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From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker. Hello and welcome to

Free Expression with me, Jerry Baker from the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Thanks very much for

joining us and if you're not already doing so, please be sure to subscribe at Apple Podcasts,

Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts, and do kindly leave us a nice review. Free expression is essential to the functioning of any democracy. And each week on this podcast, we aim to contribute by having a wide-ranging, candid conversation with leading figures in the worlds of politics, business, technology, academia, the arts and culture and so forth, exploring in depth the themes, people and topics driving our world. This week, I'm delighted to be joined by Andrew Roberts. Andrew's one of our

leading and most prolific historians, having written innumerable works on an impressively wide

range of topics. His biography of Winston Churchill, published in 2018, has been praised, rightly,

in my view, as the best single-volume biography of the man in a very crowded field. But he's also

written magisterial works on figures such as Napoleon, and most recently George III, published in the US under the title The Last King of America, the Misunderstood reign of George III. He's written other histories too, of course, including works on both the First and Second World Wars, and with a title that suggests a little homage to Churchill. He also wrote a history of the English-speaking peoples. He holds academic

positions on both sides of the Atlantic and is a prominent commentator on current events in Britain and around the world, with frequent pecan and pellucid observations from a conservative perspective on the state of modern politics. Andrew Roberts, thanks very much for joining me. Well, thank you very much indeed, Gerians. Thank you so much for saying such nice things about my books. Not at all. They are wonderful.

Anyway, I want to get into your historical work, but these are tumultuous times in politics, particularly right now in Britain.

I should say we're recording this Wednesday, in lunchtime, New York time, Wednesday afternoon, London time.

And any minute now, we're going to have the results of the first round of elections for the new conservative leader in Britain and, of course, the new prime minister after Boris Johnson's resignation last week. This is a process that will go on over probably over the next few weeks and we'll have a prime minister by September. But I want to ask you, Andrew, about these tumultuous times we're living in. Don't need to spend too much time on Boris Johnson and his fall and his prime ministership, or significant though I think it was, perhaps more significant than some people give him credit for. You're very close to this, both from a thorough reading of the history of the Conservative Party, but also as an observer of current Conservative politics. What do you think the Conservative Party is looking for at this moment? And as they in the process of electing their next leader, what are the big central debates in British conservatism?

I think the first major debate that they are having successfully is over levels of taxation.

The question is really between the Keynesians on one side and the Laffer Curve people who believe that tax cuts can in and of themselves finance their own tax cuts.

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