Dan Corry spent decades at the heart of British government — as an economist in the civil service, a special adviser to Labour through opposition and into power, and as head of the Council of Economic Advisers at the Treasury. He was closely involved in shaping some of the biggest economic decisions of the Blair and Brown years, including the minimum wage and the response to the 2008 financial crisis. Yet most people will never have heard of him. That, as he explains, was often rather the point.

After 2010 he moved into the charity sector, leading New Philanthropy Capital — a charity focused on helping other charities understand and demonstrate their impact — for a decade, before returning to policy work as an independent expert.

In this episode, Paul explores how economic advice actually shapes government decisions — and what gets lost along the way. Michael explores what it takes to build lasting influence without a public profile, and what Dan has learned across three very different careers.

Key themes

• From civil servant to special adviser: how economic advice actually reaches — and gets filtered by — political decision-making
• The minimum wage and the 2008 financial crisis: what it looked like from inside the room
• Influence without a profile: why being happy not to take the credit is often the most powerful strategy
• Running the National Economic Council: Gordon Brown's crisis innovation, why the Treasury hated it, and why it faded
• From Whitehall to the charity sector: a very different world, with no balance sheet and a Goldilocks reserves problem
• What has gone wrong with economic thinking about regulation — and where the current government is struggling

Links:

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If this conversation got you thinking about your own career — whether you're just starting out, looking to move up, or wondering about a change of direction — Michael offers one-to-one coaching. Find out more at www.michaelkellcoaching.com.

Paul's recent books: Sunday Times bestseller Follow the Money: How Much Does Britain Cost? and Challenging Inequalities: How We Got Stuck and Where We Go Next

Amelia Fletcher is almost certainly unique in British public life: a highly regarded competition economist who has spent decades at the centre of some of the biggest questions about how markets work, while sustaining a serious and still-active career in music. In this episode she talks to Paul Johnson and Michael Kell about both — how she ended up in economics almost by accident, what competition policy actually does and why it matters, and what it means to have kept two very different creative lives running in parallel for forty years.

As an economist, she spent twelve years as chief economist at the Office of Fair Trading, helped establish the Competition and Markets Authority's digital markets unit, served on the board of the Financial Conduct Authority, and co-authored the Furman Review — the landmark 2019 report that recommended pro-competitive regulation of the big tech platforms, and which shaped both the UK's Digital Markets Act and the EU's equivalent legislation. She is now Professor of Competition Policy at the University of East Anglia.

As a musician, she formed Talulah Gosh in her first year at Oxford, turned down a major label deal to stay at university, carried the bands Heavenly, Marine Research, Tender Trap, The Catenary Wires and Swansea Sound alongside her career as an economist, and now runs Skep Wax Records with her husband Rob Pursey. Heavenly currently has 430,000 monthly listeners on Spotify — a number Amelia notes translates to roughly £4.30 in income.

In this conversation, Paul explores the substance of her economics:

• how competition policy actually works,
• what the OFT and CMA do and why it matters,
• what went wrong with Facebook's acquisition of Instagram
• why digital markets are different from ordinary markets,
• what the Furman Review's recommendations actually were and where they have led
• the pressures on the CMA to approve mergers in the name of growth, and why Amelia thinks those pressures are dangerous.

Michael explores the person behind the public role: how Amelia ended up studying economics almost by accident having taken science A-levels, why she chose consultancy over academia after her PhD, what it was like to leave a large public institution and return to university life, and what — after all of it — she is prouder of: the economics or the music.

Links:

Watch this episode on YouTube

If this conversation got you thinking about your own career — whether you're just starting out, looking to move up, or wondering about a change of direction — Michael offers one-to-one coaching. Find out more at www.michaelkellcoaching.com.

Paul's recent books: Sunday Times bestseller Follow the Money: How Much Does Britain Cost? and Challenging Inequalities: How We Got Stuck and Where We Go Next

Baroness Sharon White has had one of the most varied and consequential careers in British public life. She grew up in Leyton, East London, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, attended a comprehensive school, won a place at Cambridge to study economics, and from there rose through the civil service to become the first Black person, and only the second woman, to serve as Second Permanent Secretary at the Treasury. She then moved into more public roles, first as Chief Executive of Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, and then spent 4 years as Chair of the John Lewis Partnership. She is now Head for Europe at CDPQ, a major Canadian pension fund, as well as Chair of Frontier Economics.

In this conversation, Paul and Michael explore what Sharon's career reveals about economics in practice, about public leadership, and about how to navigate decisions when there is no clear map.

Paul focuses on the substance of public policy — particularly Sharon's years at the Treasury during the austerity period of the Coalition government, when she was helping to oversee decisions about where the cuts fell and why. They discuss how those decisions were made, what was understood about the consequences at the time, and how Sharon reflects on them now.

Michael explores the personal story — growing up in East London, the accident of a good school that shaped her trajectory, what gave her the confidence to step into stretching roles she wasn't obviously qualified for, and how she managed the transition from a powerful but largely anonymous civil servant to a very public leader.

Topics covered include:

• Growing up in Leyton: the Windrush generation, a postcode-lottery education, and why she chose economics at Cambridge
• The mechanics of austerity: how spending decisions are made at the Treasury, who gets protected and why, and whether those choices were as well understood as they should have been
• Moving to Ofcom: why she left the civil service at a fork in the road, and what it felt like to become publicly accountable for the first time
• Leading John Lewis: what "compassionate capitalism" actually means, the democratic structure of the Partnership, and why it was harder and more public than anything she had done before
• The cabinet secretary question: why she chose not to return to the civil service, even for its most senior role
• What makes a career meaningful: her advice to a 25-year-old economist, and why impact — not prestige — is the thing that holds up when you look bac

Hosts: Paul Johnson (Frontier Economics / Queen's College Oxford / IFS) and Michael Kell (career coach, michaelkellcoaching.com)

Links:

Watch this episode on YouTube

If this conversation got you thinking about your own career — whether you're just starting out, looking to move up, or wondering about a change of direction — Michael offers one-to-one coaching. Find out more at www.michaelkellcoaching.com.

Paul's recent books: Sunday Times bestseller Follow the Money: How Much Does Britain Cost? and Challenging Inequalities: How We Got Stuck and Where We Go Next