What if...Boris Johnson had backed remain during the Brexit referendum?

This is a Global Player original podcast. The last thing I wanted was to go against David Cameron or the government. But after a great deal of heartache, I don't think there's anything else I can do. I will be advocating vote leave.

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. The News Agents. It's John. It's Emily. It's Lewis. 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. Very nice. It's very formal. Hang on. But we're not going to carry on this throughout 2025, are we? I'm going to get more formal as the year goes on. I'm going to end up in a rough by December. Ties are back. Ties for 2025. Garters. Yep. Garters. Velvet. All the rest of it. Smoking jacket.

So you're going to become Oscar Wilde, really? Already there, John.

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, drippity, bit, you are not it. 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?

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, he had made his name in the 1990s as a young political reporter based in Brussels, writing stories, doing stories, 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, had a very cosmopolitan European type background, lots of different reasons.

And Cameron had been like that during his two terms as London Mayor, when he was very welcoming of immigration. And he was still mayor, 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 back leave, 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. So interesting, when you look back to think, there was something that the market 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.

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. 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, and we shouldn't forget Gove's 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 tried 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 skilful in lots of ways, is a far more Marmite figure and would have repelled as many 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 the argument 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. George Osborne has said that since as well. He says that the actual real seminal moment was Gove, because Gove came out, but 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... Which has nothing to do with leave or remain. It's all to do with the crown of the Conservative Party.

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.

Yeah, Johnson is a chameleon, but Gove had always felt it. So, you know, Cameron was the one who asked the question, Gove didn't want there to be a referendum in the first place. Yeah, but the thing that shocked him about Gove, and later about Johnson, was how quickly they adopted the lies of the Farages.

Well, they started to attack Cameron personally. 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 Mordaunt 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.

We talked on one of the other What If episodes about if Scotland had voted for independence. 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, 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. Because 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. Well, really? And I think they got away with an enormous lie. And Boris Johnson was the perfect vehicle for telling that. And 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 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 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 Cameron, the thing is about what Cameron says about Gove and Johnson, I think there was a bit of displacement activity there, to be honest. 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 had 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 door. 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 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 in 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-olds vote, but he didn't do so because he knew it would piss off his backbencher. So Cameron, as any one of those things, could have changed the game, just like Johnson.

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 were trying to frighten the voters. I also think that despite 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... Big forces at work. I think it was bigger than everything. As we always talk about, the idea of the financial crash, the idea of trust in institutions, the idea that people hadn't actually seen their incomes materially increase, their children's welfare materially increase 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. I would argue with the exception of Blair, who did talk about the advantages of Europe. We have had a succession of prime ministers. Yeah, but Blair also opened the gates to immigration, arguably the biggest cause of all this. 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 Romaine. Gordon Brown was 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. 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 would 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. It just didn't make any sense. So I think a lot of the strategic problems were his. Yeah.

But I guess the question is, if you had been too much of a backer of the EU, would that have driven people away? Because they would have said, oh, he's just part of the, you know, the establishment. He's just one of the same. They're all talking the same language. They don't understand it. He had to position himself, I guess, as being the person who understood both sides. But he did that more for the politics of his own party rather than the politics of the country. Because he always did.

I mean, I think that ultimately, remember as well, I actually think when we look back when we say 52-48 and what a shock, partly because what you were just saying, Emily, in some ways, when I look back now, now we can see the big sweep of everything that's going on. I'm amazed it was that close. I'm amazed it was that close. Actually, people say about Project Fear or whatever, actually, I wonder, I think they probably ran a pretty bloody good campaign in some ways. When you put it now in the sweep of things and you see it as part of a pattern and maybe, you know, that's contingency effect. We were ahead. I mean, the question is, we were ahead on that. And did we open the gates then for everyone else?

Yeah. If we hadn't gone through with Brexit, would Trump have had the same success, you know, six months later? Or did we have still seen the strength of Marine Le Pen, blah, blah, blah. I mean, we just, we just don't know. Did we somehow liberate populations all over the world to go, let's give it a try? Well, Scotland was the outlier. You mentioned about Scotland. In a way, when we look back on all of these events now, Scotland is the outlier, not Brexit. Brexit's part of the pattern. Yeah. Yeah.

And the fact of the matter is that what, you know, if you want to be judgmental about this, it's not- And when are we not? And when are we not? It's not- Exactly. Boris Johnson decided in the end he wanted to support Brexit. It was that Boris Johnson decided he wanted to support Brexit because it was best for Boris Johnson and his chances of becoming the next prime minister. And it worked. Let's just say, for the sake of argument for a moment, actually, in his heart of hearts, he was a Remainer and he thought Remain would win, which is what Cameron has since said, that he texts him saying that, you know, Brexit will get crushed by, I can't remember the sort of colourful metaphor, but it will be crushed.

What an astonishing, if you leave aside kind of the rights and wrongs of it, that is astonishing. I mean, that is astonishing that he might be able to sit there and say, I endorse something I didn't believe of titanic importance to this country, where I myself might have made the difference. And I did it for myself. OK, I'm going to just flip that on its head, which is really weird. But supposing there was something in Boris Johnson which said, there is a groundswell of this and I can lead it. And it doesn't really matter what I think. It doesn't really matter what my views are as a Remainer or a Lever. If he tapped into something that was felt by the majority of the people, maybe you could argue that's what politicians do. They listen to the electorate. I don't know. But it is unusual for politicians. That's the thing.

People always assume that politicians are like that, that they're cynical or go where the electorate is. But actually, as we know, most politicians are not like that. They're actually quite inflexible about what they believe. It depends whether you want ideology or whether you want somebody to listen. I don't know. I mean, do you want an ideologue? We're not being judgmental now. We're actually being very understanding. I think it's because I had a drink this lunch. It's new you. It will never happen again. I hadn't noticed. We will be back with more WIFE just after this. 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. There we go. There we are. That was fabulous.

Go on, mate. Don't want to hear from Louis or me. No. I mean, I guess the question that Elisa's 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. We should say to people who might not remember, there was a 99-year lease from the UK to the Chinese government.

I mean, basically, where do you want 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 the colonial powers, which involved actually, you know, addiction through opium. It was everything that you don't want. But interestingly, after 45, 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.

And... It's like literally your leasehold running out on your flat. It's like your leasehold running out. Your freeholder takes it back. 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 is 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 84-85, 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 democracy, all the rest of it.

And then in the middle of this was 89, was Tiananmen, right? Which was the massacre of 2,000 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-your-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 Patten, who was the last governor of Hong Kong, who moved out 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 Patten 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 protests of 2014 was the first big showdown between China and Hong Kong. And it was brutal. And it was horrible. And he famously wept.

Yeah. Patten, of course, in 97. 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.

There was a drop on his nose.

Yeah. It was a very funny moment because it was, 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.

Were people dreading it?

Sorry, I just got really intrigued. As the sands sort of ticked down, were people dreading it there?

I mean, it was more than dreading. I think people were sort of hyperbolizing 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 out.

So I was a political correspondent at Westminster at this period. And of course, the reason that Chris Patten was out there was that he'd lost his seat in the 1992 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 Patten sort of was at war slightly with the Foreign Office.

Yeah. With the Foreign Office. The mandarins, he called them. 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.

And Patten'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 Southeast Asia. But I mean, the capitalism was always going to be preserved because China loved Hong Kong's capitalism. What it didn't like was the rule of law. What it didn't like was democracy. And I remember doing a story in the prison there, we got access to the prison.

And I went to speak to two Nigerian prisoners who I think were there on smuggling charges, probably drug smuggling charges, and they were fearing the death penalty. You know, there was nothing that would stop China from commuting a sort of a 10 year sentence in a Hong Kong prison to a death penalty. Now, you might say, OK, I don't have a problem with that. You know, that's how China operates, all the rest of it. But that was what we were up against. It was this idea that Britain had delivered this very benign, caring, careful democracy with a rule of law, with checks and balances, with institutions in place. And China was just kind of like, well, we don't care about that.

And the first elections after the handover were the thing that kicked off the umbrella protest because they said, yes, one person will vote. You can vote for anyone you like, anyone you like, but we've got to vet them first. And people of Hong Kong were like, well, hang on a sec, we don't want to vote for your choices. We want to vote for our people. And that was what brought them onto the streets.

And so just this last thing, but I remember going back in 2014, the thing that broke my heart was being on the streets of Hong Kong and seeing girls in knee socks and check skirts and blouses and going, oh, that's funny. I wonder what all these protesters are, you know, what are they wearing? They were school kids. They were 14 year olds. They brought their homework down because they're all so hardworking. They didn't want to miss a day's school. They were protesting and doing their homework at the same time, wearing their school uniform, having lied to their parents and told them that they were all going to sleepovers at their friend's house. And they were protesting for the Hong Kong that they knew they were going to lose. And it was utterly heartbreaking.

So do you think there could have ever been another outcome? It's hard to know what Britain could have done. I think that this is something that is post-imperial about, you know, when kind of two thirds of the globe was painted pink under the, you know, of the British Empire. And at that time, China still had a smaller economy than we do. I mean, like it's sort of hard to... But the direction of travel was clear. Was clear that China was this great. I mean, China was huge. I mean, the whole, you know, Deng Xiaoping, who was the big figure of the 80s, kind of came up with this phrase, Geiger Kaifeng, which was like the opening up. It's like, you know, I guess it's the perestroika, the glasshouse 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, 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. We've since offered enormous numbers. 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? 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%.

But somehow, if you've got free markets operating... Isn't that the lesson of our age, though? Do you remember the 2008 Olympics? Yeah, I was there. Okay. So, it 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 isn't. The idea was that you would have economic growth. You'd 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 going to 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 about it. And they control the media. They shut down Weibo. They stopped TikTok. And so this whole presumption 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.

At the time, though, you can understand why people might have believed it would happen, because it happened everywhere else. But now we know it doesn't and won't necessarily. And that means we do have to confront the fact that, you know, let's be really honest, the rise of China, without doubt, particularly its economic strength, has been a story of the 21st century. And we accept it and we partly accept it because we want cheap goods. We want what it has to offer. And we want it.

I don't think it did happen everywhere else. I mean, it's really interesting that you say that. And I'm just I'm going through my head. Well, if you think of the breakup of the Soviet Union, you had the democracies of Slovakia and Slovenia and all the rest of it. But if you look at the, dare I say, the Eastern Valleys, Singapore had Lee Kuan Yew, right? They used to lock people up for chewing gum offences, right? It was capitalist and it was draconian. It had Asian values. The same with Mahathir in Malaysia. Asian values, whatever that meant. It was about a very, very tight rein on democracy, however much capitalism there was.

I suppose what I mean by that is that from the vantage point of the mid-90s and this, you know, this great apogee of kind of liberal democracy, you know, obviously the famous stuff with Fukuyama, the end of history entirely mean by that. But, you know, this idea that basically liberal democracy had won out. It was the end point. And from that point and from that vantage point, that did feel or at least for many people and perhaps it was not always naive, but it did feel there was a kind of like wiggish inevitability to all of this stuff and that China would follow. What we can definitely say now, though, is that that is not the case and that there is such a thing as illiberal democracy. We put these words liberal and democracy together as if they're sort of natural bedfellows is not true. Yeah. You can have all sorts. Democracy is just a mechanism. The liberal bit is what we choose to have with it.

And coming up after the break, our last what if of this series. This is the News Agents. Earlier today, I spoke with His Majesty the King to request the dissolution of Poland. 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?

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? Hmm. Interesting.

"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. It wasn't the narrative set after Liz Truss. It probably was. But then if you had run a campaign saying, look, we put 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. I think that they think that lots of stuff would have come out over the summer and, you know, it would have just been a different thing. I mean, I think it's fair to say. I mean, actually, the argument will 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 that's always 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."

"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 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 have been much worse. It really couldn't have been. Do you think? I don't think so. It couldn't have been much worse."

"Yeah. I mean, maybe they would have got 140, 150 seats instead of 120. 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 30th. How would we be feeling about that? We wouldn't be sat here in our splendid clothes, I'm sure. We'd be getting ready to hit the road."

"I'm looking forward to a scruffier 2025, by the way. Is that right? My clothes are out. So wait, scruffy, but with ties. Can I just check?"

"No, no, no, no. So what are you going to be wearing? Like a string vest? Yeah, with my potbelly hanging over. It's a bit of Stella Artois going in. A couple of tacks. Yeah, exactly. Going to be inked. Great. In a sleeve. You're going to be like Geoffrey Hughes in Keeping Up Appearances."

"Yes, whatever that is. Okay. Great to get an early reference to Geoffrey Hughes."

"So broadly, no, no, no. Wouldn't have made any difference. I don't think it would have made much difference. I think the die was cast. The year of three prime ministers, I think the Tories were done. Yeah."

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. We'll see about this August. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New Year.

This is a Global Player original podcast.