Simon Kuper
speaker
89 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 4 Jun
Simon Kuper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And what happens is a lot of conservative donors, like Michelle Moan, kind of WhatsApp ministers who they're mating with. Because if you're a donor, you meet politicians a lot at dinners because you get to be at the dinner. And they say, oh, well, I have a PPE company. I can supply you with kit. And the minister WhatsApps back saying, yeah, brilliant. I'll tell the civil servants too.
I'll tell the civil servants to wave you through. And so they have this, what the civil servants start to call the VIP lane, where if you've been referred by a minister, then the civil servants are terrified of saying no. And the civil servants internally have this conversation, yeah, but this person, minister's mate, has never made or acquired masks. Why are we... Forget about it.
Don't worry about it. Push it through. And then you have people whose job it is to make and supply medical masks. They can't get through on the line. They don't know who to call because they're not conservative donors. They don't have the WhatsApp numbers. And so what happens in these weeks is that billions of pounds are wasted. And we end up with PPE mountain.
I think part of the new forest, there's this thing. Literally, there's this landfill where we have all these unused and often unusable because bad, crappy masks and gowns supplied by donors. And just storing them costs billions. So you have a bad mask. You can't do anything with it. You have to store it. And so by some estimates, we spent more on the masks than... than we paid in the first place.
So it's just a nightmare running into the billions. And if you didn't have political party donors, I think this would never have happened because ministers are afraid to say no to donors. And, you know, one corruption expert I spoke to said this is the biggest case of state capture in British history. Now, versions of this happen all the time in smaller ways.
You know, if you're a company selling to government, you want to find a way to funnel money to the ruling party so they'll pick up the phone to you. You say, you know what, we're making a new helicopter. I think it would be great for the UK Armed Forces. Can I come in and have a chat? And your call is taken because you're a donor. I have developed a new piece of healthcare technology.
I think it would be great for the NHS. I could see every hospital working with it, improve outcomes. Oh, and I gave you guys a million pounds last year. Oh, sure, come on in.
I mean, sadly, our community organizations have all kind of collapsed in recent decades. So few people go to church or other religious services anymore. They don't belong to trade unions and pubs, which were a form of British community, has also shrunk massively. So we used to have churches turning into pubs, and now the pub is turning into something else.
So I just don't see that you could get millions of people. I mean, it happened briefly under Labour with Corbyn, the kind of three-pound members who brought Corbyn to power. I don't see it as a durable thing. So I think that we just need to go to a system of massive rules... which we have never had in British politics, limiting what you as a politician or civil servant can do.
So, for example, if you work for the Ministry of Defence, you can't three months later be working for an arms company that sells to the Ministry of Defence.
Well, I mean, I live in Paris. I've been there 20 years. A decade ago, I'd have said France is a significantly more politically corrupt country than the UK. And that, you know, French people get very angry about political corruption. And so then in 2017, when Macron is elected, he sees this and does what Starmer hasn't yet done.
And he says, we're going to have massive rules on what he calls the moralization of politics. And so, for example, you never used to have to have receipts. You say, oh, I spent 100 euros on this, and they would refund it to you. There was no limit for what you could spend for lunch. So you'd go for massive, you know, five-course lunches.
And then you'd have elderly male politician bringing along 22-year-old female intern for five-course lunch. And it was all the way it worked. It was done with impunity. And you, I mean, the famous case is François Fillon, who was prime minister in France for several years. He supposedly employed his wife, a Welsh woman actually, Penelope, as an employee. And all the MPs in France were doing this.
You employ a spouse, the spouse doesn't really have to turn up to work, but you ascribe some massive salary to her. So Penelope Fillon got, I think, into the millions of euros over many, many years for work she never did. Wow. And so all this is reformed. There's stricter rules. The politicians whine about it. I spoke to a restaurateur who works near the Assemblée Nationale.
And he says, yeah, politicians don't have any money anymore. So I now have this set price lunch for 49 euros because he said they could only charge 50 euros on expenses. So it kind of wiped out a lot of the luxury industry that had accrued around it. And I mean, French people still whine and complain about their politicians all the time, but it has actually cleaned things up a bit.
Nobody's willing to admit it, but French politics is a bit cleaner.
It's true that in the last couple of years, I mean, of course, ahead of an election, amounts have spiralled to levels that we've never seen before. But if you say £130 million a year, that is similar to what the parties combined probably bring in in a good year when there's not an election. So I don't think they would have much cause to whine too much about that.
Well, I think the MP salary is now £91,000. Yeah. So that's about two and a half times the average wage. So if you say that to the average Briton and someone like Walsall or Nunez and where I was before the election covering what was supposed to be the election campaign, they'll say 91 grand. You're kidding me. Most people in Britain think MPs are just minting it. It's incredible amounts of money.
The problem is we have two economies. We have the London economy, especially the high-end London economy for educated people, where 91 grand isn't that much money. And especially if you're a conservative, they tend to have richer friends, private school friends who are making millions as lawyers or hedge funders. They think, 91 grand, I can't possibly live on that.
Sir Johnson, in Downing Street, is complaining without irony that on the Prime Minister's salary of about 150 grand, he can't afford to live.
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