One Tory building: Rishi Sunak’s mission

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. Today from London, I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. In Russia, the ever stronger arm of the state is trying to reach into the country's cultural spaces. Lots of citizens have been won over to the party line, but a closer look at the arts reveals that the Kremlin's control isn't as complete as it would like. And today, the autobiography of jazz pianist Brad Mehldau is out, covering a career that's been as broad as it has long. Our correspondent lays out why he thinks Mr. Mehldau is one of the most thoughtful and inquisitive spirits in jazz. First up though, Today Britain's Finance Minister, Jeremy Hunt will lay out the country's annual budget. It's the first since the disastrous mini budget that spelled the beginning of the end for former Prime Minister Liz Truss. Mr. Hunt has to start patching the holes in the British economy while at least appearing to extend a helping hand to an electorate suffering from a cost of living crisis. It's just part of a broader balancing act of the governing Conservative Party under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. A Conservative Party that's slumping in the polls. That includes tackling the meat and potatoes issue of immigration, specifically hardline legislation designed to stem the flow of small boats across the English channel. But Mr. Sunak's agenda doesn't stop at Britain's borders. He's been doing a fair bit to burnish the country's international reputation too.

Rishi Sunak has had a pretty busy seven days or so.

Matthew Hullhouse is the Economist's British political correspondent.

He was in France talking to President Macron to reset the UK France relationship. He's been in the United States with President Biden and Prime Minister Albanese of Australia. The UK has launched a major defence review this week. And today his government sets out its budget for the year. Ahead, an important moment as he gets his party together to contest the next election, which looks like a pretty uphill struggle.

Okay, and before we get into the re election question, let's talk about all that jet setting. We spoke about the Aukus deal this week already. How did Mr. Sunak and President Biden actually get along?

That's right. He flew over to California for a joint announcement of the next stage of this agreement, which will provide submarines for Australia. This really is about trying to reset the relationship between the UK and the United States, which came under significant strain, first under Theresa May and Donald Trump, and then arguably worse, between Boris Johnson and President Biden. One of the major sticking points in that was the UK's approach to settling the question of Northern Ireland. Now, recently, Rishi Sunak signed a new deal with the eu which both parties hope will put that to bed or at least de dramatize it. On the personal front, it was an opportunity for Sunak and Biden to spend some time together.

It's great that we're going to see each other also a lot over the next few months. I was pleased to accept the President's invitation to Visit him in D.C. in June.

Sunak knows the United States well. He studied in California at Stanford. But really this does seem like quite an important reset and that having secured this new deal on Northern Ireland with the European Union, that is having sort of a positive follow on effect in terms of helping to put Britain's relationship with its most important ally on a different footing.

And you mentioned he had been meeting also with the French President, Emmanuel Macron. How did that go? Similarly chummy.

Again, this was another sort of big repair job. This was a Relationship that was terribly strained, both by Brexit, but also by the person of Boris Johnson, with whom President Macron had, it has to be said, a pretty dire relationship. There was a huge number of topics covered and wrapped up in the communique covering defence cooperation, trying to improve economic ties, but also this issue of small boats, which are a pretty big political issue in the UK and ultimately are a manifestation of a failure to have a productive bilateral relationship. And the two seem to like each other. If you talk to diplomats, they say, look at their careers, both worked in banking, look at the way in which they sort of present themselves and approach problems. They're actually cut from pretty similar cloth. And at their joint press conference they were full of praise for one another and hopes for the relationship.

It makes sense with our history, our geography, our DNA, I would say, is to have the best, I mean the best possible relation and the closest alliance. I believe today's meeting does mark a.

New beginning and entente renewed. We are looking to the future, a.

Future that builds on all.

So it sounds as if Mr. Sunak has been busy and reasonably successful on the world stage. What about at home? How are things going domestically?

So that's exactly right. Sunak has been having a pretty successful week abroad, as so often the picture at home for his party at least, is pretty sticky. So polls are showing the opposition consistently in the region of 20 points ahead. And it has to be said that the polls are pretty noisy on this. Now, this is due to a number of factors. One is that under his short lived predecessor, Liz Truss, the party lost its reputation for economic competence. So when you lose that, then the polling generally follows. It's also a story actually about the fragmentation of the Conservative right and lots of voters who sort of backed the Conservative party in 2019 because they liked the figure of Boris Johnson and they wanted to get Brexit done, as the phrase went, are starting to look elsewhere. So a big challenge for the Sunak premiership if they want to at least minimise the loss of the next election, if not whisper it, win it outright, is about trying to bring this coalition back together. And the boats issue is very important in that, in that that is seen as a major concern for many of those voters who vote in Conservative.

And what's Mr. Sunak's government doing about that boats issue?

So to tackle this issue of the 45,000 regular crossings, the government has taken a pretty strident approach at home. The centerpiece of this is a new bill which aims to basically sever any prospect of somebody who's crossed the channel on the vote of gaining settlement in the uk. This is deeply controversial because, as the British government admits itself, it is potentially in violation of the UK's obligations to refugees under international law. Sunak has taken a really pretty strident approach at home. So they've adopted the slogan of Stop the boats. And he, you know, despite being something of a sort of an urbane metropolitan figure himself, has been very, very happy to let his party off the leash a little bit.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman has warned millions, if not billions. That's the word she uses in an article in the Daily Mail today. Billions of asylum seekers could come to the UK without her planned immigration crackdown.

Which really does appear intended to assure said part of the Conservative electoral coalition that, you know, you will not find a more determined and alive party on this issue than the conceptives.

And amid the kind of cost of living crisis that a lot of countries are suffering right now, we have a budget coming out today. What are you looking for in that? What will. What will that tell us about Mr. Sunak's government?

That's right. It will be Chancellor Jeremy Hunt's first world budget and the first since the disastrous mini budget of the Trust era, which really cost the concep, departed its reputation for economic competence. Now, the backdrop to this is that the UK is facing, as many countries are, a pretty acute cost of living squeeze. Inflation, whilst it does appear to be down from its peak, was still over 10% in the year to January. And this is potentially going to be the biggest issue that people will be thinking about when they're thinking about their voting intention. Hunt is really very keen to focus the budget as a cure for Britain's sort of chronic growth problems. So it's going to focus on the incentives of business to invest in plant and there's going to be a big focus on how to get people back to work.

And so if you take all of this in aggregate, what does it tell you about how Mr. Sunak is doing and whether or not he'll be able to pull his Conservative Party out of the electoral hole they're in.

I do think there is a thread that you can pull through this pretty diverse set of issues. And that is the story of Sunak, who came into power and said, I'm basically going to clean up the mess that I've inherited. You look at a Labour critique that says the Tory Party has left the UK isolated from the eu, isolated from France, isolated from the United States. You're struggling with the cost of child care There is an uncontrolled issue with small boats in the Channel and government in general is incompetent and incapable of solving these problems. You can see a story in which Sunak is basically moving fairly sort of management constant style problem to problem closing them down, trying to get some resolution to them. So in that sense, he is a much more sort of difficult opponent for the Labour Party than Boris Johnson was. The question is now how the Labour Party sort of changes its critique and whether it can come up with a new line of attack on Sunak which helps it retain this pretty chunky lead that it has in the polls at the moment.

Matthew, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

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At the current point in time, Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine is obviously up against difficulties, but inside the country itself, inside Russia, perhaps you would argue it's having its greatest success.

Oliver Carroll is a foreign correspondent for the Economist.

I've been visiting Russia, working in Russia for the best part of two decades, and I returned there this winter. And it's a very strange experience because on the one hand, it's all very familiar. It looks the same. But something very strange has happened and something substantial has happened. One of the major ways in which the Kremlin is affecting life in Russia is in its approach to conformism, dissent, and the cultural space, the personal space. And for the first time since the Soviet era, it's reaching its arms as far as possible into people's personal spaces, into schools, into theaters, into all kinds of cultural spaces. It's the biggest disruption to Russian culture since Stalin's Cultural Revolution. But while you do have this very big machine working against all areas of personal and public space, you see that the effect is not total. They may have won over large swathes of the population. But they haven't won over every single individual. And as much as the Kremlin might like to create a new cultural space, it hasn't actually been particularly successful in doing so.

So how have the artists that you've spoken to reacted to this reaching arm of the state into the cultural sphere?

Well, the responses very much vary. A great deal of really high class artists have abandoned Russia. Others have taken a position of pragmatic silence. On one extreme, you have a few artists in the main minority who have associated themselves with the Z operation, Z being this symbol, the war. One of three symbols, Z, V and O, which were painted onto Russian tanks and armor in the invasion and has since become a symbol of nationalism and the mindset that goes with it. That's one end of the spectrum. But then another end of the spectrum are a few brave souls who have stayed and ignored the very heavy hints to shut up and follow the cultural propaganda and oppose the war. Some of them have been prosecuted for that, but others continue to do remarkable work, mostly in the shadows.

So let's talk about the people who have taken the side of, let's call it Z culture. What's been going on there?

Well, as elsewhere in society, the war has brought a class of winners alongside the losers. You see certain musicians, artists, theatre directors who've been promoted using state money and given stadiums to play in, and so on and so forth. The most prominent artist which has broken into the so called mainstream with government help is the musician Shaman, who is a fairly primitive artist with hits such as I'm Russian and so on.

So the commercial imperatives here seem clear in this situation. But what about the artists themselves, the ones who stuck around, the ones who continue to be non conformist? What are they saying about all this?

They are definitely the minority. Most have taken the hints and are either keeping quiet or that they've immigrated. But I did get the chance to witness something quite special in Moscow, in a theater space, Watching a play which essentially has very clear anti war motifs. Contemporary take on a biblical classic, the story of Christ showing the Sovietized version of Bethlehem, and a very recognisable paranoid elderly autocrat preparing to slaughter young boys aged 2 and under. The inspiration for the play was not Jesus, but little Sergei, who in fact is inspired after 2 day old Sergei Podlyanov from Zaporozha region, who was killed in November by a Russian missile. And I had a chat with the writer of the play, Who struck me by the sense of her absolute creative clarity and moral clarity she was under a little illusion about the reach of her work. She talked about a dance of a mosquito. That's basically the level of what she's doing, she believes. But she was very clear that she felt the need to stay in Moscow and that those who say that this is not a time for culture, this is a time to be depressed and to reflect well, she said, yes, we understand all of that, but it wasn't a case of choosing between culture or conscience. Despite the well advertised jail sentences and repression all across the board, you had someone who was prepared to put on a play with such a clear moral message. That does suggest that government control is some way short of that Soviet level of totalitarianism. And it's a strange paradox because on the one hand, technologically, of course, we're so much down more further down the road, which is very much sort of sellotaped over in many respects. It's totalitarian on the cheap.

So the totalitarianism hasn't reached Soviet levels, and yet the state does seem dead set on exerting this kind of control. Where is all of this heading in particular for culture?

The repression we're seeing at the moment is very selectively applied. And it works in a system where the sort of architecture is there to be turned on or turned off. It works to shut the majority of people up. And it's effective and it's much greater than the sum of its parts because of two things, the glue which holds the system together, it's fear and its propaganda, certainly for people like, for example, Zhenya Bedakovich. She's already been threatened with prosecution, she's already appeared at festivals and at the last minute those appearances have been cancelled. And it's clear the risks of stepping outside of what counts as possible. They're real, they're growing. You don't have to be particularly creative to imagine the kind of things that can happen to artists who do step out of the line for Ms. Berkowitz. As she told me, she intends to stay in Moscow for as long as is possible. She sees value in doing that. She saw Putinism not as a geography, not as something which is specific to a place, but as a state of mind. As she told me at the time, you can close your window to stay warm, but it will still be cold on the streets outside.

Thanks very much for joining us, Oliver.

It's always a pleasure.

Examining Russia's cultural scene is one way to look at how its public discourse has been derailed by the invasion of Ukraine, but a surprisingly insightful view can be had by looking outside Russia to the expats who fled in the wake of the invasion. That's what my colleague Arkady Ostrovsky is doing in our new series Next Year in Moscow. Listen to their stories to learn how Russia got where it is and just a hint of where it might be going. The first three episodes of Next Year in Moscow are out now with new ones every Saturday.

The best experiences of jazz are to be had close up.

Sebastian Scotney writes about music for the Economist.

Where you can really marvel at how the musicians communicate with each other. It's in small clubs, in small venues. That's an experience that really brings the music home to you. There's a lovely quote from Keith Jarrett, who once said, jazz is there and gone. Among the top practitioners in the world, and certainly among one of the most thoughtful and inquisitive spirits in jazz, is pianist Brad Meldow. And since Keith Jarrett has had to withdraw from public performance following Strokes in 2017, he probably has the mantle of the world's preeminent jazz pianist. There's a huge recorded output, but the latest thing is an album of almost exclusively Beatles covers. It starts off with the title track youk Mother Should Know. It's just a beautiful thing. There's a new autobiography, or rather part one of an autobiography, which deals with the years until 1996, which is actually published today. And the thing that really emerges from it is quite how wide the range of music that he is interested in really is. I think anybody who thinks that they know about rock music or thinks that they know about classical music is going to find their horizons expanded by it. And one of his hallmarks as a player is the wide range of tunes that he's adapted.

I used to play a radio head tune called Exit Music for a Film, and it has a deep similarity to Chopin's famous Prelude in E Minor with this descending doleful minor chords that. That just keep on going down and down. So I would play that and some older classical music people, oh, that's wonderful. You play the Chopin prelude. So you can have these kind of influences, and if you bring them into your music, you kind of get dropped there As a listener, I like that experience too, because I don't necessarily even know where it's coming from, the artist, or if I do make the connection, it's nice. I can make it on my own terms and say, oh, that's Brahms or Schubert.

One particular thing about Brad Mehldau, and he talks about it in the book as well, is that he is drawn very much to sadness, melancholy. You go to the track that has been most streamed, his take on the Beatles, Blackbird. It's based on a figure from a Bach Bouray. And also there's the whole human rights, racial tension side of it, which the Beatles and Paul McCartney have talked about. He's drawn to all of these things simultaneously.

I don't think all my music is sad because we wouldn't want that. You know, it gets a little one sided. But I think that in some of my music I've been able to communicate some of that. And then there's this notion of a kind of catharsis. What I've experienced when I listen to like a Mahler symphony or something, that really goes to the edge of despair, you know, is an identification with that and then a feeling that, well, at least I'm not alone in that feeling because someone else just named that feeling musically. And then there's a kind of dignity to it maybe, or a kind of hope or grace that you can find in that.

What he's done in the autobiography is a story of his early life. The stigma of being adopted, the stigma of being not one of the sporty ones at school, tales about being abused or groomed by a figure in authority at school. None of it gets hidden. And maybe that goes with the honesty of being a musician who's sort of telling your own story on stage.

I used so much heroin that I really almost died, you know, almost overdosed. And some of my friends did. So I felt that it was important to write about them. It wasn't necessary, but to just show the. How serious that is. And also what I wanted to show with that is how it didn't help me as a musician at all. And maybe just put a little hole. I don't think that myth is around as much as it used to be, but to sort of just make sure that people understood that it wasn't anything good for me as a musician. You know, it didn't lead to any revelation, it just brought more pain.

What you have here with Brad Meldau is a fascinating mind, a creative mind, an open mind. I've really enjoyed his solo on a track called Afterglow, which I felt kind of showed a very early incarnation of his style. And, you know, one can read this autobiography and all that comes across, you can hear the albums, but really the best way is to go to one of the concerts and he'll really shrink the room and you're really close up and you're watching the way that he tells a story through music.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show, Drop us a line@podcastseconomist.com or leave us a rating wherever you listen. We'll see you back here tomorrow.