Seven years ago I slipped a scrap of paper across a café table to a politician who was deep in conversation with a friend about future plans.
On it I had written: “Looks different. Sounds different. Offers something new.”
“That’s your slogan” I said. They used it.
I’m not sure if I’d seen anyone use it before but the fact is years later, I realise, it is essentially what all political pitches for change are trying to achieve. A discarding of the old, a change in the offer – and the way it’s communicated – from someone who looks a little different from the stereotypical.
Farage has done it, for years. Polanski is doing it; Badenoch is doing it. Starmer tried it – and it worked, right up to the point a few days after it worked, it relentlessly and unendingly didn’t. If you had no plan to make it real, it stays, like his view of his own current position, as one of his former aides put it: in the Willy Wonka phase – ‘a world of pure imagination‘.
One of the rules of success in a team is having the right people in play, playing to their strengths. The electorate seem last week to have sent a rather clear message to Labour, have decided that the wrong person is in play. As if distorted by some coping static of their own invention, Starmer’s people – those who are left – say they have received that message loud and clear, and then paraphrased it as almost the complete antithesis of what it really said.
Starmer says they told him that they need to deliver the same things he promised, harder and faster. That he needs a decade of his presence at the top to really change Britain and that he has no intention of going quietly – and he’ll lay his buffet of hope out to people this morning, in a speech.
Starmer has had a handful of good speeches in his entire career, and this one will have to be astonishing if he is to look different, sound different, and offer anything new. Closer EU integration? Well he’s tried that. After interventions and rumblings from the triumvirate of rivals who think deep down, they’d do a better job than he – Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting, and Andy Burnham – the PM will be lucky to limp forward ten days, rather than ten years.
But I will leave Labour’s fate for the moment, with a recommendation to read Patrick Maguire’s sharp observations in the Times, ahead of the ‘speech of Starmer’s life’.
The Guardian’s Jessica Elgot thought over the weekend that so much attention was being paid to Labour’s woes, that the Conservatives were looking far too cheerful or upbeat for a party that had just lost 500 seats. She suggested there was dangerous complacency at work.
That’s not really true. Sir Mel Stride sets on ConHome today that no Tory thinks surviving to fight another day – when eight months ago even that was a concern at these elections – is enough but London and elsewhere gave just enough sparks of revival to keep them in the game. There’s not been big celebrations in CCHQ, just a dose of relief, it was better than it might have been.
You’ll see a lot from Tory supporters of ‘we are second behind Reform, 20 percent to their 27, we are still in play and despite his tsunami of dislike online, not, as Zia loves to say, in any way, ‘dead.’
On Friday much of what was expected occurred. However they dress it, Reform UK did well but not as well as they’d boasted they would. Labour did worse than their worst imaginings, and the Tories were, as I put it on Friday morning, the ‘just about managing’.
Kemi Badenoch explained her view well in the Telegraph, and I know she sees the political future of the country and her party as playing ‘a long game’. She’s a fan of poker so taking risks, and betting on her hand is not alien to her. She has explained what she intends to do, more hard yards on policy, offering a Conservative vision that is less left or right but more pure Conservatism. Last Friday Mark Littlewood of the Popular Conservatives outlined a path he hopes they’ll take, this morning Knight-expectant David Gauke offers another, rather different.
It’s some time now since Gavin Rice, once of Onward and now working for Nick Timothy MP outlined on ConservativeHome a similar dilemma for the Tories; to chase Reform votes, or tack to the centre and that those were probably mutually exclusive paths. That dilemma remains.
Badenoch has ruled two things out. Both significant and both a risk.
No reshuffle – though many, including some of her shadow team, would welcome one. Outsiders think it better, with the slogan I started with, to bring in some fresh faces, and build a team for the 2030s not just the now. So far, she doesn’t seem keen. A big change in the Labour line up were there to be one, might give her the window if she wanted one.
No deal – I said in the new year 2026 would be the year the Tories and Reform settled into some more fixed position towards each other. It seems, much to the derision of some of their supporters, and sadness from those who argue that a deal would be the best thing for the ‘Right’ that that’s not the way it’s going to be.
The constant attacks, threats to destroy, predictions of death, deadlines for ‘failed Tories’ are about as attractive a pitch as a dose of diphtheria, and Badenoch and Farage are not going to get friendly any time soon. If it’s a long game it appears it’s going all the way for one winner. So be it.
But Friday I think showed one thing. Anyone who thinks that Reform will fizzle out, implode or get so mired they are not an electoral option, needs to give their head a vigorous wobble. All of those might occur, but the efficacy of those things must be doubted, and relying on that is no strategy at all.
Last Conference Badenoch was under huge pressure to give a reassuring lead and some eye-catching policy. Having done just that, she’s spent much of the time since giving much more of a lead, and getting the hearing she wanted. On the doorsteps she is popular, the Tories still aren’t.
Her personal performance won’t be enough or even a guarantee that the brand can be dragged into “her slipstream” as Sir James Cleverly put it, but without it, it would prove impossible. They’ll be more calls after ‘the two years’ she mentioned she needed, for more eye catching policy, and a signal of where that takes them. They also need to get on with choosing a challenger to Sadiq Khan.
But in that combination, or other startegies, hope lies in a way it cannot for Starmer.
This is the point. However big the mountain, whatever the chances of less than ideal outcomes, the Tories are still, just about, moving forward. Slower and less flashily than Reform but moving forward. Starmer can’t do that, and it’s possible neither can his rivals for his job. The Labour fundamentals are so wrong it’s hard to see them turning the UK, or their fortunes, around.
The Tories are still staring up a mountain with a long hard slog to go, and could still find another grinning and laughing at them from above when they get closer to the top, but the point is they aren’t going backwards.
The path they choose next is the vital bit.