From the Australian. Here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Monday, May twenty seven. An embarrassing defense secret is out in the open. Australia had almost no submarines available to defend the country between twenty oh nine and twenty twelve, even as China was aggressively expanding its navy. That's an exclusive live right now at The Australian dot com dot a u.
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Missing mother Bromwin Winfield was given legal advice just before she disappeared in nineteen ninety three that she was entitled to a significant share of assets from her failed marriage. Husband John Winfield was the last person to see Bromwin alive, but he says she chose to leave him and their young daughters. He's never been charged and denies any wrongdoing. It's all part of the gripping cold case investigated in The Australian's new podcast Bronwyn, available now at bronwynpodcast dot com.
Compulsory national service for all eighteen year olds, that's the bold policy. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunac is staking his future on It's the Billionaire Versus the Silk. As Barrister kirs Starman tries to bring labor back. Stay with us.
Over the next few weeks. I will fight for every vote. I will earn your trust.
Standing outside ten Downing Street getting soaked in the rain, stoically refusing to hold an umbrella or even wear a raincoat. That's the image Rishi Sunac created for voters as he announced Britain is going to the polls on July fourth. It's his bid to extend the Conservative's fourteen year rain for one more term. As Sunac he got drenched, a nearby loudspeaker started playing the opposition's anthem things can only get better.
China is looking to dominate the twenty first century by stealing a lead in technology, and migration is being weaponized by hostile states to threaten the integrity of our borders.
You might have thought sopping Sunak looked resilient or just a bit of a drip.
I have to say I took the slightly more conventional view that whoever and Reshisunac's communications team didn't bother to look at the sky or their weather app should be sacked.
Richard Ferguson is the Australian's National Chief of Staff as you can hear he's also a Scotsman and he's spent a lifetime immersing himself in British politics.
That would have worked that scene of him in the rain if it had been a stronger speech, but it was not a strong speech. It was pretty flat. He looked like a dejected man who knew he was going to lose an election in a landslide. People in his cabinet had no idea he was going to call an election, and it was a surprise he called it, considering he's about fourteen to twenty points behind in the polls.
Richard is a politics junkie and he likes things to be done properly, so he was horrified when it emerged over the weekend Sunak had broken the first rule in political campaigning, resting look.
He had taken a day off, to which the jok had become well, this might be a bad day for labor because Reshi Sunak has an out campaigning making mistakes.
He's had a tough first week. He was photographed in front of an exit sign. He visited the shipyard where the Titanic was built, prompting lots of gags about sinking ships, and he watched scores of his own MP's quit tonight. One of the Prime minister's most senior cabinet ministers is calling it a day, Michael Gove and influential.
Then Reshisunak came out with a blinder of a policy which is compulsory NASH service for everyone aged eighteen in Britain. Basically they will get to choose between twelve months in the military or their weekend doing volunteering firefighter ambulance that kind of thing. So that would be the first time since the early fifties that they have national service. I mean, he needs something, so he might as well try a couple hail Mary's.
The other idea Sunak really needs to work is migration policy. He wants to send illegal immigrants who attempt to enter the UK via the English Channel to Rwanda.
Richie Sunac himself one day one which didn't help his bad campaigning streak, said that there would be no flights to Rwanda before July the fourth, when the election will be held. He says it will only happen if a Conservative government wins, so he won't have the image of sending anybody it off. But the problem he was going to have is what if flights left in September to Rwanda, but the small boats just kept on coming across the
English Channel. He couldn't resk the policy being seen as a failure.
There have been five Conservative pms since twenty ten and they've instituted immense reforms through education, to health and social policy, but they've stumbled by seeming entitled and out of touch. First David Cameron, who gambled and lost on Brexit, Britain's departure from the European Union. Cameron called the referendum pleading with Britons to stay in the EU.
The British people have spoken and the answer is we're out. And I think the almost seven years of his premiership were kind of flown away.
In that one instance, Cameron quit and Theresa May stepped up. But May was slow to respond to the dreadful twenty seventeen Grenfell Tower public housing fire, where seventy two people died.
The warnings this building was a fire trap apparently went unheard, but it was impossible to miss the screens that those begging to be saved.
From it, And she couldn't get her own MPs to agree on how the EU breakup should be handled.
She just didn't have the charisma and she didn't have the control of her party to succeed, and it was left to Boris.
Boris, the brilliant, deeply flowed scruffbag who had successfully convinced the British that EU was to blame for all their problems.
He was definitely the most consequential of those five prime ministers, Claire and probably the most consequential prime minister definitely since Blair, although you could make a very strong argument since Thatcher. He got them out of the European Union, he led them through the coronavirus pandemic. I think there's no doubt that Boris and had extraordinary leadership when it came to backing U train in the months leading up to the war.
This hideous and barbaric venture of Ladimir Putin must end in failure.
Boris Johnson is a hero and you train, and rightly so. But then there was the other side of Boris Claire. There was the struggle with the truth, there was the chaos. He shut up a bit during lockdowns. It turns out that his entire staff and Downing Street were constantly having parties when other people, you know, couldn't go to the funeral of their parents.
Missus speaker I wanted to apologize.
His operation was chaos, and so he was steamrolled by his party. Basically he was only left with a couple of ministers and he had to go. But a lot of those ministers now say they wish they'd never done it, because then they got Liz Truss.
You'd be forgiven for saying who, because Liz Truss's prime ministership only lasted fifty days and featured a wildly ambitious economic plan that crashed markets and sent interest rates soaring. Perhaps her most memorable moment was visiting Queen Elizabeth I at home in Balmoral and posing for what turned out to be the last formal photo of the Queen.
I think there's a great irony, Claire, that the late Queen's first prime minister was Winston Churchill, maybe the greatest Breton who ever lived. Definitely the greatest British prime minister, you know, the man who won the Second World War and stopped Tler. And we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender. And then her last prime minister was the shortest serving. I'd probably the worst Prime Minister Breton ever had.
We import two thirds of ar cheese. That is a disgrace.
She's written in her recent book that you know, she said, why is this happening to me? To which point most prime minister's globis is actually an incredible opportunity to lead your nation, and you know, kind of darkness. But she did it very woodenly. She had no charisma. She had radical policies that most of her party fought went way too far. It's okay to do Reaganomics if you're the world's currency, but it doesn't really work when you're written in you're about number seven.
And that led us to Rishi Sunak, who shares with his wife a fortune of just over one billion Australian dollars.
I think that Rishi Sunac deserves a lot of credit for fixing a lot of the economic mess he was left with by Liz Trust in such a short period of time. Inflation has come down to target band just in the past week, which is why some people think he called this election.
It's a huge gamble. Will Briton's thanks Sunac for fixing the mess, punish him for the years of chaos.
He has a reputation for being quite catchy and for not really getting away. Everybody doesn't love them. It's just not that good at politics.
Coming up the man who's carrying Labour's hope of kicking out the Tories. If you haven't already caught Headley Thomas's new podcast, Bromwin. It's a new cold case from the journalist who created The Teacher's Pet. Episodes one and two of Bromwyn are free to listen for registered users right now at bromwynpodcast dot com.
Excuse me not at that cannot only get better?
Things can only get better by d Ring. That was UK labor theme song for the nineteen ninety seven election when Tony Blair swept to power. Now there's a new labor hope, so Keir Starmer. Casey a former Crown prosecutor and human rights barrister, the son of a nurse and a factory worker.
Over the course of the last four years, we've changed the Labor Party, returned it once more to the service of working people.
Starmer wants to slash public health waiting times, create a new border security command, set up a publicly owned green energy firm paid for by a tax on oil and gas and recruit thousands of new teachers. But so far there's no big vision for sweeping change.
I think our cousin The Thames The Great Thames columnist Daniel Finkelstein put it really well recently, in which she said Keir Starmer's message at this election as Breton has broken, let's do nothing about it.
Starmer stumbled over the issue of the trans community, struggling to answer questions like what is a woman? All the while he was battling to get rid of the forces of former Labor lator Jeremy Corbyn, a hard core left winger who'd promised to rip up the Bricksit deal and nationalize the railways.
He has really brought them back to the center, you know, saying that they would stick by, for example, Tory's spending rules, which would lead to some big cuts in the future. He's you know, repaired the relationship with business. He has really done a fantastic job of making the Labor Party an electable alternative of the classic centrist kind of hot keating Clinton Blair kind of way. Gaza has been the
big problem for Keir Starmer. You know, he has done so much clear to try and separate his party from the Party of Jeremy Corbyn, which had some of the worst conspiracy theorist Anti semits you could imagine kind of near his center of power. But there's a lot of British Labor MPs with huge Muslim constituencies who feel very
strongly on the issue of Palestine. Because he's so far ahead, it hasn't really made a problem in opposition, but I think it will become a huge problem for him in government, especially if he gets a large majority where he has a lot of left wing MPs that essentially act as the real opposition about like Tony Blair faced during the Iraq War when left wing MPs were constantly voting against
him on the Iraq War. But he does have this general problem that he's basically trying to say nothing in order to not scare the horses and get in and that doesn't always work, especially in an election campaign.
Richard focus On is The Australian's National chief of Staff. Thanks for joining us on the front. If you like the show, give us five stars wherever you listen, and don't forget to join us subscribers at the Australian dot com dot AU and be the first to know