Afternoon summary
Priti Patel, the shadow home secretary, has been forced to eat her own words after she gave an interview defending the way net migration figures soared under the last government – despite the fact that Kemi Badenoch has repeatedly described this as a failure. Patel’s comments, followed by her climbdown, overshadowed her party’s attempts to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Brexit. (See 9.23am.)
The Institute for Government conducts regular, in-depth interviews with former ministers, and it has just published nine of them with ministers from the Scottish and Welsh governments, including Nicola Sturgeon, Mark Drakeford and Humza Yousaf.
You can find all the interviews here.
And this is from an IfG blog summing up some of the lessons from the interviews.
How seriously the prime minister takes devolution determines whether it is considered a priority for the rest of government. Drakeford described how, between 1999–2019, prime ministers from across the political spectrum displayed a “basic respect for devolution.” However, he explained that the last five years of Conservative leaderships saw this attitude change significantly.
As prime minister, Boris Johnson took a ‘muscular’ approach to the union – an attitude that Sturgeon told us made him “impossible” to work with. Relations further deteriorated under Liz Truss, who didn’t undertake the customary phone calls to the first ministers upon taking office – a move Drakeford described as “a deliberate act of disrespect.”
By comparison, Sturgeon noted that Rishi Sunak “intellectually got” devolution, although her successor Yousaf told us that Sunak “was not one for hanging on the phone for longer than he had to with the Scottish government.”
Keir Starmer has taken positive steps to change the tone. He embarked on a tour of the nations within days of entering office and Scottish first minister, John Swinney, is reported to have said that the relations are “incomparably better” than before. Even as other issues compete for the prime minister’s attention, it is vital that this approach persists. As Sturgeon reflected on Theresa May’s tenure, “I think Brexit just overwhelmed her […] I just don’t think she had the bandwidth to really work out devolution.”
Updated
