Lord Matthew Elliott, Baron Elliott of Mickle Fell

**Luke Hyde-Smith** (0:02)
Welcome back to the W1M Why Invest podcast with me, Luke Hyde-Smith. And today we are delighted to be joined by Lord Elliott, Baron Elliott of Mikkel Fell, currently the co-founder and president of the Jobs Foundation and a member of the House of Lords. Matthew, it is fantastic that you've taken the time to join us today, and a first for the Why Invest podcast with a genuine Lord in the studio.

**Matthew Elliott** (0:25)
It was a great pleasure to be here, so thank you for having me.

**Luke Hyde-Smith** (0:27)
Well, we are much looking forward to the discussion. And for those of you that were wondering, in 2023, Lord Elliott was nominated for a life peerage in former Prime Minister Liz Truss's honors list and formally introduced to the House of Lords on February 20, 2024 He sits as a conservative peer and chose the territorial designation of Barwick in Elmett in the city of Leeds, while taking his title from Mickelfell, the highest peak in North Yorkshire.
Matthew is a British political strategist and lobbyist who served as the chief executive officer of a number of organizations and has been involved in various referendum campaigns, including Vote Leave. Matthew has been described by the BBC as one of the most effective lobbyists at Westminster and in 2010 was named Total Politics as one of the top 25 political influencers in the UK, which you very much continue to this day.

**Matthew Elliott** (1:21)
It's funny, I always get called a lobbyist by these people, but actually I see myself as a campaigner. There's a big difference in my view, a campaigner is somebody who picks their causes. I actually think I've picked my causes, whether it's lower taxes with Taxpayers Alliance, or Brexit with Vote Leave, or jobs and business with Jobs Foundation, rather than being a gun for hire.

**Luke Hyde-Smith** (1:39)
Yeah. No one understood. Okay. From now on, it's campaign and not lobbyist. Thank you. More recently, Matthew founded the Jobs Foundation and co-authored the excellent book, Prosperity Through Growth, with former guest Arthur Laffer, on how the UK can revive its economic fortunes.
It would be remiss, obviously, not to mention Matthew's new book, The Untold Story of Brexit, Ten Years On, released to the day to mark ten years since Brexit. And we are definitely going to discuss the contents of that today. So I thought for the discussion today, we would center on sort of three areas. Firstly, Brexit, Ten Years On. Let's discuss the positives, the negatives, and how you see both the last ten years, but also how we might look forward to what is coming in the future. Number two, Prosperity Through Growth. You know, the UK's economic fortunes. We have definitely had a difficult ten years economically. Prosperity Through Growth sets out the agenda for how that might improve, and I'd love to get your up-to-date views. And then also, tied into that, your current work at the Jobs Foundation, what that is, what you aim to achieve. And it would be remiss, obviously, not to weave in the current political backdrop, which in the UK clearly looks extremely interesting. So thank you for taking the time. So let's start. Brexit. Huge amount written on this. Indeed, you have written a whole book. Ten years on, as you look back on Vote Leave, how would you describe the last ten years, and what would you frame as both some of the successes of that campaign, and perhaps some of the pitfalls?

**Matthew Elliott** (3:16)
I think the first thing to say is it's fair to say there's a period of uncertainty after the Brexit vote.
This is no small part was the fact that we had Prime Minister Theresa May who was on the remain side in the referendum, who I would say didn't really understand Brexit, so it was being a thing about migration rather than a thing about taking back control and sovereignty and regulatory freedom. So it was also three years where basically it was a psychodrama of the Conservative Party battling it out after the general election, which of course didn't go her way. She thought she'd get a landslide and of course went into minority government, so that's a period of uncertainty. That was difficult. I wish it had gone straight from vote leave in a sense to a Boris Johnson premiership with the Brexit, but it implemented Brexit, they were doing a big difference.

**Luke Hyde-Smith** (4:00)
It was almost like we didn't have the conviction when the vote went that way to carry through with what the mandate was.

**Matthew Elliott** (4:07)
Well, it's funny, in the book, there's a little after section to the referendum where I talk about the leadership election and what might have happened had Boris taken over rather than the squabble with Michael Gove, should we say, and Streets of Make and We Threw the Line. So that period of uncertainty wasn't great. I think the other thing to say is that, of course, Brexit got done in 2020, January 2020, after the general election. And that's where we formally left the EU.