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RICK:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Rick Morton. This is 7am…

By the end of this week, the United Kingdom will almost certainly have a new Prime Minister and an end to 14 years of Tory reign. There is one man in particular working very hard to prevent that and it’s not the current Tory leader Rishi Sunak whose campaign from the very first bizarre rain-soaked election announcement has been marked by ineptitude, misstep and ignorance.

Today, veteran UK correspondent and contributor to The Saturday Paper Paola Totaro, on the young strategist from regional New South Wales whose stratospheric rise in the dark arts of campaign tactics has helped craft a series of so-called ‘miracle’ victories.

That’s after the break.

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RICK:

Paola, you've been watching the election campaign in the United Kingdom at the moment, and you've been particularly looking into this young Australian figure at the centre of it. Who is that?

PAOLA:

Well, his name is Isaac Levido, and he's an Australian. He was born in Maitland, he was raised in Port Macquarie, and he now has pretty much the weight of a seemingly unwinnable UK government election on his shoulders. Remarkable young strategist, who actually began his life at university thinking he might want to be an accountant. And very quickly found out that this wasn't for him and began a really interesting trajectory into political strategy and poll reading.

Audio Excerpt – Interviewer:

“My friend Isaac Levido, joining us from London, England, this evening in London. Thanks very much for joining and welcome, Isaac. “

Audio Excerpt – Isaac Levido

“Thanks very much for having me.”

PAOLA:

He's seen as a bit of a magician here because he's had some extraordinary wins working with Boris Johnson, and delivered that incredible election win in 2019.

Audio Excerpt – Isaac Levido:

“In the UK, we were in quite a challenging situation where an incumbent government, but effectively running against the status quo”

PAOLA:

And of course, in Australia in the very same year, winning the election with Scott Morrison and which was I think was called the miracle election, wasn't it?

Audio Excerpt – Scott Morrison:

“I have always believed in miracles”

RICK:

I was on that campaign and very few people saw it coming.

PAOLA:

Yeah. So he's got a bit of magic around him, which I suspect, considering what we've seen in the last couple of weeks, it's a little tarnished at the moment. I wouldn't like to be in his shoes, put it that way.

RICK:

Well, let's sketch that out a little bit. So how is the Rishi Sunak campaign going, the Tory campaign, where are they at? And is he kind of riding on the accumulated scandal of many years of government now?

PAOLA:

The truth is that it could not be going worse for the conservatives than it is going at the moment. Sir John Curtis, who is the kind of election guru, looks very cadaveric, kind of face when he gets on the BBC. But he's the most trusted of the pollsters and he's basically, you know, he's saying that they're going to be it's going to be a route. They will take at least two terms, possibly, to get back into power.

I think we all saw, around the world, and I certainly watched it live, when Sunak announced this big surprise announcement outside number ten and it was pouring with rain and, you know, everybody was watching television wondering how it was possible that somebody couldn't come out with an umbrella and put it over the poor man.

Audio Excerpt – Rishi Sunak:

“Can restore pride and confidence in our country and with a clear plan and bold action, will deliver a secure future for you, your family and our United Kingdom.”

PAOLA:

Even Larry the Cat was seen in the background. You know, the number ten cat that lives and has seen a number of prime ministers. You know, he took shelter in front of the cameras. It was, it couldn't have been written, you know, by the satirist better. It was just shocking.

RICK:

Walk me through the greatest hits so far, of the snafus and gaffes and other things that whyme with “aff”, of this campaign. What else have we got?

PAOLA:

Well, I think the one that was incredible, and again, you wonder where Levido was and if the problem is with advice or whether it's Rishi Sunak not listening to advice, but that was the D-Day, you know, the celebrations. And he disappeared, you know, early supposedly, for a really quite unimportant interview, really, with ITV. Could have done it at any time.

Audio Excerpt – Interviewer:

“Hey.”

Audio Excerpt – Rishi Sunak:

“Thanks. You. No, not at. Sorry.”

Audio Excerpt – Interviewer:

“Well, thanks, I know you're filming.”

Audio Excerpt – Rishi Sunak:

“Yeah, we'll just run out. It was incredible, but I just ran over. So apologies for keeping you.”

Audio Excerpt - Interviewer:

“No, not at all.”

PAOLA:

There is quite a lot of gossip around Whitehall etc. that Sunak, unlike Boris, just isn't listening. He tends to sort of go his own, plough his own furrow.

Audio Excerpt – Rishi Sunak:

“National service will be compulsory. The military option will be something that people choose to do.”

Audio Excerpt – Host:

“So how will you make people do it?

Audio Excerpt – Rishi Sunak:

“Sorry?”

Audio Excerpt – Host:

“If National Service is going to be compulsory, how will you make people do it?”

Audio Excerpt – Rishi Sunak:

“Well, you'll have a set of sanctions and incentives, and we will look at the models that are existing around Europe to get the appropriate mix of those.”

PAOLA:

You know, every time we see Rishi Sunak you almost feel sorry for him because he's constantly apologising.

RICK:

And there's a betting scandal now within the Prime Minister's own staff. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

PAOLA:

Yes. The story began with the Gambling Commission being alerted, we think by an anonymous tip off, to a small rash of bets for the date of the election.

Audio Excerpt – Interviewer:

“Hi Mr. Williams. Joe Pye from BBC News. Did you have inside information when you placed your bet on the election date statement?”

PAOLA:

There was a clutch of personal protection offices around number ten. Police, Met police, who had done this, and then the Gambling Commission decided to widen it.

Audio Excerpt – Interviewer:

“It sounds like you did know, didn't you Mr. Williams, that there was an election coming, and you were trying perhaps to take advantage of that.”

Audio Excerpt – Craig Williams:

“I wont be adding to the statement I've already made”

PAOLA:

And it's now snared a number of conservatives, a number of Tory MPs, to have had to apologise and step down.

Audio Excerpt – Interviewer:

“Did you tell Craig Williams, a man that you said you were with almost every minute of every day, the date of the election before he put the bet on?’”

Audio Excerpt – Rishi Sunak:

“Sam, I've been clear about this. I'm furious to have learned about these allegations. We've initiated independent inquiries of our own internal ones.”

PAOLA:

All in all, I think there's at least ten, if not more. And what we do know is that the Gambling Commission is being very close lipped about it, and that it could be much, much wider than we've already seen. So, at the moment, the front pages of all British newspapers, a week or so from the election, are full of the Tories, you know, gambling on inside knowledge of the date of the election. You couldn't make it up, could you?

RICK:

I think I know the answer now, but Isaac Levido is tasked with trying to turn it all around. We're only days out now from the election. Can he pull off another miracle?

PAOLA:

You know, the polls are so tight now. And the reading of focus groups, it's an art becoming a science. And I think that if Sir John Curtis, who is really very conservative when it comes to these things, says they haven't a chance, I don't think they really do. I mean, they have a huge majority but It looks like the biggest problem is that the southern states, the sort of the more metropolitan, moderate rump of Tory voters that lost those two because of Brexit. So in the end, they've moved to the right, thinking that they could hang on to that rump of right of centre voter, but they've actually lost a much more important one in the city. So it looks like an absolute mess.

At the moment the landscape is looking incredibly dramatic for them and if the worst case scenario polls are correct, of the six 650 seats in the UK Parliament, and worst case scenario, they might end up with as few as 53, which, as the pollster, the British pollster Professor Curtis said, could possibly be the worst performance since World War one. And possibly worse.

So wipe-out is potentially an understatement at this point.

RICK:

After the break – what will Isaac Levido do, if the Conservatives are decimated on polling day.

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RICK:

Paola, so far, Isaac Levido has not exactly had the secret to turning around Rishi Sunak's fortune, though I don't think at this point many people expected he could. What do we know about Levido and how he operates? I'm fascinated by this kind of person and what motivates them and how does he apply his trade?

PAOLA:

It's really interesting because usually when you talk to people about this kind of strategist, the one that's in the background, sort of the dark arts person generally, you know, negative things come out. When you talk to people about Levido, no matter whether you talk to Labour or Conservative people, he's very well liked. He has a, apparently, really strong work ethic. He gets his team up and ready at 5:40 most mornings to ensure that they are ready to listen to the first round of news.

Audio Excerpt – Isaac Levido:

“I mean, all campaigns that, you know, no matter how short, short a period of time you've got, you need to sort of sweat the small stuff.”

PAOLA:

Obviously he cut his teeth working for Crosby Textor, in Washington as a young man. Levido was Sir Lynton Crosby’s star protege, the strategist who's known for the bottom drawer stories that emerge about the opponents. He's really well known for those kind of darker strategies, if you like. Unlike Lynton Crosby, who was known for his blue language and Dominic Cummings, who was known for flying crockery, Levido is apparently very generous with his time, listens, you know, during a campaign in the hustings and long hours. And there's a lot of grunt work even for, you know, for the more senior people. And so he has this tradition of having a soft furry toy which is handed ceremoniously to each person who is the star campaigner on the day. And I think one year he had an echidna and another year he had something else, something else Aussie. So he has the capacity to to draw people together and to, to ensure that they feel like a team. He also is apparently a magician in terms of focus groups.

Audio Excerpt – Isaac Levido:

“I saw some research recently where an overwhelming majority of voters wanted to nationalise the railways. If they were asked the question, would you nationalise the railways? 65, 70%. Same poll, the question was asked, do you think nationalising the railways is actually going to solve the problem? Basically, the same number said, no, that something's going to solve the problem.”

PAOLA:

He's a big believer in intuition. He believes that voters immediately gut understand when a politician is not being honest, that they don't need to hear words, they will read the body language and the feeling of the person.

Audio Excerpt – Isaac Levido:

“voters are extremely perceptive is when they see that there, you know, whether it be ulterior motives or whether, again, it just be...”

PAOLA:

So clearly he trusts his own intuition. And so in focus groups, he's able to pull together how people are feeling as he's travelling and listening to voters. I mean, it's a great pity that in this occasion, the best surgeons get the worst cases. I think that may well be the case for Levido in this election.

RICK:

Yeah. And of course, as you mentioned, you know, come Friday Australia time, it's almost a sure thing now that the United Kingdom will have a new leader, and that that leader will be Keir Starmer, who is sort of there. But I couldn't tell you a lot about him. What can you kind of pull apart about who Keir Starmer is?

PAOLA:

I think that what you observe, even in Australia, is what the electorate is still saying, even though the polls are showing a massive, massive landslide for Labour, when you look at the polling for voter response to Starmer, they don't really know him yet. He's somebody who is apparently in private, very witty, very funny, very relaxed. But as a politician in debates, when we see him on television, on the hustings, he's quite wooden. He doesn't seem to relax very much.

Audio Excerpt – Kieir Starmer:

“We're going to hit the ground running from the very get go. Day one. First, obviously stabilises the economy. We have to get that back under control. Secondly, you know, making sure that we're bringing down the waiting list, 40,000 appointments each and every week. That's 2 million a year extra, bring down that waiting list.”

PAOLA:

You've got to remember that to get to where he got to, he had to completely restructure the Labour Party. He had to sort of get rid of the far left that was exemplified by Jeremy Corbyn, who lost that election to Boris Johnson so dramatically. He's, you know, he's a very ambitious, quietly ambitious person, I think, and maybe that will come out more, you know, once he's in number ten, we'll see more of the real Keir Starmer.

RICK:

Well, it is a neat kind of dichotomy, isn't it? Because for as long as he's been in politics, the conservatives have been in power. They've held government for, what, 14 years now? They're one of the oldest parliamentary parties in the world. How big a moment is it for the Tories if they are wiped out and does that reshape British politics in the short term or even the long term?

PAOLA:

Well, I think if it does happen to that degree, it's incredibly, incredibly dramatic, because what we haven't spoken about in as we've chatted, and which Levido would have had to deal with internally at the 11th hour, is the entry of Nigel Farage at the very last minute into into the election campaign.

Audio Excerpt – Nigel Farage:

“The MRP poll out last night said that Reform have gone from expecting to win no seats to 18 seats.”

PAOLA:

He was originally not going to campaign many times, never won a seat, and since then Reform has polled relatively well. And they do appear to be taking in the oxygen of the right of centre, far right of centre ex-Tory constituency. So if they get a seat or two, that will change things hugely if Reform actually managed to have any success at all, I think.

RICK:

And then, of course, there's Levido. I think one of the benefits of not being in the spotlight is that no one notices when the spotlight is on, so he will continue working and taking clients. No doubt.

PAOLA:

Very much so. You know, in 2019, about a month after he won the election with Boris Johnson, he set up a consultancy just as Lynton Crosby before him had done, which is called Fleetwood Strategy. And now he's got a number of election wins under his belt. Sadly, this one won't be one of them but corporate clients, in the end, you know, having a strategist that has had access to such senior politicians over a period of time, you know, obviously very, very attractive. It's said that he made his first corporate million, in the first year of Fleetwood Strategy, opening his doors. So I suspect he's not overly worried about his future. Probably will want to wash his hands and just get on with it and back to the, back to the corporate stuff. He believes that corporate PR and strategic work is now so similar to the political, and that ultimately you have to keep CEOs on message. You need to have a campaign, you need to have a clear focus. You need to have a team with discipline. So he's just transferring his political skills over to, over to the extremely lucrative corporate world. So good luck to him.

RICK:

Yeah, that's terrifying and fascinating at the same time. Paula Totaro, I thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate you giving us the time.

PAOLA:

It was an absolute pleasure. Any time.

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RICK:

Also in the news today…

Defence minister Richard Marles says Joe Biden “definitely” has the capacity to be president for the next four years. After Biden’s performance in the first presidential debate, his party reportedly entered a “panic” over the weekend, with media reports that some democratic party figures were hoping to convince Biden to drop out of the race.

And…

It’s been reported that a Federal Police operation looking into links between Australian Defence Force members and extremist or supremacist groups has led to at least 16 investigations into personnel. While the outcome of those inquiries are unknown, The Guardian reports that at least two of the investigations found that a member of the services, ‘took part in [nationalist and racist violent extremist] groups or associates.’

I’m Scott Mitchell, this is 7am. Rick Morton will be with you again tomorrow. Thanks for listening.

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