“It’s nice isn’t it. The quiet”
It took less than two years for this pithy if premature six words to become an icon in the field of hubristic social media posts.
Otto English – not the gentleman’s real name – was saying something shorter than left leaning commentator Andrew Marr, and former, if ever, Conservative Anna Soubry also tried in the summer of 2024. Labour had won a landslide, a new politics was in charge, the rightly rejected Tory infighting had been banished – probably for good, they thought – and the ‘grown ups’ were back. A calm, a control, a competence, had returned. Quiet had descended.
Well we all now know that like a lot of the phooey Labour claimed about themselves, and their outriders trumpeted in triumph, it turned out not to be true. It remains astonishing that it took less than two years for Labour to hit the rocks, and keep doggedly doing so at almost every stage of their time in office. It’s seems an age ago that things were so bad Rachel cried. She could’ve done with a break then.
I envied the idea of ‘quiet’. I wanted quiet. I bet we all did. Politics has become so loud of late, often ‘full of sound and fury signifying nothing’. Cutting through it is really hard.
However I have. Well for a week anyway.
It was nice. The quiet.
I took a week off, and rather deliberately avoided the phone, the news, the papers, the TV and radio. I let Makerfield absorb others’ attention and retreated to the garden where, as it happens, I have full control of my borders, there is a lot of abundant growth, pests are dealt with efficiently but humanely and my energy costs are some light pruning and pouring collected rain water on thirsty shrubs. The only hint of the maelstrom of politics were my red roses, which were wilting too.
I gather in my absence Carla Denyer the Green MP and Dr David Bull the former Chairman of Reform appear to have taken a similar attitude to the rigours of modern politics and opted for a break. We all need them, and sometimes we are told to take them.
In my ‘quiet’ breaks I looked at ConservativeHome as a reader, not the Editor.
Stepping back and viewing from afar, is a useful lesson. I, like many a politics watcher, have been accused of being ‘too long in the Westminster bubble’, and whilst it’s true that I’ve been doing this a long time, the truth is I don’t spend that much time in Westminster at all.
My political reporting career was spent actively not being in Westminster but around the country trying to understand how policies emanating from SW1P, impacted people far away from its narrow chatter and obsessions. The fact is, just taking a week to block it all out, gives you an idea in itself of how most people see politics. It pops in and out their consciousness because it is not their main priority, or topic of conversation. They don’t ignore it, but they aren’t awash with it.
Lord Ashcroft’s regular focus groups are a fascinating dip into what sticks in people’s minds and what doesn’t. Even then there’s a certain level of interest in politics from the participants but for a salutary tale for those who wish to wield power I noted this week the person who told the group they’d never heard of Wes Streeting until he resigned.
But now my ‘quiet’ is over. It’s back to the noise. And my week of reading gives me some handy pointers.
Makerfield, the by-election that isn’t really a by-election, is something of a blackhole whose magnetic field has drawn even the bubble breathers who never leave Westminster if they can help it, to experience, and then write about, ‘The North’.
For what it’s worth I suspect Burnham is going to win. But that was from my literally down- to-earth perspective of a sun lounger.
Once again, we are faced with a by-election where the Tories are so far off the pace it’s hard for us to meaningfully cover it save that although we’ve not won it in the past, we did used to contend.
Restore Britian is causing Reform the kind of problems Reform would rather cause the Tories, and Nigel Farage has kept out of what appears to be a spat between Zia Yusuf and Robert Jenrick – the sort of tensions that were never going to be easy to manage when Zia has the home affairs brief and Robert the experience of doing that job.
So experienced he claimed credit for measures that reduced migration that he didn’t actually manage to put in place, but I’ll let bygones be bygones.
I’m not sure I agree, though I like him, with Lee Cain’s assessment of Kemi Badenoch and the Conservatives post the disappointing, if expected, local election results. Dr Ranj Alaaldin makes the case this morning, but my main objection is that Lee has been saying all this for quite some time before his piece last week. His own focus group reactions should not be ignored of course and yes; the Conservatives have a very long way to go.
If James Cowling of the ‘Next Gen Tories’ has his way there might be new faces in the shadow cabinet. Now Kemi has ruled a reshuffle out, but if we are discussing noise and quiet, I note the calls for new faces as part of ‘renewal’ is slowly getting louder.
Peter Murrell’s list of luxury purchases with four hundred thousand pounds of SNP money has also been a amusing diversion into niche questions like, who needs a portable leather bound tea set? And why does a pen cost four thousand pounds?! And enjoying the bravado of his ex wife Nicola Sturgeon saying even a brand new camper van, wasn’t a clue, to the fraud she definitely didn’t know he was committing.
And finally stepping away for a week I find our Prime Minister pretty much exactly where we left him, limping on, convinced that what the country needs and wants is the quiet competence and leadership he has given them – in his head. I fear the Burnham momentum (an exercise in convenient amnesia about some of his less successful history in government) is still likely to see Starmer to the exit this year.
The imminent threat of being removed however does seem to have perked him up a bit. Like Rishi Sunak, and Ed Miliband when the ‘leadership gig’ was all over, there’s a “what the hell” feel to what they say and how they say it.
If only Starmer had found some ‘mojo’ two years ago, the ‘quiet’ might have actually been real.
Right, I have some deck chairs to stow, and phone calls to make, but it was genuinely nice while it lasted.