WTH is Going On with the Conservative Implosion in Britain? Gerry Baker on What It All Means for the Right in America
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 26 October 2022
⏱️ 53 minutes
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Summary
The last four months have been, by any measure, incredibly tumultuous for UK leadership. Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson was ousted and replaced by Liz Truss, a new monarch took the throne, then Truss resigned from leadership in record time after plunging the UK economy into disarray... and this week Rishi Sunak was sworn in as the new Prime Minister. Americans, looking at their closest political and economic ally across the pond, have every reason to be nervous. What happened to the Tory Party in Great Britain, and how long can it survive this turmoil? Is Sunak up to the task? And, importantly, what parallels can we draw between the challenges facing conservatism abroad, and those facing conservatives at home?
These questions and more with our guest, Gerry Baker. Baker is the editor at large of the Wall Street Journal. He has a weekly column, Free Expression, that appears every Tuesday; he also hosts “WSJ at Large with Gerry Baker,” a weekly news and current affairs interview show on the Fox Business Network, and the weekly WSJ Opinion podcast "Free Expression". A former editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, he began his career working at the Financial Times, the Times of London and the BBC.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.0 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on? |
| 0:01.1 | Who in God's name knows what it's all about. |
| 0:35.2 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. |
| 0:36.3 | And I'm Mark Tieson. |
| 0:37.3 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:38.5 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:40.9 | Mark, what the hell is going on in the UK? |
| 0:43.7 | What the hell is going on in the UK is there has been pretty much, I think the proper word is implosion of the conservative party. |
| 0:50.9 | I mean, it's just, so Alan McGuinness, who's an editor at Sky News, had the following |
| 0:55.3 | tweet. He said, my son has lived through four chancellors, three home secretaries, two prime |
| 1:00.4 | ministers and two monarchs. He's four months old. I know, no, I saw that too. That was fantastic. |
| 1:06.0 | That just says it all. And I mean, the greatest meme ever, and I really admire them for thinking |
| 1:10.7 | this up, |
| 1:11.3 | was what will last longer, this head of lettuce or Liz Truss, and the lettuce one. |
| 1:17.7 | Yeah, as Dimitri Medvedev pointed out in a tweet, former president of Russia. |
| 1:21.6 | The Chinese and the Russians like to point out that, you know, democracy is not always great, |
| 1:26.5 | and sometimes it generates not great outcomes. The point about that is not, no, you know, democracy is not always great, and sometimes it generates not great outcomes. |
| 1:29.7 | The point about that is not, no, you're wrong. |
| 1:32.1 | Democracy is always perfect. |
| 1:33.6 | The answer is it's still always better than what you have in Moscow and in Beijing. |
| 1:39.3 | Thank you very much. |
... |
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