George Osborne: “Boris Johnson Has Taken a Very Big Gamble”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: What do you think the result is going to look like?

GEORGE OSBORNE, FORMER U.K. CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER: Well, the truth is, I don’t know. And if I don’t know, that’s because lots of people who follow politics very closely, have been involved like I have, you know, think this is a very, very uncertain lecture. And what that means is, it’s a big gamble. Boris Johnson has taken a very big gamble. Some say he had no choice, because he was essentially in that situation where he couldn’t govern. In our situation, you need a majority in Parliament. He didn’t have that majority. But it’s a big risk. And, you know, people assuming that he will walk it I think are making, you know, very generous assumption. He’s a good campaigner. He’s a good politician. He’s charismatic. But at the same time, the Conservative Party that he leads is repelling a lot of urban professional younger voters, voters whom I think are minorities, voters in cities like London who, frankly, want a more open internationalist socially liberal Conservative movement. And, you know, they’re not getting that at the moment. In a way, Brexit divided the country that was already, like many political systems, divided on economic class on a kind of cultural —

AMANPOUR: Yes.

OSBORNE: — axis as well between the sort of open and closed world. And it’s not unlike, of course, what has happened in the United States, you know, where you found the centre-right party, the Republican Party, ending up, representing former industrial towns that used to be Democrat and the Democrats representing, you know, progressive forward-looking, well, you know, economically more active places that used to be Republican. So, you are getting a similar kind of segmentation going on here and a big churn and people don’t know how that’s going to play out in terms of the actual seats won in this politics.

AMANPOUR: And people are getting very nervous about what the politicians are promising them, as they always are. But in this case, for instance, Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers, essentially, staked everything just about on these great new bilateral deals that they would make after Brexit, including, number one, with the United States of America. Well, this weekend, Donald Trump, the president, had a phone call with Nigel Farage, the Brexit Party leader, the man who brought us Brexit, essentially, who now has a radio program. And he poured cold water over that issue. I’m just going to it and then we can talk about it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: We’re far and away the largest economy in the world and we want to do trade with the U.K. and they want to do trade with us. And to be honest with you, this deal, under certain aspects of the deal, you can’t do it. You can’t do it. You can’t trade. I mean, we can’t make a trade deal with the U.K. and we can be — because I think we can do many times the numbers that we’re doing right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: I mean, that raises so many questions.

OSBORNE: Well, we got to start with, that’s a radio phone-in program.

AMANPOUR: Right.

OSBORNE: And the president of the United States has called in to take part in a discussion about British politics.