Leadership plotting, in real life and in fiction

Welcome to the latest email for our podcast, Political Fictions: political drama on screen and on the page. Please do spread the word about the podcast to your friends, colleagues and even dastardly rivals who you want to distract from doing something else. They can all sign up here:

Now, on to the proper business of this email which this time does not feature a new episode but rather has some bonus content for you about recent episodes. Take it away Cory…

Our last chat on the Yes, Minister episode Party Games was the most-downloaded show since Political Fictions’s debut on The Iron Lady. Thank you for all of your feedback, especially to those who left comments on our Substack piece.

It’s hard to disagree with Alan Kershaw’s assessment that:

Party Games is the single greatest hour of sitcom ever created: an absolute textbook of manoeuvring in public life, written with pinpoint accuracy and beautifully acted.

We talked a bit in that episode about there being much press interest in Jim Hacker’s speech which was unrelated to its subject of fire and safety regulation in government buildings. Peter Lloyd pointed out that “the example that came to mind for ‘event where the political media turned up but you wouldn’t suspect it’ was the Great North Investment Summit” where Andy Burnham gave a speech expanding beyond his brief as Mayor.

On a slightly different tack, I wonder what those delegates at the CBI conference thought when they turned up to hear a speech from the British Prime Minister, only to listen to Boris Johnson ramble on about Peppa Pig World:

The last two episodes we have released were both about leadership plotting, which quite by accident have had some parallels with recent events in Westminster.

We discuss the importance of timing and decent internal party rules in King’s Game, which we’ve certainly seen play out in the fall of Keir Starmer. The rules of the Labour Party, where MPs have to challenge a sitting leader with MPs who need to commit to supporting them in public, has played out very differently to the Conservative leadership races over the last decade. In those, where leaders faced a challenge because of anonymous MPs submitting no-confidence letters, contests are more easily-triggered. And as MPs can switch between different leadership candidates anonymously this can lead to some interesting outcomes: as we saw with the election of Kemi Badenoch which seems to have happened in part because many of James Cleverly’s backers switched their support in an effort to try and influence which candidate reached the final two.

In Party Games, Mark made the point that making someone Prime Minister purely because of internal party politics isn’t always the best strategy. We’ll have to wait and see whether this happens in the Labour leadership contest that’s about to play out.

We will shortly be recording our first episode about a book, The Division Bell Mystery. It is a locked-room murder mystery from the Golden Age of detective fiction, set in Parliament and written by one of the first female MPs.

If you’d like to read the book alongside or in advance of our podcast episode, grab your own copy now.

This will be one of our first episodes to feature a guest, so if you are not yet subscribed to Political Fictions in your favourite podcast app, now is a great time to sign up to make sure you don’t miss out.

Thank you for reading and hope you enjoy the episode. Feedback is always very welcome!

Best wishes,

Cory & Mark