Blonde ambition: Boris’s bid for power

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. It was one of the first trials to be fully televised, and it had the American public transfixed. Claus von Bülow, a European who had joined America's aristocracy, was tried twice for trying to kill his wife in order to be with his starlit mistress. We look back on his life and consider the still unanswerable question: did he do it? The success of some American blockbusters in Chinese cinemas might make it seem that the two film markets are converging. We speak to a Chinese-American actor who's worked on both sides of the Pacific and who says quite the opposite.

First up, though, The total number of votes given to each candidate were as follows.

The race to become the next leader of the Conservative Party, and therefore the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, is down to two.

Michael Gove, 75. Jeremy Hunt, 77. Boris Johnson, 160. We therefore declare that Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson are going forward to a vote of the qualifying membership of the Conservative and Unionist Party.

It had been up to the Tory parliamentarians to whittle the candidates down. The final vote will come from 160,000 paid-up members of the party, who overwhelmingly support Brexit. The winner will be announced in about a month. The out-and-out favorite is Boris Johnson. He was a key figure in the Leave campaign, and says the UK should be prepared to depart from the European Union without a deal, the hard Brexit that many fear. His opponent, the Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, voted to remain and, like Theresa May before him, argues that a no-deal scenario should be avoided. Now a Brexiteer, he's picked up the nickname Theresa in Trousers. If Boris Johnson becomes prime minister, what will that mean for the UK? The Conservative Party and Brexit.

Boris Johnson has been one of the biggest figures in British politics for almost the past decade now.

Duncan Robinson is our political correspondent.

He's a former mayor of London, which gave him this huge pulpit as boss of Britain's biggest city. Then he helped lead the Brexit campaign and was arguably the reason that the campaign won. Then he became foreign secretary, where he had a very gaffe-prone record and quit over Theresa Theresa May's handling of Brexit. So he's been quite a prominent figure for a while.

What kind of guy is he?

So Boris Johnson has always been this very cartoonish figure. There was one moment when he was Mayor of London where he got trapped on a zip wire and managed to turn it into a PR coup. Get me a ladder! Can you get me a rope?

Get me a rope, OK?

He's a man for whom things do not always appear serious. And that was sort of OK when he was Mayor of London, because people sort of forgave it, but became much more of a problem when he was Foreign Secretary, as people didn't want the man who represented Britain abroad to be a clown, effectively.

He's sometimes compared to another blustery blonde politician across the Atlantic. Do you think that's a fair comparison?

Imagine if Donald Trump could speak Latin, and then you have a decent picture of Boris Johnson. The main way in which they are similar is that they have this tremendous ability to suck up attention. So their political rivals really struggle for oxygen whenever they're in the room because they're very charismatic. They just They generate news wherever they go, and politics is an attention game. And like Trump, Johnson has a record for making very controversial statements, then trying to wiggle out of them. There was a column recently on whether or not the burqa should be banned, where he described women who wear the burqa as looking like letterboxes. Now that sort of gets into the contradictions of Boris Johnson, because that column was— it had a fundamentally liberal argument. He said that burqa bans were bad, but he did so in an extremely insulting way. That people think is actually just a veneer for some actually quite nasty views that lurk beneath the surface.

You regret your comments.

Do you regret your comments?

Go on, have a cup of tea.

Thank you very much.

And so when this blew up into a large scandal, Boris Johnson tried to defuse the situation. There was press camped outside his house and he sort of appeared bearing big mugs of tea and sort of tried to laugh it off. Because I have nothing to say about this matter except to offer you some tea. Okay.

Okay.

Go on. Okay, thank you.

And that's essentially how he goes about his business.

And so why do you think he's been such a strong contender in this race? How has he been able to bring the party onside if he is kind of often this figure of fun?

Boris Johnson is very, very popular among the Conservative base because he is entertaining, because he has charisma, and also because he backed Brexit. Who elected those people?

Nobody.

Nobody elected them. Do we want to be sucked into a federal superstate like that? No.

No, we absolutely don't.

And Brexit, for Conservative members who will have the final say on who becomes the next Prime Minister, is approaching a be-all-end-all issue.

And what about his only remaining contender for the job, Jeremy Hunt? What's his backstory?

Now, Jeremy Hunt comes from a relatively similar background to Boris Johnson. They both went to posh schools in South England. They both went to Oxford. But there they start to diverge. Jeremy Hunt's got a background in business. He started a firm, became incredibly rich from that. And as a politician, Jeremy Hunt has a reputation for slightly dull technocratic competence, which is the polar opposite of Boris Johnson.

And does he pose any real risk then to Boris's bid?

Not unless Boris Johnson blows up his own campaign.

Which is not out of the question, mind.

It isn't entirely possible. Jeremy Hunt isn't especially charismatic, and there is this danger that he will just be completely overshadowed by this blustering blonde bombshell.

But as you say, the Brexit question is the be-all, end-all one. So it's about where each candidate stands on that.

Yes, and Hunt has the original sin of having voted remain in the Brexit referendum. So since then, he has repented. He's become quite a hard Brexiteer, and he is determined to take Britain out of the EU.

We need tough negotiation, not empty rhetoric. Because having talked to many European leaders I believe that if we show determination, ingenuity, and confidence, there is a deal to be done.

But members fundamentally won't trust him because he voted remain in the first place.

Pretty much the problem Theresa May had.

Exactly.

So aside from the Brexit question, what would Boris Johnson as prime minister be like?

There's a few schools of thought on how Boris would actually behave in government. So there's one side of Boris that he is this liberal, he will sort of sit back, he will just let others do all the work. The policies that have come out have been aimed at tax cuts for relatively well-off people. The policy on Brexit is more nebulous than he let on, although he's determined to leave by October 31st, which is a potentially large rod for his own back. But beyond that, there's very, very few details. Johnson doesn't have his own political compass. He's a weather vane. He just goes wherever the political direction blows at that point. Politics in Britain is blowing in quite a nasty direction. You've got the populist right who are really, really surging. So there is a dangerous that the liberal Johnson who we saw as Mayor of London will turn into this altogether slightly nastier, more right-wing one.

And what about beyond Britain? What about on the world stage where during his tenure as Foreign Secretary, he made a bit of a fool of himself?

Boris Johnson was remarkably unpopular as Foreign Secretary. There was a high degree of contempt for him in Brussels in particular. They saw him as this irresponsible, to be blunt, clown who had helped push Britain off this cliff. And so he's not going to be swimming in a pool of goodwill when he first heads to Brussels as Prime Minister, if he gets there.

I mean, does that play into his seeming willingness to pursue a hard exit, a no-deal exit, or do you think he might soften on that point when he comes to power, if he comes to power?

I think people in Brussels fundamentally believe that Johnson is not serious. They can't quite believe that Britain is coming back after a 5 or 6-month extension and pretty much asking for the things that were refused earlier in the year. And so that will be a very, very tough obstacle for Mr. Johnson to clear.

What risk do you think it'll be a very short tenure?

It's a very, very high risk. There is a risk that Boris Johnson could go down as one of the shortest-lived prime ministers in British history. Johnson has a very unstable electorate within the Conservative Party. One side are people who want some sort of deal with the EU, and the other half of his base is people that want to leave the EU without any deal at all. And you can't keep those people happy at once. And the moment he upsets one of those two groups, he no longer has a majority in the House of Commons. And when you no longer have a majority in the House of Commons, you will face an election very soon.

I have a feeling we're going to be talking about this again in the near future.

I do too.

Duncan, thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

In 1980, Sunny von Bulow was found unconscious on the marble floor of the master bathroom at the mansion she shared with her husband Klaus in Newport, Rhode Island. And it seemed that she had taken too much insulin, or she had been injected with too much insulin. She fairly rapidly went into a coma from which she never emerged. She died 28 years later.

Anne Rowe is our obituaries editor. She's been writing about the socialite Claus von Bülow, who twice faced trial for the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny. A woman with an estimated worth of $100 million and to whom he was being unfaithful. She had low blood sugar. Too much insulin could kill her.

There had been a discovery of a black bag in the closet in the master bedroom, which contained a vial of insulin with a needle encrusted with it. And it seemed that this must be the bag which had been used to attempt the murder. And the verdict was given.

The jury finds the defendant, Klaus van Buhr, guilty.

And he was given 30 years. His face was utterly unmoving. He made no flicker of disagreement or surprise, nothing at all, a complete mask. Because remember, he had had a public school upbringing. He described himself as not only stiff upper lip but frozen solid upper lip. His background was minor aristocracy, and he knew how to conduct himself and behave himself, and he was always very stately, tall, courteous, well-tailored, and he was just the sort of man who wouldn't react. Even to a verdict like that. So the verdict of guilty came down in 1982, and this was appealed by Mambulo for two reasons. One, that the first investigator's notes hadn't been made available to the prosecution and the defense, and secondly, that the famous black bag containing the insulin syringe had been taken without a search warrant. And so the verdict of the first trial was overturned, and the second trial started in 1985.

But pictures like this have been beamed across the nation from cameras in the court. They've heard from the mistress, Alexandra Isles, talking about a phone call from Klaus about the coma.

When she was on the point of dying, he He said that he couldn't go through with it, and he called and saved her life. Well, these trials were sensational, first of all, because people saw them, because trials had not been televised gavel to gavel before.

Describe what you heard.

Mm. Mm. Sonny's devoted maid describing her mistress's last conscious moments and then going on to claim that she found insulin and needles in this black bag. In her master's wardrobe.

The second reason was that it was high society. And see, you had a really glittering cast. There seemed to be minor aristocrats on every side of this case, very rich people, all the glitterati of Manhattan, all together in one trial. For the second trial, von Bülow was determined not to leave any stone unturned. He hired a new lawyer, a new chief lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, who was a real street fighter lawyer. And the evidence they most wished to gather was the medical and forensic stuff. So they wished to prove that he couldn't have injected the insulin, which meant looking at the black bag again and looking at the needle very carefully that was on the insulin syringe and finding that if there was an incrustation in it, then it it couldn't have been used for an injection because it would have been wiped clean when it was pulled out of the skin. They also emphasized very strongly the fact that Sunny was psychologically fragile, that she had long been taking too many drugs and drinking too much.

But defense medical experts like this British doctor claimed the coma was self-inflicted through alcohol and drugs. But she was drinking enough alcohol to damage her red cells.

And in fact, on that evening in December 1980, before she was found, she'd had a real binge for the whole day on sweets and drugs, and also on a huge eggnog, which contained 12 fresh eggs and a whole bottle of bourbon. The medical and forensic evidence simply wasn't there for making him the culprit.

How do you find?

Guilty or not guilty? Not guilty.

So the verdict of the second trial, there was an extraordinary reaction from him, the most emotional one that we had seen him make all through the trials. And he simply collapsed his head in his hands with sheer relief about it. He had never been a man of many words. After the trial, he gave a press conference, a brief one. Well, it's been 5 years of worry.

After the first worry, breasts kind of come automatically. Were you worried today? Yes.

And then he gave an interview to NBC 10.

What did happen to Sonny Von Bulow, your wife?

I don't know. I know that I'm totally convinced by the medical picture. I know I didn't do anything.

But pretty shortly after that, he clammed up because he reached an agreement with Sunny's children from her first marriage, which was to an Austrian prince, that he would not say any more about the trial. They always believed he was guilty.

Neither Klaus von Bülow nor the jury's verdict can take away what our mother was—a caring, loving, and giving person. Klaus von Bülow only succeeded in depriving our mother of meaningful life, and now he's gotten away with it.

But he was silent from then on, with one exception, that he did crack some, I think, rather tasteless jokes every so often. It seemed he couldn't resist it. There was an incident where he was dining at Mortimer's in New York on the Upper East Side, which was his favorite restaurant, and a chap died of a heart attack on the next table, and he shouted out, "It wasn't me!" So I think these are most extraordinary things for a man to say when the world is still very unsure of whether he has done the deed or not. I really cannot say myself. I have thought and thought about it because in a way how the obituary was written would almost depend on how I felt about it. But I simply couldn't come down on one side or the other.

Anne Rowe on Claus von Bülow, who's died aged 92. As the trade war between China and America escalates, adventures on the big screen are becoming the latest battlefield for great power competition.

Chinese leaders have had a kind of love-hate relationship with Hollywood since the first big-budget American movie was allowed in in 1994. They sell a lot of tickets, that's good for cinemas, but they don't like the fact they're so popular. David Rennie is The Economist's Beijing bureau chief. The two film markets are now the largest in the world, and some American films like Avengers: Endgame, the recent superhero hit, was a gigantic hit, broke box office records in China. But the bigger trend is that the two markets are drifting apart. And even the trade war is starting to intrude. So there's a lot of rumors in the Chinese film world that American storylines and American actors are being dropped by Chinese producers.

You know, they say violence never solves anything.

It sure is fun. So Wolf Warrior 2 is a revealing hit. It's a patriotic adventure. It's set in war-torn Africa. And the star is this lone Chinese commando who is rescuing Chinese and African hostages, and the baddies are wicked American mercenaries. Salena Jade plays a Chinese-American doctor who is in Africa trying to find a cure for a deadly disease.

Going through the studio process is like taking a tea bag with 10 teacups and dipping the tea bag in each cup. So by the time it gets fully approved, you know, the creativity or the story has, has really reduced.

Her character looks a bit like kind of the Angelina Jolie of China. She's not quite Angelina Jolie famous yet. She is kind of recognized in the street, mobbed, you know, in airports by crowds when they realize who she is. She's kind of the supporting actress from a very famous film, but she's still sort of making her way up the ladder. And I met her in Beijing. She was just coming back from meetings in Hollywood with producers, and she was on her way to Norway to film a Chinese TV travel show. So she's very much a kind of bridge between those two film worlds. She was really interesting about her meetings in Hollywood. She said that only a very short time ago, it was all about sort of dropping a token Chinese actress into an American film to try and make a crossover hit. But that kind of super bland, super safe crossover approach is losing popularity right now.

I think that sometimes having limitations forces people to be more creative, like someone who's really creative will find a way to work within the system.

One of the painful questions obviously is Chinese filmmakers, they operate in a world of very strict state censorship. And they used to feel bad if they didn't make a film that would do well overseas. It used to be the ambition of Chinese filmmakers to make movies that would appeal to Westerners. Partly because the market's getting bigger, and partly because the political control is getting so much tighter, you're seeing Chinese filmmakers saying, we're just going to make movies for the Chinese market and not worry as much about overseas audiences.

Well, what about the reverse? I mean, how much is Hollywood interested in continuing to have a big presence in China?

Hollywood would love to, and Hollywood has self-censored and removed kind of Chinese villains and changed plotlines to try and get past those Chinese censors. But there are still strict quotas on how many movies they can send into the market. And the Chinese market is changing as more and more cinemas are opening in small provincial cities. You're getting audiences which are much keener on Chinese themes and Chinese actors and Chinese storylines and less keen on foreign ones. So it's a sign of the times, I think, that a Chinese-American actress educated in the West is willing to make a case that censorship is actually good for movies because that's how you get ahead in the Chinese film market right now.

Let's be honest, like, I feel like democracy kind of slows things down. I love this like collectivist culture or mentality? This is bigger than movies, really.

This is a very, very political, very strict moment in China. And you can see that someone like Selina Horan moving between those two worlds is going to have to choose. And she is willing to make the case that democracy, American-style democracy, just looks inefficient and unimpressive. And that's the kind of choice that you're going to see people increasingly having to make.

So we have these two sort of diverging industries. And yet the numbers are still enormous on some of these Hollywood films like Avengers: Endgame. Why is that?

That film Avengers: Endgame is actually really interesting because it shows that China is not monolithic. Avengers: Endgame is a very American movie, but it's about misfits. It's about these kind of very individualistic, not always very heroic superheroes. And that appeals to a definite sort of slice of Chinese society, particularly younger Chinese who feel that kind of pressure to conform. And they loved the fact that it was a nonconformist American movie. So this place is not one mass that all moves the same way.

Thanks for your time, David. Thank you. That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, and you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/radiooffer. 12 issues for $12 or £12. See you Be back here on Monday.