Episodes

  • Dan Corry: Power, Influence and the Art of Getting Things Done

    Dan Corry: Power, Influence and the Art of Getting Things Done
    May 22 2026
    Dan Corry has spent most of his career close to the centre of British economic policy-making — but largely out of public view. As a civil servant, a think-tank economist, a special advisor across multiple government departments, and ultimately as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors at the Treasury during the 2008 financial crisis, he has been one of the more quietly influential figures in recent British economic history. In this episode he talks to Paul Johnson and Michael Kell about how policy actually gets made, what influence looks like when it doesn't come with a public profile, and what he found when he eventually left government for the charity sector. The career in brief Dan grew up in Barnes, south-west London, in a Labour-supporting household that was, he notes, probably the only one in the area with a Labour poster in the window. He read PPE at Oxford intending to focus on politics and philosophy, but gradually moved toward economics. After graduating he joined the Government Economic Service, working first at the Department of Employment and then at the Treasury during the Thatcher years — an interesting position, as he puts it, for someone whose sympathies lay firmly elsewhere. He left the civil service in 1989 to join the Labour Party's newly created Economic Secretariat, working through the years of opposition, then spent time at the Institute for Public Policy Research before returning to government as a special advisor in 1997. He worked across the Department of Trade and Industry, Number 10, and the Treasury — including at the heart of the response to the 2008 financial crisis — before moving in 2010 to lead the charity New Philanthropy Capital, where he spent over a decade. He remains involved in the charity sector and continues to advise government, most recently conducting a review of environmental regulation for DEFRA. On working for a government you disagreed with Dan is thoughtful about his years as a civil servant under Thatcher. He didn't experience it as a crisis of conscience — the civil service's job is to serve the elected government, and he did it — but he is honest that the atmosphere was slightly strange, peopled largely by those who had stayed in the public sector precisely because they believed in it, while those more sympathetic to the free market had left for the City. He also quietly got involved in the Labour Economic Strategies Group, a network of centre-left economists trying to develop credible policy thinking outside the party machinery. On the 1992 shadow budget One of the episode's most historically resonant passages covers Dan's involvement in John Smith's shadow budget ahead of the 1992 election — the document that has since become totemic in Labour folklore as a possible contributor to the party's defeat. Dan is proud that the numbers were never successfully challenged. But he reflects honestly on what went wrong politically: Labour had committed to significant increases in pensions and child benefit, had to find the money somewhere, and the National Insurance changes that resulted allowed the Conservatives to construct their "Labour will put up taxes by £1,000 per household" attack — which they ran regardless of what Labour actually said. The shadow budget was designed to reassure; it ended up providing ammunition. He draws an explicit line from that experience to Labour's self-imposed tax constraints in 2024. On life as a special advisor Dan gives one of the clearest accounts in the series of what special advisors actually do — and don't do. They are political appointees who can do things civil servants cannot: liaise across departments, push back on proposals that officials are recycling from a previous minister, and act as a conduit between the Secretary of State and the political world beyond the department. But the job is brutal in one specific way: your employment ends the moment your minister leaves. Dan had three Secretaries of State at the DTI — Margaret Beckett, Peter Mandelson, Steven Byers — and stayed through all three, which he describes as unusual. Watching civil servants test new ministers with proposals their predecessors had rejected was one of the more instructive lessons in how departments actually work. On the minimum wage Dan is rightly proud of his role in the introduction of the minimum wage — work that began during his time at the Department of Employment, continued through his years at IPPR, and came to fruition when Labour won in 1997. He traces the intellectual shift clearly: the standard civil service answer when he started had been that a minimum wage would destroy jobs, based on simple supply and demand. But American academic work — David Card and others — was beginning to show that in labour markets with monopsony characteristics, the opposite could be true. He credits the Low Pay Commission model — bringing together the CBI, TUC, small business representatives and academics to reach a ...
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    51 mins
  • Amelia Fletcher: Competition, Creativity and the Economist Who Rocks

    Amelia Fletcher: Competition, Creativity and the Economist Who Rocks
    May 22 2026
    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 simultaneously 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. The career in brief Amelia studied PPE at Oxford having done science A-levels and stumbled into economics almost by elimination — she liked the idea of philosophy and politics, turned out to be good at the economics, and ended up too qualified not to pursue it. After a PhD supervised by John Vickers, she moved into economic consulting, then joined the Office of Fair Trading as Chief Economist — a role she held for twelve years as the OFT became the Competition and Markets Authority. She is now a professor at the University of East Anglia, sits on various regulatory boards, and has been closely involved in shaping the UK and EU's approach to regulating digital markets. Alongside all of this, she has fronted a succession of indie bands since her first year at Oxford — most recently finding a new generation of listeners via TikTok, with her band Heavenly currently attracting around 430,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. On the music — dialling up the rock star The episode opens with Michael pressing Amelia to set aside her modesty and give full credit to her musical career. She obliges, up to a point. Her first band, Talulah Gosh, formed in her first year at Oxford, was offered a major label deal — which she turned down rather than leave university, thereby setting the template for the next four decades. Her doctorate-era band Heavenly became associated with the Riot Grrrl scene, and it is that catalogue that is now finding a new audience online. Her most rock-and-roll moment? Playing a white stadium in Spain with the entire audience singing along. She has never thrown a television out of a window. "I've been quite an economist-y sort of rock star," she says. On what competition policy actually does Amelia gives one of the clearest explanations in the series of why an economic institution that most people have never heard of shapes almost everything about daily life. The OFT and its successor the CMA exist to make markets work well for consumers — through competition enforcement, merger scrutiny, and consumer protection. She illustrates the point with two concrete examples: the long campaign against unauthorised overdraft fees, which took a Supreme Court defeat and years of regulatory pressure before the practice was effectively ended; and a cartel case against around 120 building companies who had been colluding on bids for public works. On the Facebook-Instagram merger One of the episode's most striking moments is Amelia's frank admission that the OFT cleared the Facebook acquisition of Instagram at phase one — when Instagram had around ten employees, almost no revenue, and looked like a photo filter app. She calls it straightforwardly: "That is seen as having been a highly problematic merger that we should have looked at in a lot more detail. That's my bad. I learned." On digital markets and the Furman Review A substantial part of the episode covers Amelia's work on the regulation of big tech. She was a member of the Furman panel — commissioned by the Treasury to examine competition in digital markets — which concluded that competition law alone was insufficient to address the dominance of Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook, and recommended a new regime of pro-competitive regulation. She explains clearly what makes digital markets structurally different: massive economies of scale, powerful network effects, the centrality of data as both input and output, and the ecosystem lock-in that makes it almost impossible for rivals to compete even with better products. The EU's Digital Markets Act and the CMA's new digital markets powers are the direct descendants of that work. On the CMA and growth Amelia pushes back — carefully but clearly — on the current government's pressure on the CMA to be more permissive about mergers in the name of growth. Competition, she argues, is generally what drives growth, not what impedes it. She is equally clear that the CMA can be outgunned politically — large companies can spend far more on lobbying than a public authority can resist — but that on the economics, the CMA's staff are remarkably good, motivated by genuine belief in what they're doing rather than salary. On economics and music — are they really so different? Paul frames the two sides of Amelia's life as almost diametrically opposed — economics as structure and logic, music as emotion and creativity. Amelia pushes back on ...
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    48 mins
  • Tim Harford: The Accidental Economist

    Tim Harford: The Accidental Economist
    May 22 2026
    Tim Harford is one of Britain's best-known explainers of economics — author of multiple bestselling books including The Undercover Economist, longtime columnist at the Financial Times, and presenter of BBC Radio 4's More or Less. But as this episode makes clear, almost none of it was planned. Tim talks to Paul Johnson and Michael Kell about a career built on curiosity, accident, and a willingness to follow what genuinely interested him rather than what seemed sensible. The career in brief Tim grew up in the south of England, a self-described nerd who wanted to write fantasy novels and published a role-playing fanzine as a teenager. He read PPE at Oxford — almost dropping economics at the end of the first year before a handwritten note from his tutor changed his mind — then spent a year teaching at University College Cork, returned to Oxford for a master's degree, and briefly considered academia before being told directly by his thesis supervisor that it wasn't where his comparative advantage lay. After an unhappy stint in management consultancy and a more interesting period working on Shell's scenarios team, he began writing The Undercover Economist in his spare time with no agent, no publisher, and no clear plan. An internship at the Financial Times, a stint at the World Bank, and then in 2006 everything came together at once: the book was published, the FT offered him a full-time role, and Radio 4 came calling. He has been presenting More or Less ever since. On almost not studying economics Tim is disarmingly honest about how little thought went into his academic choices. He ended up at Brasenose College partly because his father had been there. He chose PPE because it let him hedge between arts and sciences. He nearly dropped economics at the end of his first year and would have done so had his tutor, Peter Sinclair, not bothered to write him a letter. "If Peter had not written that letter, we certainly wouldn't be having this conversation," he says. It is a recurring theme: small moments of intervention or accident that redirected everything. On being told you're not good enough for academia When Tim was considering a return to academia, he phoned his thesis supervisor Paul Klemperer — a formidably brilliant economist — and asked what he thought. Klemperer told him plainly that it wasn't where his strengths lay. Tim recalls not feeling wounded by it at all. "He wasn't saying I was incompetent. He was saying this was not where my comparative advantage lay — and he was completely right." It is one of the episode's most memorable moments: the value of someone who respects you enough to tell you the truth. On writing The Undercover Economist The book began over coffee at Shell, when Tim told science writer David Bodanis he wanted to write something like E=mc² but for economics. Bodanis's response: "Are you waiting for permission? Who's stopping you?" Tim spent the next five years writing the book in his spare time, sending it to agents who responded with "maybes" rather than rejections, doing an internship at the FT, working at the World Bank — and then in 2006 it all clicked. The book caught a wave partly created by Freakonomics, which had come out six months earlier. Tim is modest about its success but characteristically analytical: "Sometimes books are popular because they're popular." On explaining economics without dumbing it down Tim is thoughtful about the craft of economic communication — finding the starting point in everyday life, making the familiar seem strange, and then explaining why it's strange. He's also clear-eyed about the limits: the book was written in the mode of a student rather than a reporter, with no interviews, no sources, just reading and observation. That constraint, he suggests, may have been part of what made it accessible. On More or Less and why numbers matter Now in his eighteenth year presenting More or Less, Tim makes a compelling case for why the programme matters: the BBC using its authority to take statistical claims seriously, to ask whether numbers are actually big or small, and to correct misinformation before it hardens into accepted wisdom. He gives a recent example spanning the menopause's effect on women's workforce participation and Manchester United's financial valuation — a range that captures exactly what the programme does. He is also honest that they make mistakes, and that the ones most likely to slip through are the ones where no one expects Tim to be wrong. On what economists should understand better Asked for the most important economic ideas he'd want people to grasp, Tim offers two: the possibility of non-zero-sum gains — that situations exist where everyone can be better off, and that economics is largely the business of finding those hidden free lunches — and the importance of scale, of asking whether something is actually big or small rather than just expressing it in impressive-sounding units. His third observation is...
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    45 mins
  • Baroness Sharon White: From East London to the Heart of Government

    Baroness Sharon White: From East London to the Heart of Government
    May 20 2026
    Sharon White's career is one of the most remarkable in modern British public life. Starting out as the daughter of Jamaican immigrants in East London, she rose to become one of the most senior civil servants in the country, then chief executive of Ofcom, then chair of the John Lewis Partnership — and is now heading to the House of Lords. In this episode she talks to Michael Kell about how those transitions happened, what drove them, and what she learned along the way. The career in brief Sharon grew up in Leyton, east London, the daughter of Windrush-generation parents — her mother a factory dressmaker for forty years, her father a British Rail worker. A gifted state school education, inspired in part by an economics teacher who spotted her potential, led to Cambridge, then UCL for a master's, then the Government Economic Service. She spent the first decade of her career as an economist and then generalist civil servant at the Treasury, with postings to the British Embassy in Washington and Number 10 under Tony Blair. She returned to the Treasury as Second Permanent Secretary in charge of public spending during the austerity years, then left in 2015 to become CEO of Ofcom, followed by five years as Chair of the John Lewis Partnership. She is now taking on a portfolio of roles including supporting a Canadian pension fund, chairing Frontier Economics, and joining the House of Lords. On growing up in Leyton and getting to Cambridge Sharon is warm and precise about what made the difference in her early life — a state secondary school that happened to be exceptionally academic, and an economics teacher, Mr O'Connell, who sought her out and suggested she try the subject. "Literally two streets away and I'd have had a very different school trajectory," she says. Cambridge in the late 1980s was a peculiar experience — economics was still deeply un-quantitative, heavily influenced by Keynesian political economy, and the cohort of women was tiny. She found it stimulating but alien from her background. On austerity and the limits of Treasury power The most substantive section of the episode covers Sharon's time overseeing public spending during the coalition's austerity programme. She is thoughtful and honest: she didn't experience personal or professional dissonance in implementing the cuts, believing that stabilising the public finances after the financial crisis was a genuine duty. But she acknowledges, looking back, that protecting health and schools spending meant justice, social care and local government bore a disproportionate share — and that the consequences were severe and not fully understood in real time. "It didn't happen without thought," she says, "and it didn't happen without an understanding of some of the consequences. But it's very tough — and you can see the consequences today." On moving from anonymity to accountability One of the most interesting threads in the episode is Sharon's relationship with public visibility. The civil service suited her — consequential work, but largely anonymous. Ofcom was the first role where she became a public figure, and she is candid that it was the thing she was most conscious of leaving the civil service. She grew more comfortable with it, but never sought it out. On the leap to John Lewis The move from Ofcom to chair the John Lewis Partnership is the most surprising transition in a career full of them. Sharon describes being genuinely taken aback when the headhunter called. But she was drawn to the Partnership's democratic structure, its employee-ownership model, and the alignment between its values and those of public service. The Partnership historically hired from the civil service and the armed forces for exactly that reason. She is notably reticent about the difficulties of her tenure — which coincided with serious trading pressures for both John Lewis and Waitrose — but reflects that the scale of public accountability at John Lewis exceeded even Ofcom. On never going back Paul floats the idea that Sharon might have become Cabinet Secretary — the most senior civil service role in the land. She is characteristically direct: she was happy to sit on the interview panel, but "never go back" is the principle she lives by. Ten years out of the civil service, having done very different things, she doesn't think it would have been right. On what economics is actually for Sharon returns several times to a concern she shares with others in the series: that economics has become so technically demanding that it has lost sight of its purpose. She worries that the tools have become the subject, rather than the means to answer difficult questions about how to make people's lives better. It's a theme that runs through her advice to young economists at the close of the episode: impact is what matters, not the sophistication of the method. Key themes Social mobility and the role of schools, teachers, and luckThe experience of implementing austerity ...
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    49 mins
  • Stephanie Flanders: Making Economics Make Sense

    Stephanie Flanders: Making Economics Make Sense
    May 20 2026

    Stephanie Flanders has spent her career in the space between economics and public understanding — explaining what's happening in the global economy to audiences who didn't study it, and doing so across some of the most prestigious platforms in journalism and finance. In this episode she talks to Paul Johnson and Michael Kell about a career that has taken her from the Oxford PPE tutorial rooms to the US Treasury, the BBC, JP Morgan, and now Bloomberg.

    The career in brief

    After Oxford and two years working in economic think tanks (including a stint at the IFS, where Paul and Michael were colleagues), Steph went to Harvard's Kennedy School, originally intending to study political philosophy before pivoting to economics-focused public policy courses. From there she joined the Financial Times as a leader writer, then crossed the Atlantic to work as a speechwriter — and de facto policy insider — for US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Back in the UK, a near-miss at the New York Times led eventually to the BBC, where she served as Economics Editor for eleven years, appearing on the Six and Ten O'Clock News and Newsnight. She then moved to JP Morgan's asset management division, and is now Head of Economics at Bloomberg.

    On Harvard and the limits of pure economics

    Steph is sharp on what was gained and lost in her economics education. The Kennedy School courses were explicitly designed for people heading into policy, not academia — and she found them far more useful for it. The pure economics courses at Harvard, by contrast, treated any mention of the Federal Reserve as an unwelcome intrusion of the real world. She draws a direct line from that theoretical detachment to the intellectual failures that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.

    On the US Treasury and the Asian financial crisis

    Working for Larry Summers during 1997–2000 put Steph at the centre of some of the defining economic events of that era — the Asian financial crisis, the Russian default, the Brazilian crisis. She reflects on the extraordinary influence the US wielded over IMF policy, and on the somewhat poignant spectacle of Summers and Gordon Brown competing to claim credit for debt relief for developing countries. "I wish countries were competing now for who could have the most effective debt relief programme for Africa," she says.

    On explaining economics on television

    This is where the episode comes alive. Steph is thoughtful and funny about the particular challenge of making economics both accurate and accessible to a mainstream TV audience — what she calls "dumbed-down highbrow." Her example of finding a cement factory with a furnace that had to be kept burning even when not producing cement — as a way of illustrating the permanent loss of economic capacity — is a small masterpiece of economic communication. She is equally honest about the vertigo of going to air knowing that someone in the audience will catch any mistake.

    On JP Morgan and what the City taught her

    After eleven years at the BBC, Steph joined JP Morgan's asset management side — not trading, but explaining economies and markets to clients. She's candid about what she found: a well-run institution, genuinely interesting for its insider view of how investors actually think, and also a salutary lesson in how much "made-up nonsense" gets talked about markets when people are trying to sell things.

    On Bloomberg and the bigger picture

    Now at Bloomberg, Steph reflects on a career spent moving between large institutions — Treasury, BBC, JP Morgan, Bloomberg — each with its own culture and its own species of people. She has come to see that as one of the defining features of her working life: collecting different ways of understanding the world, from picture editors to bond traders to engineers.

    Key themes

    • The tension between theoretical economics and the messy real world
    • What it takes to communicate complex ideas without losing the substance
    • The outsized influence of the US in global economic institutions
    • When to walk away from a job that isn't working
    • How different institutions — government, journalism, finance — each distort and illuminate the economy in different ways
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    53 mins
  • Sir Steve Webb: From Economics Nerd to Pensions Minister

    Sir Steve Webb: From Economics Nerd to Pensions Minister
    May 20 2026

    Steve Webb is one of the most effective pensions ministers Britain has ever had. In this episode he joins hosts Paul Johnson and Michael Kell — old colleagues from their days together at the Institute for Fiscal Studies — to trace a career that has moved from academic economics to Parliament, through government and out the other side.

    The career in brief

    Steve spent nine years at the IFS as a microeconomist working on taxes, benefits and poverty, before a brief stint as Professor of Social Policy at Bath University gave him cover while he pursued a political career. Elected as a Liberal Democrat MP in 1997 — partly on the tide of that election rather than any great expectation of winning — he served 18 years in Westminster. The final five were as Pensions Minister in the coalition government, where he drove through two landmark reforms: automatic enrolment into workplace pensions and the flat-rate state pension. After losing his seat in 2015, he joined mutual insurer Royal London and later moved to his current role as a partner at actuarial firm Lane Clark and Peacock.

    On the flat-rate state pension

    The centrepiece of the episode is Steve's account of how he actually got this reform done. The previous system was complex, opaque and left many women with inadequate pensions. Steve's strategy for navigating the Treasury — including an unusual direct conversation with George Osborne's special advisor, Rupert Harrison, IFS-geek to IFS-geek — is a masterclass in how policy actually gets through government. The Treasury's condition: not a single year of net spending. The result: a messier transition than it needed to be, but the reform got through.

    On losing your seat — and your identity

    Steve is candid about the human cost of 2015. He describes taking his children to the count for the first time, convinced he would hold on, only to lose his seat at five in the morning in front of TV cameras. "You've lost your identity," he says. "Didn't you used to be Steve Webb?" The episode explores how he rebuilt — leaning on faith, on his professional network, and on a fortunate opening when his successor as pensions minister couldn't fulfil her speaking engagements.

    On the revolving door

    Paul pushes Steve on the ethics of moving from ministerial office into the pensions industry. Steve engages with it honestly: the rules are largely symbolic, some cases are genuinely questionable, but if what you bring is substance rather than just a contacts book, it can be justified.

    On the underpayment scandal

    Post-ministerially, Steve uncovered a systemic failure in the DWP's administration of state pensions — largely affecting women whose pensions should have been reassessed after life events such as bereavement or a spouse's retirement. The resulting investigation led to over £850 million being repaid to more than 100,000 people. He describes hearing from a family whose mother had died before receiving her backdated payment: "Now we can afford a nice headstone for Mum."

    Key themes

    • How economics training shapes a political career — and its limits
    • What it takes to get a major reform past the Treasury
    • The identity crisis of losing a parliamentary seat
    • The ethics of the public-to-private transition
    • The value of breadth — PPE, faith, community — alongside technical expertise
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    50 mins
  • Trailer - What is Econ to Icon?

    Trailer - What is Econ to Icon?
    May 20 2026

    What is Econ to Icon?

    In this short introductory episode, hosts Paul Johnson and Michael Kell introduce their new podcast: Econ to Icon.

    Paul is an economist of nearly 40 years — former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, with stints in government, academia, and consulting. Michael is also an economist by background, having worked at the UK Treasury, the IMF, and in economic consulting, before moving into careers coaching.

    Together they've set out to make a podcast that focuses on the substance of economic policy, and the human stories behind it. Paul brings the economics; Michael brings the career lens — the turning points, the transitions, the choices people make about what kind of life to build.

    The first series features six guests: a pensions minister who redesigned the UK state pension; a senior civil servant who went on to lead Ofcom and chair John Lewis; a political advisor at the heart of Number 10 during the 2008 financial crisis; a competition economist who has also built a parallel career in music; and two of the UK's most prominent economics communicators.

    The trailer gives a flavour of the personal territory the series covers too — being told you're not cut out for academia, the tension between being a people pleaser and surviving in politics, and how most guests' relationship with economics has shifted from certainty to something more nuanced over time.

    The pitch, in their own words: "Economic ideas on one side, human lives on the other."
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    3 mins