'End the insanity!' | Former Australian PM Tony Abbott reacts to Keir Starmer's Labour coup

Tony, thank you very much for coming in. You have experienced in Australia, indeed you were a victim of, this revolving door of Prime Ministers. How damaging is that to a country and to its government? Look, if it produces a better Prime Minister and a better government, I suppose it's an improvement. But if it's simply change for change's sake, if it's a change which exacerbates the problems that are already apparent, well then it's obviously not a good thing. And look, I think plainly the Starmer government has been, to put it at its kindest, a dreadful disappointment. People understandably voted against the Conservative government because it hadn't lived up to its professions. It had talked right but governed left, to use Kemi Badenoch's phrase. But plainly, the British public, with their vote, have jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. And now the Labor Party itself realises that it's got a problem. The question is, is changing the leader going to help, or to use Churchill's phrase, are they simply changing donkeys in Is there a difficulty of government more generally? Because we've got in this country, obviously, Nigel Farage, who's hugely popular. Reform is leading in opinion polls. You've got Pauline Hanson. Traditional parties seem to be losing support and parties that were fringe parties gaining it. What does that tell us about the success or the weaknesses of modern democracy? Throughout the West, but the Anglosphere in particular, there's been this growing sense of frustration on the part of large swathes of the population that their life is not improving as they expect, and that government generally is letting them down. Now, I think part of the problem is that the parties of the left have got more left. And as you'd expect, I think that big taxing, big spending and big regulating government is enormously damaging, not just to the economy, but to the morale of society. But I think that governments of the centre-right have been a disappointment as well. And that's largely because over the last few decades, there's been an increasing tendency on the part of weak politicians to subcontract out the business of government to unelected and unaccountable judges, commissions and bureaucrats. And that famous Brexit slogan, take back control, the politicians have got to take back control from the judges and the bureaucrats. And the difficulty, if I may say so, with the recent conservative government in Britain was that things like the Equalities Act, which, in a sense, let the judges into a whole lot of decisions about the day-to-day governance of the country, weren't repealed. Now, I can understand why politicians want to say, it's not my fault, it's someone else's fault. But in the end, you don't elect politicians to pass the buck. You elect politicians to make decisions, often unpopular ones, decisions that they should be prepared to make, defend, and then be accountable for. So the basic problem, and I can't see this changing simply because the current government has changed its leader, is that far too much of life is determined not by elected and accountable members of parliament and ministers, but by unelected and unaccountable judges. That must change if our countries are to revive. What impact do you think COVID had? Because Australia had an even more crazy lockdown than we did here. But did that leave electorates thinking that governments could do more than in reality they can, and therefore expects them to do things which actually are outside their competence? Well, there's no doubt that COVID vastly accelerated these tendencies to expect government to do more than it can or should. COVID was a dreadful manifestation of the culture of safety-itis, which bedevils so much of modern life. At the time, I personally railed against this notion that you should live your life in fear of dying rather than live your life to the full today, because who knows what's going to happen tomorrow. And yes, there's been a long COVID hangover in terms of added regulation, added spending, people who, as it were, got used to the soft option of not working, who took what was effectively early retirement. There's been this long COVID hangover. The worst aspect of it, in my view, is almost the spiritual malaise, this dispiriting sense that the best way to handle your problems is not to tackle them head on, but to sit back and wait for experts or government or someone else, deus ex machina, to fix things. Well, I accept that there's a providence that, in a sense, shapes our lives. But as the Jesuits said to me many, many years ago, pray as if all depends on God, but work as if all depends on you. And that's what we've lost. Well, we're changing Prime Minister on the feast day of St Thomas More and St John Fisher, St Thomas More, patron saint of statesmen. What do you think his intercession should be asked for if you're Andy Burnham, who was at least brought up as a Catholic? Well, I hope he has the strength to change what needs to be changed. And that means fixing immigration. It means ending the energy insanity. It means sorting out the something for nothing welfare mindset. It means restoring national pride. And a big part of restoring national pride is strengthening the British Armed Forces, which at their best rubbed the envy of the earth. Having been a leader who had to get backbenchers to go along with him, what's the strategy for doing that as they just look at the opinion polls and think, am I going to win my seat next time? How do you persuade them to do things that go against the grain possibly for left-wing people? Well, a leader who seeks out first and foremost approval is a leader who is doomed to fail. I mean, the essence of leadership is not giving people what they want. It's deciding what they need and then attempting to persuade them that that is also what they want, even if in the short term, at least it might lead to some difficulty and discomfort. So I hope that the incoming Prime Minister is someone who is determined to lead. And just as Tony Blair, who I think was in his own way an admirable and successful Prime Minister, just as Blair was determined not to be a prisoner of labour shibboleths, the old class war thing, I hope that Starmer will learn from the Prime Minister whom he once served. And that Burnham shows no evidence of doing that. All his previous political career is that he is a chameleon who goes with whatever, he was a Blairite, he was a Brownite, he was a Corbynista. He's said completely contradictory things on being in or out of the European Union within the last few months. The one ray of hope, and I wonder what your thoughts are on this, is you never know how good or bad a Prime Minister will be until he gets that office. Some people unexpectedly turn out to be good and some people who you think will be very good, possibly like Keir Starmer, who was very experienced in some ways for it, turn out to be hopeless. Correct. We just have to hope that cometh the hour, cometh the man, and that someone who has perhaps not always risen to the occasion in the past may turn out to be just the man for this time. Let's hope. I mean, as an Australian, I want Britain to succeed, because if Britain succeeds, the world is a better place. And what advice would you give to Ken Bednock and Nigel Farage to try and bring the right together? You're facing exactly the same problem in Australia with the divided right. Doesn't a divided right just help the left win? I can understand why, at least for the next couple of years, or until an election is imminent, they both want to maximise their position. There's no doubt that parties on the right are in a sense in competition with each other. Let's hope it's a healthy competition. But in the end, what parties of the right should want is to replace underperforming governments of the left. And that means being sensible about what's necessary in the particular political system you find yourself to try to maximise the chances of a much better government. Tony, you are England's most popular visitor. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you. Thank you, Jacob.