this which had basically the tory Party had been agitating for and the eurosceptic wing of his party been agitating for for year after year after year for him not to believe that in some way that would not descend into The most acrimonious civil war he's since said i couldn't believe there were so many blue on blue attacks hello for some of these people this was the political fight of their lives they Couldn't care less about you and your premiership and what happens you know once he'd opened that and it was bigger than the conservative party and it was bigger for them than the conservative Party exactly so i think that there was an element of that that was always inevitable and cameron cameron made lots of choices which could have changed the results or put him in a better Position to win but he didn't do specifically because he wanted to protect his premiership and the Conservative Party. He could have, for example, played it longer. He had given himself all the way until 2017 to have that referendum. He didn't want to do so because he didn't want it to consume his premiership. Well, we know how that turned out. He could have allowed there to be more ferocious attacks on the Leave side and Gove and Johnson, but he didn't want to because he didn't want to exacerbate the problems of the Conservative Party. He could have let 16-year vote, but he didn't do so because he knew it would piss off his backbencher. So Cameron, any one of those things could have changed again, just like Johnson.
Lewis Goodall
And there was basically, if you were to compare and contrast the two campaigns for Remain and Leave, Leave's slogan, take back control, was a winner. And the Remain campaign, to a large extent, was Project Fear, if we do this or we're going to lose that. And you're trying to frighten the voters.
Jon Sopel
I also think that despite, you know, what we think of as a very narrow margin, there was clearly a movement and there was clearly unrest in this country, which you cannot bottle back up, Right? And given everything we've now seen in Europe, given everything we've now seen in America, to suggest that the Brexit vote sort of hung on a Boris thread, I think is probably naive. You know, I think it's slightly...
Emily Maitlis
Big forces at work. I (Time 0:09:47)
Underlying Unrest
Brexit was a symptom of deeper societal unrest, not solely dependent on Johnson's influence.
Factors like the financial crash and distrust in institutions fueled the movement.
Transcript:
Jon Sopel
Think it was bigger than everything. As we always talk about, the idea of the financial crash, the idea of trust in institution, the idea that people hadn actually seen their incomes materially increase their children's Welfare materially increased from their own that was always going to be there whether the answer was brexit i mean i think many people in this country still don't think that the answer Was brexit but the anger was clearly in that result and has stayed with us for the next 10 years right it's a personal failure of David Cameron's.
Lewis Goodall
I would argue, with the exception of Blair, who did talk about the advantages of Europe, we have had a succession of prime ministers. Blair also opened the gates to immigration, arguably the biggest cause of all this. Which biggest mistake. But he did speak about the advantages of being part of the EU, whereas John Major kind of was, you know, kind of carping about Europe, even though he was part of Remain. Gordon Brown was very similarly kind of, you know, often very cross with Brussels. It's not surprising that the British people kind of they'd been fed a diet of hostility towards what was happening in the European Union.
Emily Maitlis
That's what I mean about Cameron's strategic mistakes in a sense that remember, Emily, you mentioned the renegotiation. The absurdity of Cameron's position was that literally right up until February 2016, when he secured the end of that negotiation, you remember what the government line was? His line was, if he wasn't happy enough with the outcome of the renegotiation, he himself might lead the Leave campaign. But then literally the next day is turning around to the british public and going it is of existential importance that we stay in the eu those two things just don't add up you can't be saying On one day you might lead us to leave and the next day say this country's basically finished if we don't stay in i just didn't make any sense so i think a lot of the strategic problems were His yeah (Time 0:13:02)
Patten's Protest Strategy
Chris Patten, Hong Kong's last governor, encouraged protests to prepare citizens for Chinese rule.
He believed that learning to fight him would equip them to fight future oppression.
Transcript:
Jon Sopel
This is The News Agents. Hi, News Agents. It's Elisa from Quebec City. I'd love to hear Emily in particular, no offense boys, on Hong Kong and the paths not taken around Handover. Is there a world where Hong Kong's democracy and independence could have been better protected from China? Or, to fit your format, what if Handover hadn't happened? Also, I'd like to be one of your legion of fans to say thank you for your hard work. Your voices are the first I want to hear on any subject, and I look forward to your episodes every day or night through sleep training and all. All right, that's enough fangirling. Merci beaucoup. Gros bisous. Bye. Oh, I love that. I love that. And I love to feel that we're reaching parts of Quebec City that I never knew we did.
Lewis Goodall
There we go. There we are. That was fabulous. Don't want to hear from Lewis or me.
Jon Sopel
No, I mean, I guess the question that Elise is asking is, is there any world in which Hong Kong wouldn't have been handed back to China? And in my life, that was never a question because you know i went out to hong kong in 1992 when it was already on the cards and it was like the salt timer the egg timer where we just watched The sands ticking down for five years until the date younger who might not remember there was a 99 year lease from the UK to the Chinese government. To start? Yeah, the Brits gained Hong Kong 170 years ago. It was through the Opium Wars. It was, you know, all the stuff that we now loathe and hate and talk about, you know, which is sort of the colonial powers, which involved actually, you know, addiction through opium. It was everything that you don't want. But interestingly, after 1945, there was a question of whether Taiwan would take Hong Kong. And actually, the Brits then sort of won it back and carried on ruling. And it was only in the 80s that this whole question of delivering Hong Kong back began.
Emily Maitlis
It's like literally your leasehold running out on your flat.
Jon Sopel
It's like your leasehold running out.
Emily Maitlis
The freeholder takes it back.
Jon Sopel
But the person that you're giving it back to is an autocratic communist regime. And so the discussions began in the 1980s, you know, the sort of 84, 85 was where they started to build together what was called the basic law, the sort of the premise of the joint declaration. The joint declaration, I think, was 84 or 85, which was how we're going to handle this. And it was all very civilized. You know, we're going to do this and we're going to make it a special administrative region. And they coined this phrase, one country, two systems. In other words, China is going to kind of own Hong Kong, but Hong Kong is going to have its own freedoms. It's going to have its own freedoms to make money. It's going to have its own democracy, all the rest of it. And then in the middle of this was 89, was Tiananmen, right? Which was the massacre of 2000 people after the farmers marches turned into the student marches turned into the riots. And everyone remembers Tank Man, you know, the guy who bravely stood in front of the tank. And you have this absolute in-face clash of cultures, which is, what the hell are we doing? You know, do we really want to deliver Hong Kong back to this killing machine that is China? And John Major famously was, I think, the first foreign leader that turned up in Beijing. It was a bit like the Nixon in China thing, who came after Tiananmen to kind of go, you know, we're going to calm this down, we're going to sort of soften the waters. Chris Patton, who was the last governor of Hong Kong, who moved out there at the same time as I did, I like to think he followed me, but it may have been the other way around. You should have been governor. Exactly. And Chris Patton was, as you know, I mean, you just spoke to him a couple of weeks ago, was so energized about this question of giving the Hong Kong people not just the chance to escape in The form of a passport, but their rights, you know, the knowledge of how to protest, how to get out on the streets, how to fight for democracy. Every time there were protests against him, he was like, I'm delighted. If they know how to fight me, they will know how to fight the Chinese. As it turns out, the umbrella protest of 2014 was the first big showdown between China and Hong Kong and it was brutal and it was horrible.
Emily Maitlis
And he famously wept. Patton, of course, in 97.
Lewis Goodall
History is not just a matter of dates. What makes history is what comes before and what comes after the dates that we all remember. The story of this great city is about the years before this night and the years of success that will surely follow it.
Jon Sopel
There was a drop on his nose. It was a very funny moment because it was terrible weather. It was bucketing down. I was there. And I remember the scene so well because there was a raindrop on his nose and we couldn't work out if it was tears or weather and probably both.
Emily Maitlis
Were people dreading it at the time? Sorry, I was just going to get really intrigued. But were people, as the sort of sands sort of ticked down, were people dreading it there as it sort of got close?
Jon Sopel
I than dreading. I think people were sort of hyperbolising about it. So there were some people who imagined that on the 1st of July, the tanks would literally come rolling down from Beijing into Hong Kong. And that, of course, was never going to happen. But the morning after, I was working for Channel 4 then, funny enough, with a cameraman called Ray. And the morning after the handover, we were sent to Governor's House, which was like the Buckingham Palace of Hong Kong. And what I remember so clearly was the ER from the gates had already gone. Yeah. So there were just these holes in the gate. It was like, it felt like a sort of coup, even though the whole thing had been planned. Everything to do with the monarchy, everything to do with the British government was slowly being eroded and wiped down.
Lewis Goodall
So I was a political correspondent at Westminster at this period. And of course, the reason that Chris Patton was out there was that he'd lost his seat in the 92 election in Bath. And so John Major wanted to find a job for him, makes him governor of Hong Kong. And there was a feeling, I mean, Chris Patton sort of was at war slightly with the Foreign Office. With the Foreign Office. The Mandarins, he called them. The Mandarins, the Sinophiles in the Foreign Office. And there was a, I think the ambassador at the time to China was a guy called Sir Percy Craddock, who was seen to epitomise the sort of, this is inevitable, there is nothing you can do about It, it is coming, roll over and accept it. And that's probably a slight travesty of the view, and I'm simplifying enormously. Patton's view was we've got to fight to get the best deal possible so that we do preserve the system that makes Hong Kong this unique and vibrant place where you know trading companies Established and did really really well and became this kind of vibrant beacon of (Time 0:17:48)
Failed Expectations
The expectation that economic liberalization would lead to political liberalization in China proved false.
Western companies prioritized business over democratic values.
Transcript:
Emily Maitlis
So do you think there could have ever been another outcome? It's hard to know what Britain could have done.
Lewis Goodall
I think that this is something that is post-imperial about when two-thirds of the globe was painted pink under the British Empire.
Emily Maitlis
And at that time China still had a smaller economy than we did. But the direction of travel was clear. It was clear that China was disgraceful. I mean, China was huge.
Jon Sopel
The whole, you know, Deng Xiaoping, who was the big figure of the 80s, kind of came up with this phrase, Gaiga Kaifeng, which was like the opening up. It's like, you know, I guess it's the perestroika, the glass of Gorbachev. It was like, we get it. We're going to remain communist, but guess what? We're going to make lots of money. Guess what they did. Right. I mean, look at China. It's still made phenomenal amounts of money and it's still kept an absolute iron grip on democracy, human rights, you know, freedom of speech and all the things that we kind of value Here. I mean, the question, I guess, is going back to Alyssa's thing, if the British government, if Major and Patton had been able to offer passports to people, and I don't for a moment think That we would have been... We since have.
Emily Maitlis
We since have offered enormous numbers.
Jon Sopel
Yes, but we've offered them, as it were, to asylum seekers, to people who are now in trouble. If we'd said six million passports, you know, to come to the UK, it would have created a ruckus then. But most Hong Kongers, they don't want to come to Britain. They want to go to Vancouver. They want to go to New York. They want to go to Boston. You know, half of the Tiananmen Square rioters just want to go and work for the Boston Consulting Group. You know, they just wanted the chance to get out and make money. I mean, I guess the question is, if we had shown that we were prepared to rescue people, would Beijing have taken democracy more seriously?
Lewis Goodall
I think the great political miscalculation in terms of the West and China is the belief that economic liberalisation would lead to political liberalisation. 100%. That somehow, if you've got free markets operating...
Jon Sopel
Isn't that the lesson of our age, though? Do you remember the 2008 Olympics?
Lewis Goodall
Yeah, I was there.
Jon Sopel
OK, so wasn't the whole point of that is like oh we're going to give this to china and then it'll all be fine yeah it wasn't it wasn't the idea was that you would have economic growth you'd
Lewis Goodall
Have western companies doing business you would have google you'd have facebook you'd have all these companies operating and they soon found that the chinese government was saying You must be bloody joking we're not just gonna have this free for all the citizens and these companies thought yeah okay that's the price of doing business we'll accept it we won't do Anything and they control the media they shut down weibo they stopped and so this whole presumption yeah that if you had that if you had the free markets of course you're going to have Democracy that will follow just a few steps behind. It didn't happen. It didn't happen. (Time 0:26:33)
Sunak's Early Election
If Rishi Sunak hadn't called an early election, the Tories might have retained more seats, but the overall outcome would likely have been the same.
The public mood had turned against them after years of turmoil.
Transcript:
Lewis Goodall
Earlier today, I spoke with His Majesty the King to request the dissolution of Parliament. The King has granted this request and we will have a general election on the 4th of July. Not since Gene Kelly did Singing in the Rain has any man been as wet as Rishi Sunak was as he stood in Downing Street with the rain bucketing down and people just thinking, oh my God, why Did you do that? And why did you do that there? And haven't you got a coat? And haven't you got an umbrella? Or a plan.
Emily Maitlis
So Ellis has asked, what would have been different if Rishi didn't call the election early? Do you think the Tories would have had any time to redeem themselves? And do you think reform could have got even more of the vote share?
Lewis Goodall
Interesting. Nice one, Ellie. I tell you what, I heard an interview given by Rishi Sunak's chief of staff, who makes the alternative argument that they should have gone a year earlier, that they should have gone way, Way sooner than they did, that they hung on far too long, that you had the promise of change, and we're going to ask the British people to decide much earlier, before the narrative was Set of hopelessness and helplessness. But wasn't the narrative set after Liz Truss? It probably was. But then if you had run a campaign saying, look, we brought maximum distance. This was a disgrace. We're going to do things differently. And this is our plan for how we're going to make Britain a better place. You don't wait as long for the general election as they did. When Rishi Sunak made a series of pledges like we're going to stop the boats, which it was patently obvious, he wouldn't be able to.
Emily Maitlis
I think that they think that lots of stuff would have come out over the summer and that, you know, it would have just been a different thing. I mean, I think it's fair to say, I mean, actually, the argument always was that the economy might improve. As we've seen at the moment, the economy is not particularly improving. It depends whether you blame Labour for that rather than anything the Tories might have done. Obviously, the big difference might have been that Farage did not get back into the game because there was a possibility that Farage was over in the United States. If you'd had the election in, say, November, which is what everyone assumed it would be, that Farage would have been off campaigning for Trump and therefore wouldn't have got back into The game. So there is at least a possibility that Farage decides not to, never mind reform vote share going up, that Farage isn't there at all.
Jon Sopel
I guess it depends what you think has happened to this country since July, doesn't it? And whether all of that, any of that can be laid at Labour's feet. I mean, immigration numbers, inflation numbers, economic figures. Has the dial moved enough to give us a different result? I mean, I suppose somebody like Craig McKinley, who we heard from a few weeks ago at the Spectator Awards, Craig McKinley, who was this extraordinary figure who's lost both legs and Both arms and had come back through sepsis and had come back into the Commons to rapturous applause and then suddenly found that he was, you know, faced with an election it was too difficult To fight too quickly i think he would have stood i think other people probably would have stood and hung on i think there were people that the tories would have kept hold of i think their Tally ultimately would have been bigger but i don't think the result would have been different it couldn't be much worse it really do you think i don't think so i think it couldn't have Been much worse. I mean, maybe they would have got 140, 150 seats instead of 120.
Emily Maitlis
It couldn't have been much worse. And of course, we could have still been, there was a world, there was a universe where an election had been called next week because he could have had it as late as January the 30th. How would we be feeling about that? We wouldn't be sat here in our resplendent clothes, I'm sure. We'd be getting ready to hit the road.
Lewis Goodall
I'm looking forward to a scruffy of 2025, by the way. Oh, is that right?
Emily Maitlis
Nice clothes are out.
Jon Sopel
So, wait, scruffy but with ties. Can I just check?
Lewis Goodall
No, no, no, no.
Emily Maitlis
So what are you going to be wearing, like a string vest? Yeah, with my pot belly hanging over.
Lewis Goodall
It's a bit of stellar art to art coming in. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to get inked. Great. Get a sleeve.
Jon Sopel
You to get an early reference to Geoffrey Hughes. So broadly, no, no, no. Wouldn't have made any difference.
Lewis Goodall
I don't think it would have made much difference. I think the die was cast. After 14 years, the year of three Prime Ministers, I think the Tories were done.
Jon Sopel
The only thing I'd say is that we all thought Rishi would be off to California in August. And fair play to him. He wasn't. He isn't. He's still around. He's still an MP.
Emily Maitlis
We'll see about this August. Bye-bye.
Jon Sopel
Bye-bye. Bye.
Emily Maitlis
Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. This (Time 0:31:10)
