“We sent one tweet, they’ve been banging on about it for days. We’re not rattled. We’re not rattled at all.”
There is definitely a piece to be written about this extraordinary quotation, offered to Tim Shipman by a “a Tory official” in response to Kemi Badenoch’s allegation that Reform UK was faking its membership figures.
Unfortunately we already wrote it a couple of weeks ago. Suffice to say, only having “sent one tweet” – when that tweet contained an allegation that has not been substantiated – is not a defence. It is the problem. (The final bit of the quote also comes across, contrary to the speaker’s hope, a tad rattled.)
But there is another aspect to the problem of CCHQ’s negative-value media management. As I noted in the previous piece, Kemi Badenoch’s response to the row was to go to ground on Twitter. The problem with that is that it means there are simply no Conservative stories (at least, stories set on the Conservatives’ own terms) circulating at the moment.
Scanning the newspaper websites on Sunday evening we can see plenty of Reform drama (Elon Musk and Nigel Farage have fallen out) and plenty of Labour misery, be that the revelation that the Government has no plan for social care or the eyebrow-raising discovery that “the Treasury minister responsible for tackling financial crime and corruption lived in a property given to her family by an ally of her aunt’s deposed regime in Bangladesh”.
Of the Tories, there is precious little. And this isn’t a new problem. Here at ConservativeHome, we try to use our morning newslinks to highlight Conservative stories, good or bad. Since the drama of the leadership contest, that has sometimes been tricky because there are precious few and, on some occasions, none at all.
Perhaps this is all part of the plan. After all, the Government may be getting plenty of coverage but none of it is good, and whatever the potential impact of his huge donation (if ever he makes it) Musk is not doing Reform any favours by calling for Farage to be sacked and Tommy Robinson to be released from prison.
Yet whilst all this might seem to vindicate the wisdom of a submarine strategy, it also highlights a very real danger: that the Conservatives simply end up squeezed out of the political debate.
Labour’s huge majority means that when discipline starts to break down, there is plenty of scope for it to have a very engaging multi-sided civil war that doesn’t involve the Opposition at all: lots of fodder for backbench caucuses, plenty of MPs who’ll realise they’re not on the whips’ Nice List, and a fair number sitting on very narrow majorities.
That’s before we consider the impact of Reform. Whatever you think of him, Farage is a campaigner of the first rank with an undoubted talent for stealing headlines, whilst his party’s marginal status in Parliament gives it the freedom to operate as a right-wing Liberal Democrats, outflanking the Conservatives on any salient issue with eye-catching (if not, in the practical sense, serious) proposals.
Yes, there are decent odds that both parties will continue to beclown themselves between now and the next election. But even if getting elected on the basis of not being either of them were a good idea (and this unhappy Government is an excellent case study in why it isn’t), there is scant chance of the Tories pulling that off so soon after being so decisively ejected from office themselves.
And as discussed in the previous piece, the additional danger of a purely reactive strategy (notwithstanding the perils of scoring straightforward own goals, like making unsubstantiated allegations) is that the Party ends up with a series of disconnected and opportunistic commitments instead of a strategy.
This is why 2025 must be the year in which Badenoch starts to flesh out her actual diagnosis and prescription for Britain. Her defenders cite her “strengths as a communicator” as an alternative to policy but, notwithstanding the sketchy evidence for that claim on it own terms, the binary it assumes is entirely false. No volume of communication skill is useful if you have nothing to communicate.
Consider New Labour. Yes, it had an unhealthy and then-novel fixation on day-to-day media management that has been deeply deleterious to our politics and ended up backfiring once the government acquired its reputation for ‘spin’. But it also did a lot of policy. Tony Blair was a communicator nonpareil, but it is no coincidence that he also always had something to say. Even where the policies were sloppy or misconceived, they were real.
Until the Conservative Party has its own agenda, it cannot face the media on its own terms. Until the new leadership has a convincing explanation for why it the party failed in office, neither journalists nor voters have much reason to give them the benefit of the doubt that things will be different this time, honest. Or, indeed, to think about it much at all.
This is one of the challenges of returning to opposition after an extended period in government. In office, you are the story by default. In those circumstances, an individual media strategy based on a low profile punctuated by judicious interventions on favoured issues is viable – but it is no guide to whether or not one has the very different ability to fight continually for airtime for several years.
Being in opposition is hard, and it has a skillset all of its own. One of the most important is earning a hearing, and a prerequisite for that is realising that you need to do it. If Badenoch wishes to be judged on her “strengths as a communicator”, this is the sort of strength that actually matters.