Rishi, you were here: Boris Johnson’s woes

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Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow. 135 gigabytes of network busy taxes and fees extra. See mint mobile.com. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. In London, south of the River Thames, I'm Jason Palmer.

And north of the river still in London, I'm John Fassman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

In a lot of cities, workday travel is down, even if evening and weekend travel seems mostly to have recovered to pre pandemic levels. We take a ride on a shiny new line in London, reflecting on the complicated future of post pandemic public transport.

And thousands of drones have swarmed the skies over Ukraine in the past few months, mainly to gather battlefield intelligence. Armies love them. They're cheap, effective and easy to come by. Drone makers, however, are less happy. But first, Boris Johnson's grip on power has looked weak for some time, but after last night, he's clinging on to his job as Britain's Prime Minister by his fingernails. Two top cabinet ministers resigned, followed by several more junior figures. They left after Mr. Johnson apologized for promoting an MP accused of sexual misconduct.

Do you accept it was a grave error to appoint Chris Pincher to your government?

Yes. I think it was a mistake and I apologize for it. I think in hindsight it was the wrong thing to do.

Downing street had previously said Mr. Johnson hadn't been aware of the allegations. Nadine Zahawi, the new Chancellor of The Exchequer defended Mr. Johnson this morning.

Do you think this Prime Minister has integrity?

I do.

I think he.

So we need to know.

Well, because he's determined to deliver.

But his voice here is one of the few. In the face of a chorus of dissent, MPs from Mr. Johnson's party have toured breakfast shows calling for his resignation.

Some people think that he can walk on water. I'm not one of those people, I'm afraid.

I don't share the Chancellor's view of.

His integrity and I don't think.

But so far he seems determined to stay.

Johnson had been facing questions for some days over what he knew about his Deputy Chief Whip, Chris Pincher, who resigned after admitting he'd been harassing men in bars.

Matthew Hullhouse is the Economist, British political correspondent.

In quite dramatic fashion, we saw the resignations of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Arishi Sunak, that is, the Finance Minister, and of Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary. The letters landed within a few minutes of each other, close to six o' clock yesterday. They both basically said that these were standards that they were unable to defend. They felt that the British people deserved a better government than this, more honesty. And so they walked. And it really began an evening of reeling as Johnson sought to reassemble a new top team around him.

But those weren't the only ministers to resign last night, were they?

They were not, no. Later on in the evening, we had the resignation of Alex Chalk, the Solicitor General. He's one of the government's law officers, and then a slew of much more junior figures. So Johnson does seem to have managed to have contained the damage. Had it been the case that another 2, 3, 4, 5 cabinet ministers had walked, that would have been a much, much more catastrophic immediate loss. As it was, it was just these two. Although it cannot be stressed enough, you know, these are some of the most senior figures in the British Government. It's not a good thing for any Prime Minister to lose your Chancellor and your Health Secretary.

And did they all resign for more or less the same reason?

They laid out fairly similar reasons for resigning. In his letter, Sunak said that the public expect government to be conducted properly compet and seriously. And he said that these are values worth fighting for. So, you know, that is an allusion to the slew of scandals we've seen, not just over Chris Pincher, but over Partygate, over Johnson's contact with party donors, over who was paying for the wallpaper in the Downing street flat. The list goes on and on. Similarly, Javid said that the British people expect integrity from their government and that it was time for a new direction. So they're both very much focusing on these questions of ethics and competence in government.

And so, Matthew, how is the party responding?

The Conservative Party's incredibly restive. Johnson got through a leadership contest just a month ago. He survived not by the biggest of margins. Now, formally under the rules, that should have been the end of the matter for a year. But ultimately the rules are made by the MPs themselves, and so it's perfectly possible for those rules to be changed. The other scenario, which seems to me perfectly plausible, is actually that we're stuck in this sort of pattern that we've been in for months and months now, which is people say, well, he can't go on. It's humiliating, it's debilitating. He's a lamed at Prime Minister. This is just intolerable. And yet somehow the Conservative Party manages to tolerate it. And this just sort of drags on and on. One thing which is really worth noting is just how poorly coordinated the effort to remove Johnston is. This is very much far from the managed leadership challenges that we knew in days gone by. So Johnston has many, many enemies. They're ranged against him, but in some ways he is quite lucky in just how poor his enemies are at organizing themselves.

So how long do you think he.

Can survive the exit of a Prime Minister? And a leadership crisis is not an event, it's a process. It's a condition rather than a moment. And particularly when you have somebody like Johnson who really, really is determined to dig in. He considers his mandate to come not from MPs, which would be a classical understanding of the British constitution, but from the people himself. He ascribes to a form of popular sovereignty, which is sort of presidential in approach. So that is to say, he really will be determined not to go. We saw his determination last night to rally a new team around him and to push on. That said, people within the party who were previously loyal now think it really is terminal. And you're talking about weeks or months at best. What is clear is that whatever timetable emerges, you really are in a distinct phase of this premiership, one which is shorn of authority, shorn of the capacity to pull levers and get things done. It just is a question of how long. The Conservative Party thinks that that is a suitable way to run a government.

So, Matthew, in the event that he does step down, who's waiting in the wings?

The fielding in contest would be quite wide. Sunak has positioned himself as one of the Head of the rebels. You have Jeremy Hunt, a former Health Secretary, who's been quite open that he would fancy another shot at the top job within Cabinet. You have people like Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, who seems to have handled the Ukraine crisis fairly well. So it's a very, very wide field. Unfortunately, the problem with the Conservative Party is to be a very sort of myopic affairs. So there's a huge amount of energy invested in looking at, you know, who's positioning whom, who's making contact, who's organizing the drinks parties. The thing that gets missed in all this is just the challenges that will be awaiting any Prime Minister. And really the extent to which Britain is suffering from a lack of leadership. At the moment, you have the context of this huge squeeze on real incomes with very, very high inflation. In the UK at the moment, we know that the UK has got quite chronic problems with low growth. At the moment, we have relations with the European Union, really as poor as they've ever been. The list goes on and on and on. The point is that for the Conservative Party, whether any contest of any candidate to replace Boris Johnson is willing to engage in these problems, or whether it's going to be a lot like contests gone, in which you engage in this terribly so fanciful exchange of ideas about Britain being a global power, about the need to cut taxes, about the need to revive the thatch right agenda, all blue sky things, but none of which really engages with the reality of the challenges facing the British government. Now, the great attraction for Many members and MPs of Boris Johnson is that he was willing to take them on a bit of a rhetorical journey to this comfort zone. Whether the party now has the appetite for people who are willing to deliver some home truths about the condition of the United Kingdom and the choices that have to be made made is an open question.

All right, Matthew, thanks so much for joining us this morning.

Thank you.

The pandemic has reshaped lives the world over, not least how, when and whether people travel. That'll mean some readjustment on the part of those who plan for and manage public transport. There's a case in point here in London on one much delayed, sparkling new railway line.

So we're standing in Tottenham Court Road Station in the West End of London in a large tunnel, really, which looks very sort of modern. It's all shades of grey. There's no advertising. This is the new Elizabeth Line, formerly known as Crossrail, which crosses London from east to west.

Joel Budd is our Social affairs editor.

It was first talked about many, many years ago in the 1940s, it was proposed that a line of this kind would be built, and it's been called Crossrail since the 1970s, but it's only just opened.

As a Londoner, what do you make of it?

Well, it's spectacular. It is an extraordinary feat of engineering. The tunneling of it was an amazing project and it looks very extraordinary. It's much, much more modern seeming even than the Jubilee Line, which is London's most recent tube line. This train line has opened into an environment where essentially many fewer people are using trains. Since COVID 19 appeared, train use has fallen by about 10 or 15% and tube use, I.e. the use of the London Underground, is down by almost a quarter. So Londoners and people around London are simply using trains much, much, much less than they used to.

This is my first visit to the Elizabeth Line and I'm about ready to take a journey. Shall we?

Yes, let's go. Train approaching platform A to your local time service. This train will call all stations to Abbeywood.

So you said that many fewer people are using London's transport network?

Yes, especially many fewer people are taking the tube and trains. People are still taking buses almost as much as they used to. But there's almost no rush hour anymore. Things get a bit busier in the morning and a bit busier in the late afternoon. But we don't anymore have the sort of rush hour that we used to. It's much, much more spread out during the day. Weekends are almost as busy, sometimes more busy than they used to be. What has really happened is that weekday travel, especially weekday rush hour travel, has collapsed.

People just aren't going to work as much.

Yes, and especially people who work in offices coming in from sort of commuter towns outside London or coming in from the outer suburbs of London into the office districts. That has really, really declined.

Okay, short journey, we've alighted at Farringdon. I used to live around here. You mentioned that many fewer people are using the transport network. In a general sense, that's not entirely surprising right now. The world has opened back up and, you know, gigs and bars and all of that. But you don't have to go into work necessarily. This is more or less what we'd expect, isn't it?

It tells us, I think, that what has altered travel behavior is not exactly fear. So when the pandemic first hit, it was thought that people were scared of using public transport because, you know, you have to sort of squash into a train carriage or a bus with lots of People who might have Covid. And the fact that people are still traveling a lot at weekends, they're traveling a lot in the even, I think tells you that's not right. And instead what has happened is that people have altered their work habits and their travel habits have changed because their work habits have changed. And I think because it's driven by work habits, it's probably never going to go back to normal.

And do we see this in a similar way in other big urban areas?

Yes, you see almost exactly the same thing in lots and lots of rich world cities. And it doesn't matter whether there were a lot of COVID deaths in that city. You know, for example, New York looks very similar to London or if there were almost no COVID deaths. So Auckland in New Zealand looks almost exactly the same as London. These patterns seem to be pretty general.

Do you think that this is a kind of immediately post pandemic or late pandemic effect or is this just now the way of the world?

There's been a kind of quiet war between companies and workers where early on companies expected that things would get back to normal. Workers really didn't want that. And a sort of truce has been formed. And what people have settled on I think is about three days in the office and two days not in the office. And companies have increasingly sort of come round to the idea that that is all they're going to be able to push for. If they try to push white collar workers any further than that, then people will simply leave or not join their companies in the first place.

And what does that mean then for these transport networks, for that to change, for the economics of all this to change, for people trying to, I don't know, recoup the expense of this lavish Elizabeth line?

Well, it probably means that this line is too much. I mean the train that has just pulled in is 650ft or about 200 meters long. This is a vast train designed to move huge numbers of people through central London and some children. And it just seems increasingly implausible that we're ever going to need to move this many people through. Perhaps we will in a few decades time, but it's going to take a long time to get to where we thought we were going to be right now.

Do you think that presents a sort of economic or a strategic risk for the companies who depend on this, who count on the kinds of numbers we saw for so long?

Well, transport operators just have a huge problem now because their costs are more or less fixed and their revenues, which in London come mostly from riders not from the state, have collapsed, and so they are having to be bailed out by central government. And that is simply not going to go on forever. So something is going to have to give. They may have to run many fewer services along these lines, or we're going to have to accept much higher fares, or we're going to have to accept continued government bailouts of public transport networks. And all of these things are going to be very, very unpopular.

Joel, thanks very much for going on a ride with us.

Thank you.

Not so long ago, drones were merely the playthings of tech enthusiasts and amateur filmmakers. But in the war in Ukraine, both sides have been putting them to military use and the companies who make them aren't too happy about it.

We've seen small drones used in previous conflicts in the past few years.

David Hambling writes about technology and defence for the Economist.

Now, in the Ukraine conflict, we're actually seeing them being adopted by the militaries of both sides on a massive scale. There are thousands in use and in fact, both sides have appealed for donations of drones to be made to their forces.

So this is just straight up off the shelf consumer versions of these drones.

So the modern consumer drone era started in 2010 with a drone called AR Drone from French company Parrot. This was highly innovative. It had a wi fi link and a video camera, so it allowed anyone to fly around and get a first person view. That was basically just a fun toy, but it was very successful. Things changed dramatically in 2013 with a Chinese company called DJI who introduced a drone called the Phantom. The big difference there was that had a radio link so that could be controlled from a kilometre away. And it carried a GoPro camera, so you could shoot very good quality, usable video footage from any altitude from anywhere. So basically that made aerial photography available to everyone. Since then, DJI have totally dominated the drone market. They sell millions every year and their products just get better and better every year. So now you've got drones with a range of several kilometres, 4K video, automatic obstacle avoidance and all sorts of other capabilities built in for just a few hundred dollars.

And so how are they actually being used? In the conflict in Ukraine, the main.

Use for them is as artillery spotters. Traditionally for artillery, you have a battery of guns some way behind the lines and close to the front lines, you have an artillery observer who has to see where the enemy is, try and direct fire onto it, and then when he sees where the shells are landing it, tell them how to adjust fire. That's very difficult when you're on foot because the enemy is usually hidden behind a hill or a ridge or among trees or in buildings. And it's also not very easy to judge in relation to where they are, where your shots are landing. Whereas when you've got a drone, the whole thing is vastly easier. You can see any enemy vehicles, even if they're behind a hill or among buildings. So it's an absolute game changer. The other thing which we're also seeing them used for is by infantry squads tactically for gaining intelligence on the battlefield. Typically, this is used for things like tank hunting. So a squad of troops will send up a drone, find out where an enemy vehicle is, where it's hiding, what direction it's facing. So they can basically sneak up on it from the most advantageous position and get their shot in before the tank even knows they're there. And again, they are quite a game changer in terms of being able to get the drop on an enemy before they can get a shot in on you.

So why has this come to an appeal to the public to donate their drones rather than either side striking military contracts?

DJI in particular, took great exception. They say that their drones should never be used to harm people, aren't intended for military use, and they take really a rainbows and butterflies view that drones have no place in warfare. And at the start of the conflict, when Ukrainians were asking for these drones to be donated to the military, they actually banned all sales to both Ukraine and Russia of their products. And that's one reason why you're now seeing benefactors in other countries who are being asked to buy drones and pass them on to the fighters. The other problem is the procurement system in both countries is somewhat creaky and inefficient and isn't very good at just being able to buy things and pass them to the troops. So if there's someone who you can get to literally post you one to where you are on the front line, that turns out to be a much better way of getting your equipment when you need it. And that seems to have applied to both sides.

But regardless of how from where they are procured, it sounds as if drones are now just a part of warfare as we know it. If they give all of these advantages without really presenting any dangers, it does.

Look like consumer drones are likely to feature increasingly on the future battlefield. Now, there are some drone manufacturers, like in fact, Parrot, who now make a specifically military version of their drone. Now, that's got secure communications and is much harder to jam. But it's basically very much the same thing as the consumer models, and it's only a few thousand dollars. So given how readily available these things are and how incredibly effective they are, it's likely we're going to see very much increased numbers of those everywhere whenever there's a conflict in the future.

Thanks very much for joining us, David.

Thank you.

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