Rivals actor Luca Pasqualino has revealed he came close to landing a major role in a very different British show that has also gone on to become a huge hit internationally.

During a recent interview with HuffPost UK to promote the new episodes of the Jilly Cooper bonkbuster, Luca was asked if there was an audition he missed out on earlier on in his career that still “haunts” him today, to which he admitted that there was “definitely” one that came immediately to mind for him.

“One that I got really, really close to that sort of sticks out was Ted Lasso,” he explained, before sharing that he’d tried out to play striker Jamie Tartt in the Apple TV+ series.

“I got down to [the last few], went and met Jason Sudeikis, had two tests for it, and I was so close. But my friend Phil Dunster, he got the part in the end. And he was so good.”

Luca continued: “If you watch [something that you’ve auditioned for] and the person who gets it is really awful or whatever, it makes you feel worse.

“But [Phil] was so good, it’s like, ‘OK, fine, I get it. This is going to be an easier pill to swallow’.”

Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy ahead of the Labour Party Conference in 2023 (PA Images / Alamy)

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At a launch in central London at the start of last year, Lisa Nandy outlined her mission to create jobs and spread influence globally. Rather than cite the work of the Foreign Office or the use of international aid, she instead championed Peaky Blinders and Adele.

Joining her at the launch was the then-foreign secretary David Lammy – a true believer in the power of soft power, brought in to reinvigorate and reinvent the work of the Foreign Office – and 26 leaders in the arts, culture and sports sector.

It wasn’t quite ‘Cool Britannia’ but it seemed to those involved that this was a moment – like the early years of the Blair government – where the country’s leadership in those fields might be fully leveraged to national advantage.

But less than 18 months later, the so-called Soft Power Council is drifting towards oblivion, having not met in full for at least seven months and with many members believing it is doomed.

Why did it fail? Reshuffles both at ministerial and official level and spending cuts are part of the answer.

At its launch, Lammy outlined a manifesto to take advantage of the UK’s huge cultural pull, and the potential power of using it for Britain’s national interest.

“Soft power is fundamental to the UK’s impact and reputation around the world,” he said. “I am often struck by the enormous love and respect which our music, sport… and institutions generate on every continent. But we have not taken a sufficiently strategic approach to these huge assets as a country. Harnessing soft power effectively can help to build relationships, deepen trust, enhance our security and drive economic growth.”

To many, Lammy’s remarks were a signal for welcome change in the department. Allies of Lammy had continually voiced frustration in years previously about the quality of government work on soft power. Under the previous government, too often it was cobbled together at the last minute, or treated as an afterthought.

One founding member says: “I thought the council was a great idea. There was an urgency about it and a sense that the government gets that it is a new era. While the UK needs to build up its hard power, we also still need to make best use of everything we have.”

However, early cuts to international aid and funding trouble at the British Council meant that some believed that the goals were being undermined.

Baroness Chapman, a Foreign Office minister and supporter of soft power work, was simultaneously having to champion its promotion while also being the face of controversial international aid cuts.

Despite the rocky start, council members were still optimistic about the work. Lord Mendoza – the Conservative peer and former Boris Johnson appointee behind the controversial ‘retain and explain’ guidance for contentious statues, monuments and artefacts following the toppling of the Colston statue in 2020 – was very supportive upon the council’s creation.

A council member tells The House that the creation of the body was genuinely groundbreaking: “It is the first time we see a government properly co-ordinating expertise across a broad range of key sectors, like culture, creative, sports, education and science and technology to steer and advise on policy and action.”

Insiders point to the reshuffle of September 2025, and the move of Lammy to justice as the inflection point, which saw the council tip into inactivity.

Another council member says: “It was clearly an initiative that Lisa Nandy and David Lammy worked on, thought of and launched. Their personalities were very prominent at the start of the Soft Power Council; we haven’t had the same rhythm of meeting and engagement since the reshuffle.”

Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper was scheduled to attend the latest meeting in Belfast in October but dropped out just before and was replaced by DCMS minister Ian Murray. Another meeting was organised but abruptly cancelled, meaning the full Soft Power Council has not met in seven months.

“We’re still waiting for a signal that they think this is worthwhile. We’ve had some great ministerial meetings but we haven’t had the same one twice – we’re showing up and we’d like the government to.”

It’s clearly a low priority

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Another member says the council has been “neglected” since Cooper took over, and was “clearly a low priority for her”.

“There’s been a hell of a lot to deal with and it’s not at the top of [Cooper’s] priority list, but it would be good to retain the soft power we have.”

Shortly after the reshuffle, the senior civil servant responsible for soft power left the Civil Service, further robbing momentum from the initiative.

An outside contractor was also brought in to assess the success of a soft power strategy altogether. In the meantime, almost all work has ceased. 

One member tells The House: “Where we are at is that it currently feels on hold.”

Much of the ire among council members is directed at Cooper. One council member says: “We would like the current Foreign Secretary to take more of an interest. If you’re involved in this field of work you can see a future where we are marginal.”

Another agrees: “I think [Cooper] hasn’t made a decision, but it’s clearly a low priority”.

While Cooper’s arrival has triggered criticism, Nandy’s inaction since its launch has caused some previously supportive members of the council to turn on her.

“She’s been a complete disappointment. She seems to have no interest in culture whatsoever.”

A government spokesman did not deny the senior departures from the FCDO, or the lack of meetings for over half a year, but claimed the group did contribute to recent cultural visits to China and India.

They said: “The soft power they deliver is creating growth and strengthening our reputation at home and abroad. We are committed to doing all we can to further their reach, as well as promoting the English language overseas.”

With the government on the rocks and political capital quickly waning, the likelihood of a reinvigoration for the council seems low – especially when discussions around hard power and the Defence Investment Plan have become so terse. 

“It’s one of the few effective things created by this government,” one of the council members mused. “Which means they’ll probably kill it.”

An irony of the pause is that while the government has gone cold on the Soft Power Council, foreign nations are taking an increased interest. Members have met and worked with representatives of Saudi Arabia, Ukraine and Oman in recent months, all of whom have taken an interest in the work of the council and replicating it in their own nations.

Meanwhile, some members thought the work of the council could aid the government in one of the problems which led to its freeze: domestic politics.

Council member Vivienne Stern believes that its work should expand into the UK, rather than retract internationally: “This country is in a national funk – you look at the polls… people feel pessimistic. What the Soft Power Council does is bring together a list of reasons to be optimistic. We should lean on it domestically more.” 

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Jonathan Portes asks how useful a measure immigration statistics are and argues that they have served to legitimate politics of racialised grievance. 

The BBC headline for last week’s immigration statistics was “UK migration drops to 171,000 – almost half 2024’s figure.” Of course, it referred to net migration – taking it for granted that that, above all, was the key statistic.

But net migration is not immigration. It is immigration minus emigration. It can fall because fewer people come to Britain, or because more people leave. These are very different things. A country in which young people, graduates, nurses, doctors, scientists or entrepreneurs are leaving in large numbers may not have solved a problem, but acquired one.

This is not a technical quibble. The latest figures make the point. Net migration has indeed fallen sharply: from a peak of 944,000 in the year to March 2023 to 171,000 in the year to December 2025. But this conceals large movements in both directions. The ONS estimates that net migration of British nationals was minus 136,000, and net migration of EU+ nationals was minus 42,000, while non-EU+ net migration remained positive at about 350,000.

So net migration is doing a lot of work here – arguably too much. If the concern is population growth, it is a reasonable, though incomplete, indicator. If the concern is “control”, it is less useful. And if the concern is that British people are leaving while non-white migrants are arriving, it is the wrong measure altogether.

That distinction matters because the British fixation on net migration – and it is British; most other countries, even those equally obsessed with immigration politics, pay relatively little attention to this particular number – was not inevitable. It was constructed, socially and politically. It emerged in its modern form in the mid-2000s, and was then institutionalised by the Conservative Party after 2010. The statistic became central not because it was the best way to understand migration, but because it was politically convenient.

The key political move was made by the anti-immigration lobby group Migration Watch, which shaped the Conservative Party’s approach. Its 2005 briefing, “UK population increase through migration”, framed the issue not primarily as one of race, ethnicity or culture, but as one of population pressure. Similarly, other briefings claimed that England was, after Malta, the most densely populated country in Europe.

This was effective because it was respectable. Britain was a “small crowded island”. The problem was not foreigners, still less non-white foreigners, but simply numbers: pressure on housing, congestion, public services, GP appointments, schools and transport.

There are legitimate policy questions here. Population change does affect housing demand and infrastructure. But that was not all that was going on. The “small crowded island” argument allowed anti-immigration politics to be presented as technocratic rather than ethnic. It translated anxieties about belonging and identity into a language of arithmetic.

David Cameron then turned this into a target. In January 2010 he said that he wanted net immigration reduced to the “tens of thousands” rather than the “hundreds of thousands”, and that net immigration of 200,000 a year was “too much”. The context was explicitly demographic: he also said he wanted to keep the UK population below 70 million. At a time when Cameron was emphasising the socially liberal turn of the Conservative Party, net migration offered a way of talking about immigration while avoiding more overtly racial or ethnonationalist language.

That mattered in the 2000s. Open racism was still largely taboo in mainstream politics. The BNP existed, but mainstream politicians did not want to sound like the BNP. So the language of race was displaced into the language of space, pressure and pace of change. Net migration was the perfect statistic for this purpose.

But the euphemism was always unstable. Some on the restrictionist side were more candid. Paul Collier wrote – falsely, under any definition other than an explicitly race-based one – that the 2011 census showed that “the indigenous British had become a minority in their own capital”, and later defended the phrase as “a perfectly meaningful statement”. David Goodhart’s argument about “Somewheres” and “Anywheres” was a more sophisticated version of the same move: not crudely racial, but clearly concerned with the cultural and demographic position of the majority population.

But these euphemisms are now no longer necessary; the masks are off. Migration Watch now warn that the “native [that is, white] British” are becoming a minority, while Goodhart asks if London can remain the capital of the UK if it isn’t white enough.

And, just as in the 2000s, politicians have followed. Robert Jenrick, while still a Conservative Shadow Cabinet member, said that he “didn’t see another white face” and that this was not the country he wanted to live in; he later insisted the issue was integration, not “the colour of your skin or your faith”. This is not exactly plausible deniability. His new Reform colleague Matt Goodwin is more straightforwardly racist, saying that the fall in net migration just means that white Britons are being “replaced” by Afghan goatherders.

This is where the fixation on net migration becomes contradictory. If the problem is net migration, then a fall should be welcome. That is the logic of the statistic. But if the problem is that British people are leaving while non-white migrants are arriving, net migration is not the right measure. Indeed, it conceals the thing that the new right wants to talk about. For those whose politics is increasingly about replacement, that is precisely the problem.

The old language of net migration remains. It is too embedded in the machinery of British politics to disappear quickly. Governments need targets. Newspapers need numbers. Opposition parties need simple attack lines. But the emotional centre of the debate has moved. The increasingly explicit concern is not just how many people come, but who comes, who leaves, and who counts as part of the nation.

This is also why falling net migration has not depoliticised immigration. British Future polling suggests that many voters still believe migration is rising, even after the sharp fall in the official figures. Public concern is being driven less by the headline statistic than by a broader sense of disorder, asylum politics, visible demographic change and distrust of government.

There is a lesson here for Labour as well as for the Conservatives. Chasing net migration targets does not defeat the politics of racialised grievance. It may legitimate it. The Cameron target did not create the far right, but it did help entrench the idea that lower net migration was the obvious test of political seriousness. Once that was accepted, every failure became evidence of betrayal.

By Professor Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Department of Political Economy, King’s College London.