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In The Room | Stockpiling fuel, panic buying loo roll - are we prepped for war?SOURCE: The Independent
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00:00We've got 900,000 tonnes of petrol in storage, which sounds quite a lot,
00:04but that is actually only 26 normal days' supply.
00:08There is literally very big examples of governments in the past getting this wrong.
00:13How many loo rolls is too many loo rolls?
00:15And should you have a jerry can of fuel in your garage?
00:18These are the questions we're asking this week.
00:21As the US-Iran war continues, we'll be discussing how the government prepares for crises.
00:25And why telling people to stay calm might not be the best strategy.
00:29I'm Helen McNamara, the former Deputy Cabinet Secretary.
00:32And I'm Cleo Watson, former Special Advisor to Theresa May and Boris Johnson.
00:36And this is In The Room.
00:41It's episode six of In The Room.
00:43And if you've been enjoying listening to us so far, please do follow the podcast on your podcast player.
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00:57So we're very grateful.
00:58Don't forget as well that the best clips of us are on Instagram on intheroom.pod.
01:04So come and follow us on there too.
01:05Helen, it feels a bit like Groundhog Day today because yet again we're starting an episode by saying the US
01:11-Iran war is rumbling on with no signs of ending just yet.
01:15In fact, at a parliamentary liaison meeting this week, which is a sort of regular appointment,
01:20the Prime Minister has to turn up to Parliament in front of all the select committees and tell him about
01:25the good work he's been doing.
01:27Keir Starmer told MPs that while he wants to see a swift de-escalation, we mustn't fall into the false
01:33comfort that there will be a quick and early end.
01:35So that is not good news for us, I think it's fair to say.
01:39In the meantime, Iran has ridiculed Donald Trump for saying that the US is negotiating with itself, even though Trump
01:46has apparently offered up a 15-point peace plan.
01:50He does like...
01:51Count those points.
01:52Yeah, exactly.
01:53But it really doesn't feel like this conflict is going to end quickly.
01:57And with all this rumbling along, there are fears that there could be a global recession caused by the oil
02:01crisis.
02:02And a big sign of that is that Larry Fink from BlackRock, which is the world's largest asset manager,
02:08has kind of warned and predicted something like this might happen,
02:11which is always a bad sign if those guys in finance are starting to send up flares.
02:16Yeah, you don't want to hear that from the finance bros.
02:17So we've talked a lot about the global perspective, but there's no doubt that when something like this happens, it
02:24comes straight home.
02:25So the cost of living crisis, which was already existent pre any of this happening,
02:30means that this is going to be very challenging for the government.
02:33It's going to be very challenging for all of us in the UK.
02:35Plus, there's the worrying news this week that actually Israel is saying that Iran could target European capitals with missiles.
02:42So all of it brought together makes you think quite hard about, is government ready?
02:47Are we ready? What should we be doing individually?
02:49And how does the government start to think about what might happen and get contingencies ready?
02:54We've been reassured a lot by ministers in recent weeks that they've got a plan.
02:58But I think we're going to talk a bit about what that means in real life.
03:04Well, there's no doubt that a week of news like the one we've just had makes people feel a bit
03:10nervous.
03:11And to alleviate these fears, the government had a cost of living COBRA meeting this week with the prime minister,
03:17the energy minister,
03:19the chancellor, the governor of the Bank of England, which isn't always a terrific and reassuring sign.
03:26That does make it feel, you know, when something like COBRA is announced, it makes it feel a bit reactive.
03:30But is that fair, Helen? Is the government always taken by surprise, by crises?
03:34Or is there actually some kind of preparedness work?
03:38Well, rest assured, there is preparedness.
03:40We should all sleep a little bit easier in our beds because, I mean, I think probably,
03:44and this might be a very cynical thing to say, that the cost of living COBRA,
03:48I mean, you know, the cost of living crisis is not going to be solved by however important the 12
03:53people are in a room,
03:54in a basement, in the cabinet office.
03:56It's not really amenable to one meeting or a short list.
04:00But, you know, why not?
04:01Good comms thing to do.
04:03Sure, they come up with some useful small things that they can do.
04:06But your kind of bigger question about is the government, are there plans in place?
04:10Are there teams inside government who think quite hard about, are we prepared for a crisis?
04:15What would we do?
04:16What has to happen in what order?
04:17Then the answer to that is yes.
04:19And unfortunately for us, obviously, as a country, we've had a few goes at having to think about this in
04:24recent history,
04:25you know, most significantly with COVID.
04:28So there is, in fact, a whole team in the cabinet office whose job is to think about resilience and
04:32emergency planning and preparedness.
04:35And their unenviable task is to try to make sure that without alarming people,
04:40you actually are getting people to think themselves about what action they need to take.
04:45And also not alarming ministers into sometimes being a bit overdramatic and overreactive when things start to go wrong.
04:52Yeah, it's interesting you said that it's a sort of good comms thing to call a cost of living cobra
04:58because ministers have been told this week that they should tell people, you know, to stay calm, not to panic
05:04buy.
05:05And that actually isn't helping.
05:07It's making people want to kind of stockpile.
05:10And, you know, we're not quite getting into the COVID era of people hoarding pasta and loo roll just yet.
05:16But it's interesting to me that the prime minister was talking about cost of living in January as his biggest
05:21priority.
05:22And then here we are in nearly April where he has a cobra on it.
05:26And on the one hand, it does show sort of front-footed urgency to the whole thing.
05:31On the other hand, it does make it seem kind of very, very worrying and that there's trouble to come.
05:38And the government has been criticised in the past, to be clear, the previous Conservative government for comms being too
05:46effective.
05:47So I think this, I do feel a bit sorry for ministers here, but let's break it down a bit.
05:51So you've basically got the first thing, which is I think probably the most worrying thing, that because this is
05:57an oil crisis first and foremost and a fuel crisis,
05:59you know, your big risk is that people start to overbuy petrol, actually, so that, you know, fuel crises have
06:08terrible immediate political saliency.
06:12Like, this is a thing that all political, I mean, you know this, that political parties worry about this, right?
06:16Because it's so obvious that you've got a problem and the behaviour happens straight away.
06:20Yeah, that's exactly right.
06:22I mean, this does remind me a little bit of COVID and the criticism that the country wasn't prepared in
06:30time.
06:30And just to use a small example to explain this with the fuel crisis now,
06:36the big concern was that the NHS couldn't cope with the capacity of the people who become ill in COVID
06:42and that it would eventually collapse.
06:44And the whole point of the COVID inquiry was to talk about how the country can be better prepared for
06:49future crises.
06:51That being said, with fuel this time around, the government figures on our preparedness now aren't good.
06:59So we've got 900,000 tonnes of petrol in storage, which sounds like quite a lot.
07:03Sounds like quite a lot, we hear that.
07:04But that is actually only 26 normal days supply.
07:09That doesn't sound like quite a lot.
07:11No, it doesn't, particularly if people are going to start panicking and buying more because they're worried.
07:15But that's the problem, isn't it?
07:17So if you think back to the, you know, when I say think back to, I think you were probably
07:20at university or at school in 2000.
07:23So maybe don't cast your mind back, Cleo, to the year 2000 and you filling up your car.
07:28But there was a big fuel supply problem, crisis in 2000 and 2005.
07:34And you have exactly the same thing, which is suddenly you start to get queues of cars at petrol stations.
07:39And people think, well, I might as well just fill up my car.
07:43And you've seen all of the ministers this week, well, in the last couple of weeks, too fair to them,
07:47being really, really good at saying there's no need to panic.
07:49But just saying the word panic isn't a good thing.
07:51It's not good, is it?
07:52It's a bit Dad's Army, isn't it?
07:54I mean, there's a terrific scene in In The Loop, which is a spin-off film with the thick of
07:59it, where there's a minister who's on the Today programme who constantly says the word diarrhoea, talking about international development
08:07abroad.
08:08And the Downey Street commerce director is going, stop saying diarrhoea, stop saying diarrhoea.
08:13And it feels a bit like that, too.
08:14The moment you start saying things like panic.
08:16There's no need to panic.
08:18Yeah.
08:18There's no need to do anything abnormal.
08:19It's not a reassuring word, that's for sure.
08:22No.
08:22And the kind of big issue, I guess, for the ministers is that there is literally very big examples of
08:28governments in the past getting this wrong.
08:30So if you remember during the coalition, you do remember this, during the coalition era, we had another fuel supply
08:37issue that was to do with the fuel depot at the time.
08:40And the then Cabinet Office Minister, Francis Maud, said, in a sort of, in that way that sometimes politicians just
08:47sound a million miles away from, you know, everyone else, said, well, kind of surely you have, surely you have
08:52a jerry can of petrol in your garage, assuming that.
08:56Surely you have a garage.
08:57Actually, assuming that all the world knows what a jerry can is and has a garage.
09:02And also not thinking for a second that actually it's not super safe to encourage people to keep effectively really
09:10highly flammable material.
09:11Well, someone did get terrible burns, didn't they?
09:13They did.
09:14Yeah, it was not very nice at all.
09:16And so there's risks all sides on this, basically, for ministers saying the wrong thing, that things can happen very
09:22quickly.
09:22Yes, but the government does issue very, very specific advice, does it not?
09:27I think you've got some of it.
09:28I have.
09:29Do you have a hand?
09:29So there's a really, so this, one of the things that came out this week was that the Cabinet Office
09:33have issued some, don't worry, the Cabinet Office have issued some guidance.
09:37So it's fine.
09:38I'm reassured.
09:39We're all fine.
09:40I think we should just stop the podcast here, to be honest, it's all fine.
09:42Problem solved.
09:43But they've issued some guidance for ministers.
09:45So the Government Communications Service have apparently, and this is reported in the news this week, have issued some guidance
09:51to ministers.
09:52To basically tell them to not tell people not to stockpile, but also to not criticise people for stockpiling, and
09:59also to tell them it's all fine, but also not to tell them it's not all fine.
10:03So, as always, with guidance from the Cabinet Office, I'm not entirely sure how helpful that is.
10:09But you have got this issue where you are not entirely, no surprise to anyone, the government is not entirely
10:16in charge of what human beings in our country do day in, day out.
10:20And you can't predict what human beings will necessarily do.
10:25And we definitely saw, if you remember, at the beginning of the COVID crisis.
10:29So I'm being really puzzled inside Whitehall at the time.
10:34Like, why was everyone buying loo rolls and pasta?
10:37This wasn't a crisis, which was, you know, particularly we thought the answer was some loo rolls and some pasta.
10:43It didn't make you incontinent.
10:44And yet, here we were, where the one thing that got, I mean, I thought it was fascinating.
10:48And I always wanted to know, what were the countries panic buying?
10:51Was it just our country that people thought the first thing is, I mustn't run out of loo roll?
10:55I mean, you know, God bless us.
10:57And then once people have started panic buying, but like they don't panic, you know, then people panic buy.
11:03And you see that not only in what's happening externally, but also within the teams of people who are working
11:12in government.
11:12So I definitely...
11:14Did you panic buy?
11:15Well, confession time.
11:17So I definitely, before I was in the civil service for 20 years, and I would say anyone that knew
11:24me would characterize me at the beginning of that.
11:26I'm not a very organized or prepared person in any way, shape or form.
11:30And over the years of kind of being in government and occasionally being all kind of quite more and more
11:37getting involved in these sorts of crisis contingency planning situations,
11:40you do find yourself, you know, mysteriously being in possession of a wind up radio and some candles and spare
11:47food.
11:48I'll be honest, Helen, I'm actually not much of a prepper.
11:50And even during new no deal Brexit stuff, I just, I just thought something would come along.
11:56I just thought we'd get a deal.
11:57And that's my attitude to everything.
11:59I think, oh, dear, things are going very badly, but some boffin is going to dream up the answer.
12:05I mean, that's a great world.
12:06Can I live in your world?
12:07Sounds amazing.
12:09So actually, one of the things that in the early days of COVID, because it was literally the same civil
12:14servants who'd just bounced from doing Brexit into doing the response to COVID,
12:20that one of the reasons that we were all kind of not as bothered by that, well, not as bothered
12:24by, not, not impacted quite so much by having to keep supermarkets and food shortages.
12:29We were busy eating and drinking our way through our no deal stashes that we'd put together over the years.
12:35I remember one particular, there was a lot of very, very long Brexit cabinets in Theresa May's time.
12:42As we were trying, she was trying to get her, I mean, it was a work of impossibility to get
12:4722 or 24, however many people we were cramming around the cabinet table at that time to even agree amongst
12:53themselves on Brexit.
12:54And I remember standing around before the cabinet meeting, doing my own little survey of the cabinet ministers and civil
13:03servants involved, what exactly they had.
13:05So somewhere in the public record, in the back of my cabinet notebook is a list of all of the
13:10things that different people had decided to stockpile, just in case we were leaving the EU without a deal.
13:15So where people have, which wine merchants people are members of.
13:19Exactly. Some peculiar spikes in, you know, Berry Brothers accounts trading on particular days in Brexit or, you know, the
13:27rest of us on our Ricardo buying 54 tins of tomatoes or tonnes of olive oil or whatever it was.
13:33You're not someone I necessarily think of as sort of steely eyed and as organised, you know, you're not always
13:41on time.
13:42That being said, the stuff you've been exposed to over the years, you know, you're one of the few people
13:46I know who has a booker's card and goes to a cash and carry and like really stocks up.
13:51Your car's never, you know, less than half a tank full.
13:56This is a massive.
13:56I'm on fumes, baby. I am on fumes.
13:58I feel like, you know, this is like, you know, a massively irresponsible thing to say, but actually I learned,
14:03I learned the kind of half full tank of petrol thing from working with the army guys on contingency planning.
14:09It's called protocol. Never let your car be less than half full of petrol.
14:12Really?
14:13Yeah, but that's like terrible. This is terrible advice, right? Because this part of the problem is that people like
14:18us, people like me, you do that.
14:22And then actually you've got kind of not, not useful petrol in your car or you're stockpiling and stockpiling stuff
14:29is a, it's important to remember this is kind of a rich person's game.
14:32It's a privilege if you've got the space in your house, if you've got the money in the bank that
14:38you can afford to have like five spare packets of pasta and whatever else it is.
14:42It's not, it's not an option available to everybody.
14:44Yes. And, and, and to have the storage to put this kind of stuff, as much as our memories from
14:50COVID are people sort of hoarding pasta, hand sanitizer, lube on and so on.
14:56That isn't actually like where we are as a sort of nation.
15:01And I think this is where some of the advice coming from the government sort of brings out the worst
15:07in people.
15:08This is, this is based on a behavioral sciences team, which I'm always a bit suspicious of because it's...
15:15Yeah, if you need a snake oiling, these people are your guys.
15:18Yeah, yeah, yeah. They really are.
15:19They really are.
15:20It's not just about supplies and what the government's doing.
15:23It's also what we're supposed to be doing ourselves, but happily for us, the Cabinet Office have also produced a
15:31document for all of us citizens to use to help us prepare for what we should be having ready in
15:36an emergency, which I have here.
15:38I have in my hand a piece of paper, the Household Emergency Plan, Cleo.
15:42I've literally never seen that before.
15:44That's from the Cabinet Office.
15:46It's on the government website.
15:48So you're supposed to have printed this out.
15:51And I mean, that's, that's a stretch because I'm not sure everybody, I've got a printer, but I'm not sure
15:55everyone.
15:56Of course you have, yeah.
15:57I love to print things.
15:58I do not.
15:59See, the yin and yang of the relationships coming out here.
16:02I'm much older than you.
16:04So this Household Emergency Plan, which is based to fill in things like your agreed meeting point for your family
16:10outside the house.
16:10I mean, my family can't agree on an agreed meeting point in the house.
16:14So good luck to us with that.
16:15And then you've got your important, these, you know, boxes that you can fill in your important numbers.
16:20For people you might need, including very cutely mobile and landline numbers.
16:25Presumably once this is filled in, you should then laminate it with the laminator that you own at home.
16:30Do you?
16:31Do you?
16:32No.
16:33Oh my God.
16:34I think I might have to cancel this podcast.
16:36It's so embarrassing.
16:37My favourite bit of this form that we're supposed to all fill in is there's a section for radio stations.
16:42And you can, yeah, it says here,
16:43here you should make a note of the frequencies of any radio stations you use to get local or national
16:48news.
16:49So I think you're supposed to write down the radio frequency.
16:53And I'm not really sure how this works because you can actually just tune, if you remember radios,
16:59you can like tune a radio and you go past the stations you don't want to listen to and you
17:03land on the one you want.
17:05But this has got an extra contingency that you don't accidentally end up getting in use from, I don't know,
17:11Heart FM.
17:12But you can get God's good BBC.
17:14The other weird thing for me with this is that, you know, in a sort of nuclear apocalypse,
17:18paper is notoriously not sort of fireproof.
17:21So you can write all this down and then you may as well, a bit like, unless it's Father Christmas,
17:26just send it up the chimney.
17:27Maybe you learn it by heart.
17:28Tattoo it.
17:29Yes.
17:29Tattoo it to yourself.
17:30That's what you should do.
17:31Who needs to do not resuscitate order?
17:32You can just have this, your emergency FM tattooed to your chest.
17:37Then there's a list of emergency supplies that you should have in your house,
17:41which are battery or wind up torch.
17:44Portable power bank for charging a mobile phone.
17:46I mean, yeah, which of us has got those charged up?
17:49Battery or wind up radio.
17:50Spare batteries for the above.
17:52Nice, like that.
17:53Not just a battery radio, but also the spares.
17:55That's the sort of planning I can get on board with.
17:57First aid kit, wet wipes, hand sanitizer, bottled water, non-perishable food, and baby supplies,
18:04which is on all of the lists for everyone.
18:06You never know.
18:08I don't have a baby at the moment, but I'm still going to have to have nappies and formula.
18:12People just eat out of their little jars going forward.
18:15Maybe formula is the thing you need.
18:16I was just thinking, sort of going through the Rolodex in my mind, I don't have any of
18:20those things to hand in my house.
18:22So you need to get on it.
18:23Well, I'm going to have to clear the jerry cans of petrol out the way and put some of
18:27this stuff in.
18:29One of the things I do want to talk about very quickly, because you hit on it about
18:32government communications, is what incredibly difficult message the government has to land
18:37here.
18:37Because on the one hand, they're saying to people, don't panic, remain calm, and yet
18:43be prepared and vigilant.
18:46Which is quite, you know, be in a relaxed state of constant preparedness.
18:51Relaxed and yet vigilant.
18:52Which is difficult.
18:53And it has really reminded me of the COVID inquiry, because one of the big criticisms
18:59from Baroness Hallett in the last couple of weeks is that the stay at home message was
19:06too strong, that it was too effective, which is ironic because normally people are criticising
19:12government comms for being vague and not clear enough.
19:15And there was 91% salience for that message.
19:17People understood it straight away.
19:19And the reason we did it was because we didn't want to be ambiguous in the way that the government
19:24is having to slightly weigh things up here.
19:26We wanted to be clear that we needed to keep the R number down.
19:30Because the transmission.
19:32Indeed.
19:32Because if COVID kind of took off amongst the population, whether you were vulnerable or
19:37not, it was just very bad news to everybody.
19:39And this was kind of on balance the way the communications was put together to save as many lives as
19:44possible.
19:45And I think that that's also what ought to be happening here, right?
19:48Because it's difficult.
19:49National government can't do nuanced messages, actually.
19:52I mean, it can't and it can't.
19:54And it shouldn't, really.
19:55So I think the thing that should have happened with that COVID messaging, that messaging was
19:59fantastic.
20:00But then there should have been, at a local level, to vulnerable people, to, you know,
20:06in communities, the kind of your GP should have been in touch with you if you were like at
20:11risk to say, staying at home does not mean, staying at home if you think you're having
20:15a heart attack, staying at home does not mean this.
20:17And there is something about governments always need to think about both what is being, you
20:22know, what's being communicated at national level, which does need to be like absolutely
20:26primary, coloured, basic, simple stuff.
20:29And then how else are you putting all of the care and thought around what is happening
20:33to vulnerable people?
20:34And what might happen to people who are not self-classified as vulnerable?
20:37So if you chuck into this, that food price inflation is going to, I mean, the cost of
20:41food will go up.
20:42Cost of food after the invasion of Ukraine went up at the highest level for like 40 years.
20:48The food price inflation is coming.
20:50So actually, the thing that I hope government is thinking about is how do you really get
20:54ready again, you know, through the summer for what will be a hard winter for everybody
20:59and think about what you're doing to make sure that some of there is some real resilience
21:03in the planning for how people are going to be fed as well as live as we get into this?
21:08Yeah.
21:08I mean, just to very quickly pick up on one of your COVID points there.
21:12You're right.
21:13There was the kind of blanket message to everybody.
21:14There were specific comms messages on a kind of smaller scale to vulnerable people.
21:20So victims of domestic violence, disabled people, people shielding.
21:25But that, you know, comms is obviously different to actual physical help and support.
21:31And you'd hope that as much as there is messaging to the general public of don't panic, you know,
21:37be prepared yet calm.
21:39At the same time, we are making sure the ambulance service and the fire service are totally prepared
21:43and have enough fuel to do their jobs properly.
21:46The police, whatever else is necessary.
21:48Because otherwise, you know, for COVID, some of our backup plans were, are we going to have
21:53to use ice rinks as morgues?
21:55Like, are we going to have to have members of the armed forces outside hospitals to stop
22:00people coming in who need critical care?
22:02And the whole point of doing these kinds of inquiries is to get government thinking and
22:08us as citizens thinking about how to kind of look after ourselves and be prepared for the
22:14next challenge.
22:15And you're absolutely right.
22:16I really hope, both on the fuel front, but on a general, you know, from the autumn help
22:22front, that the government is really paying attention to not just fuel and energy, but
22:28across the board, how they can help people.
22:33So, Claire, what do you think the government should be doing right now?
22:36Well, speaking very much with my former political strategist hat on.
22:40It's my favourite hat of yours.
22:41It's great.
22:42It's gorgeous.
22:43Feathered.
22:43This sounds a very irritating thing to say, but you want to focus group people.
22:47You want to understand how different members of the public and within their groups feel
22:53and understand the situation and what they're most worried about.
22:58And actually, some of the best stuff to come out of that is how to communicate with them.
23:03Some of the strongest sort of three-word slogans of the last decade have actually come directly from people talking
23:10about their own frustration.
23:12So, get Brexit done.
23:14Take back control.
23:16Stay at home.
23:17There was a very strong line that came out of some focus groups when Theresa May was prime minister,
23:22when she was up in Scotland and she didn't quite know how to sort of communicate about Nicola Sturgeon up
23:29there,
23:29who was a very, very popular first minister.
23:32And we did some focus grouping a couple of days before when they said all she cares about is independence.
23:38And the next day, Theresa May went out and said that and it resonated really well.
23:42So, as much as I said on the podcast last week that the government should be careful about just immediately
23:49responding to what comes out of focus groups and polling,
23:52in situations like this, it's actually really important because they can actually understand how people feel about something
23:58and how they want to be communicated to.
24:01And it's so painful, but the messaging is so important on this one.
24:06There's also a second element, which is actually kind of pure politics at its best in some ways,
24:12which is that so much of the help people will receive will be on a local level.
24:17And obviously, there are local elections coming up in May, which involves the devolved nations as well, Scotland and Wales.
24:25And so much of this support comes from the kind of more local and national level in this stuff.
24:33So, in the sort of organogram of politics, this is one of the occasions actually on a kind of political
24:40party side
24:41when you really want to sort of fire up all those synapses, wherever you have mayors,
24:45wherever you have councils that you hold, you want to make sure that your team is doing a really good
24:51job getting people the support they need.
24:54That's really interesting.
24:55And there is a balance, right, between making people feel like, don't worry, the government's got you.
25:00And also, by the way, you need to do some stuff yourself.
25:03And I think that's quite a hard balance to get right.
25:06I'm completely with you on the simplicity of the messaging at national level and really understanding where people are and
25:12where their anxieties are
25:14and playing that back to them rather than just telling them what you think they should hear or want to
25:19hear.
25:20It's an amazingly difficult political line to stand on this one, though.
25:25I was reminded in the prep for this week's episode, I went back to see this kind of vague memory
25:30that Oliver Dowden had on the day that
25:33Wishi Sunak calls the general election in 2024, made this huge speech about resilience and preparedness.
25:39And effectively, you know, when half the conservative people in the centre of government were apparently putting bets on the
25:44date of the general election,
25:46poor old Oliver Dowden was standing up and saying, actually, his great political message of the day was actually the
25:51country's in dire straits.
25:52The world is collapsing around us and you all need to get a battery operated radio.
25:57And of course, Oliver Dowden was deputy prime minister at the time.
26:00Of course.
26:00It was an odd political disconnect.
26:02And there is going to be that challenge for people in the next few weeks and months, right?
26:06You're dropping this kind of messaging, which is things are pretty bad and people can feel it's pretty bad because
26:11they're paying more of a petrol.
26:12They can see the impact already on their feed prices in the middle of election campaigns.
26:16And that's that's tough.
26:18I mean, the other thing that I would say from now, you know, in terms of what advice we would
26:22be giving,
26:23it is also true that one of the beauties of national government and central government is because you have the
26:29whole of everything to play with,
26:31like all of operational delivery, all of the economy, all of everything.
26:35Then there are going to be bits of the jigsaw puzzle that actually you can do now that you couldn't
26:40do before.
26:41So there has to be something about really thinking hard about where are the places where you can go faster
26:47and further.
26:48This this crisis has given you the opportunity to push further.
26:52We talked about renewable energy last week, but there will be other things where the economics have changed
26:58or the sentiment is changed or people suddenly will be more happy to put up with something that they weren't
27:04happy with before.
27:05Whether that is, you know, a fuel depot in their neighbourhood or some resilience or some some something will have
27:12changed.
27:13And that allows you to be to take advantage of the situation as much as you're thinking about the kind
27:18of big capital letters things.
27:19You should also be thinking about actually what can we improve, change, do faster, get on with now.
27:25Yeah, a great example of that is what came up at PMQs this week, which was the North Sea oil
27:30and gas that could be up and running by Christmas.
27:35Of course, the prime minister is concerned that it's actually the energy secretary's role to give that the go ahead.
27:40But I think it's fair to say that although he is in the legislation, the person normally in charge of
27:45making the decision, the prime minister knows him quite well, sees him on a fairly regular basis.
27:51He could perhaps nudge him in the right direction. And there's precedent for doing that.
27:56Well, I've never met a powerless prime minister.
27:58One of the things that is going to be a real challenge for the government is talking.
28:03It's hard to run a campaign talking about the sunny uplands and the plan is working and there's more good
28:07stuff to come.
28:08When you're also having to tell people this is going to get worse, I'm really sorry and we're all going
28:13to feel the pinch.
28:14And it's not your fault. It's not the government's fault that the Strait of Hormuz has been blocked up like
28:20this.
28:22But how you keep the politics without not getting completely febrile and not getting people more panicked by telling them
28:31to calm down and so on and so forth.
28:33What a challenge.
28:34Yeah. And also the kind of it's not our war. We didn't start it isn't actually the complete answer to
28:39the but it does seem to be our problem now.
28:42And I hope that there is there's something in part of what we are seeing in our country at the
28:47moment is the fact that we have been sort of economically living on thin air and selling services to each
28:53other or imported cheap goods from China.
28:55We're having a marvellous time.
28:57But actually there are fundamentals in terms of what is there you know with all of the change that's going
29:02to come from this next generation of AI and or you can say I tell you what if we really
29:07hard invest in tech if we really hard invest in our universities if we try to think about how we
29:13support entrepreneurs if we try to become like the nation of makers that we once were again let's do that.
29:18Let's do some it's it's really much as people don't want to be lied to much as people don't want
29:23to hear everything's fine when they know it's not.
29:26They do need to have something to pin their hopes onto and there's a bit of a space for that
29:30at the moment and I'm afraid that what we're going to see in the election campaigns is obviously all the
29:35parties that are standing against Labour will be pointing at the Labour Party and saying everything's their fault.
29:39And I think we need to have a bit more kind of positive perspective good vision for our future set
29:45out please.
29:46Well speaking of communicating that positive message there is also the cunning ploy of using different spokespeople than necessarily the
29:56main the main characters that you have in in your particular stage play.
30:01Is this Keir Starmer and his army of influencers?
30:04Micro-influencers.
30:05Micro-influencers.
30:05Yes.
30:06Just a little tiny bit of influence?
30:08Well it is quite an interesting one the behavioural sciences team just to go back to their excellent advice in
30:12the capital.
30:13What do they have to say Cleo?
30:14Well they talk about using trusted voices in general expert and apolitical messengers they call it.
30:21So for example on motoring they suggest getting the RAC or the AA to kind of quietly message out to
30:28their members that again they should stay very calm.
30:31And the story out this week is that the Labour Party is using a collection of micro-influencers.
30:39So this is people with 20,000 or fewer followers to communicate out the Prime Minister's cost of living messages.
30:47And there is actually some quite good data to back this up.
30:54So we've definitely found when I worked in Conservative Party politics and particularly when I worked on the referendum in
31:022016 that trusted voices were actually quite difficult to be certain of.
31:10So if people can remember the Remain campaign for example had lots of celebrities, lots of major business people saying
31:17this is going to be a disaster.
31:18It's a bit like Kamala Harris had you know Beyonce and Taylor Swift and all these amazing people backing her
31:24that obviously did not work out very well on polling day.
31:28And during the referendum what we found was that people found either someone they know saying this is how I'm
31:36going to vote to be very reassuring and a face-to-face conversation.
31:40Not a kind of Facebook statement or anything like that.
31:43And particularly someone in a sort of trusted position, their child's teacher, their GP, a police officer they know, something
31:53like that.
31:53And I guess that is the equivalent now of the micro-influencer that Keir Starmer might want to be using.
32:00Do you want a public sector army of people telling us it's all fine?
32:05If anything, less reassured than I was at the beginning of this conversation.
32:10Well Helen, I want to just very quickly to round things off.
32:14Obviously we do not want to preach to our listeners and viewers and tell them what they should be doing.
32:19Heaven forfend.
32:20But I want to know whether you'll be taking any special measures in the coming weeks or what do you
32:26already do?
32:27I already know you've got your Booker's card and you're half full, half empty fuel tank in your car.
32:34It's always half full, not half empty.
32:36So what laminated list are you going to make yourself over the Easter holidays?
32:40I do think there is a like steady as she goes thing here actually.
32:44I do think there is a, she says slightly preachy, there's a bit of a social responsibility thing.
32:50That the more stuff that you take for yourself, the less stuff there is for everyone else.
32:52So up and until it gets much worse, I think people should be sensible and responsible.
32:57Having said that, I mean not everything on the household emergency plan list is really taken to heart.
33:04But it's not a bad idea just to refresh yourself with what you would do in certain situations.
33:09And the odd spare tin is not unuseful.
33:12It's a bit like having a Christmas cupboard.
33:14You know how you start to just slightly put away some nice biscuits or really have to hard put them
33:18away in my house.
33:20So that you hide them from yourself.
33:22There is something about, if you're in the fortunate position of being able to do that, it's no bad thing.
33:26And I think that there is a, this is going to be a long, this is a long time.
33:30This isn't a weeks and weeks thing.
33:32This is a months and years impact probably.
33:35So not a bad idea to start thinking about that too.
33:38Thanks for listening to this week's episode.
33:40Please click follow on your player of choice and leave us a five star review.
33:45And you can keep up to date with all the best bits from the podcast on Instagram, follow us at
33:49intheroom.pod.
33:50This podcast is part of the Independent Podcast Network and is produced in association with Next Chapter Studios.
33:57The executive producers are Olivia Foster and Carrie Rose and the producer is Sam Durham.
34:01A special mention for Maya Anoushka and our video editor, Vali Raza.
34:05Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.
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