The end of the beginning is beginning to end and there’s a weird lull in the air.
The Conservative party’s story for the last two years may have had a different trajectory than that of our departing Prime Minister but it has been equally turbulent and difficult.
The future is impossible to accurately predict, but the theory is that Kemi Badenoch and her team are in a trilogy cycle the first part of which has just ended. I’m sure the wags and the satirists could have fun with titles but the basic premise, as far as it goes is the story divides into: Fight for Survival. The Graft. The Return.
It’s a classic story arc, but ask anyone involved, friend of the party or foe and they’ll tell you the latter is still not ensured by any means, we’ll have to see how the middle part pans out, but the first part seems to have closed. Even Reform commentators grudgingly accept, and with caveats aplenty, that the Conservative party has survived and it neither dead, nor quitting the field.
I’ve said before that much of that is owed to Kemi Badenoch, who so many were starting to doubt last year, yes even I, and recently I wondered what exactly it was that people liked, beyond those in the Conservative party itself.
It was the death of Penelope Keith that provided something of an insight. I recommend John Oxley’s excellent column for ConservativeHome on the difficulties the Tories will have now the iconic character of Margot is no longer with us, because she isn’t representative of those who do or might be persuaded to vote the way she did.
In one of the many tributes to what was clearly a ‘good life’ a clip of Penelope Keith talking to Michael Parkinson about why she thought Margot was such a loved character struck a chord.
“I think because she’s very very honest, I think it’s a very attractive trait. I don’t think she’s a prize bitch I think she has a heart of gold and I think she says a lot of the things we’d like to say ourselves.”
I have long championed, after years of watching political obfuscation and wriggle room answers to questions from all stripes of politician, there is no room, indeed a warm welcome for telling the truth. It’s either naïve or staggeringly obvious but levelling with the public and voters has finally found it’s time.
I think that quote is at the heart of what has taken Badenoch to the point where the ‘Survival’ chapter has closed. So what next?
There is a very odd atmosphere in Westminster and Whitehall. A calm before the storm. Things are stilled and nothing much is actually happening, though under the surface big things are building up.
It’s partly seasonal. We are approaching recess; the end of term feeling is palpable. The season of summer receptions and some form of break from the bubble is part of the herd’s life cycle.
But it’s more than that, right now. Sir Keir Starmer is leaving Downing Street, scrapping over the two year marker, just. His successor is still technically unknown and yet everybody knows it will be Andy Burnham. He can’t start yet, he’s not ready to start yet, and so far, we have one word soup for policy starters, and one interview ‘with a friendly’ to pore over to glean what might come next from Labour for Britain. Not all of it sounds good, or even wise.
Burnham now has the hopes and agendas of two maybe more factions of Labour to draw together. There is so much being projected onto him he could market himself as multiplex cinema. He likes the camera too, just as long as there isn’t a reporter behind it asking awkward questions that matter.
Nigel Farage is no mood to answer questions either. Sky’s Ali Fortescue tried valiantly at the ARC conference to get him to engage, but he found five million reasons to completely ignore her. Always ask yourself who is on the other end when a politician avoids a reporter by being ‘on the phone’. Believe me, lot’s of politicians of all parties know that trick.
The Civil Service as I can absolutely guarantee you, is in limbo. Process will be continuing, that is the way, but government will not be. It is like ‘purdah’ during election campaigns where nothing major is done, an no major announcements are made.
Actually there was one yesterday, that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport will be leaving Twitter/X the social media platform at the behest of Secretary of State Lisa Nandy who says it is too full of misinformation. I can possibly see why she might make that choice for herself, I’m less clear, as is her future in that role, that an entire Department that focusses on the media should quit a social media arena.
But in most of Whitehall things are on pause. They don’t actually stop giving ministers things to opine on or decide, they just drop a few gears and say things will be ready in about two to three weeks, precisely the time when Burnham and what I’m told will be a very different team – we’ll see – get to grips with the monumental challenges the last two years have gifted them.
I won’t pretend, after the short fall in how to pay for the Defence Investment Plan foisted on him, that I wouldn’t smile wryly if Burnham starts in the job complaining about a five billion black hole in his finances that he’s inherited from his predecessor. Sounds familiar, it’s just this time it’s true.
Reform UK? Well if you talk to many of their people, and recently I have, they are at so much pains to tell you everything is fine, that you instinctually know that it isn’t. But let’s be careful. They shouldn’t have written us off, but don’t make the same mistake. They are far from imploding, and Nigel has been written off before and yet his party is still leading the polls. However there is something up, they feel unsteady, tense with each other and conflicted.
One insider put it down to like the development of a start-up, they’ve taken it this far, now they need to think, and debate about what the next phase looks like, and that is hard to do – a version of ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’
I heard Richard Tice say to founding Editor of this very site, who launches one for Reform today – no it’s not called ReformHome – that such internal senior debates were fine but that it was important it didn’t spill into the public domain. There’s a reason he’s worried about that.
Whatever it is that’s bugging them, something is, and Nigel not answering questions and not having good enough answers to the questions being asked isn’t helping. I found almost every senior Reform character I spoke to, happy to defend the five million pound ‘gift’ and yet admit he could have made things so much better for himself if he’d just said he should have registered it, and he regretted not doing so.
You can say it doesn’t matter nobody cares but I think the evidence is that they do. And never gift your opponents a huge multi-million pound stick to beat you with.
Kemi Badenoch was at the ARC conference too, happy to talk. Not just en passant with Sky but a sit down interview. You can’t say from a podium ‘bring me your questions’, and then not respond when they do. She wanted when she started to get the Tories ‘a hearing’ that has been done.
We learn she thinks a Reform government might be ‘as bad if not worse’ than a Labour one, which inevitably they have spun as her preferring one over the other, but since that poster the Tories are used to this mendacious tactic.
The Green’s seem to be very quiet, the Lib Dems louder but not getting heard.
The next Chapter is about to open.
If the theory is ‘Survival’ first then ‘the Graft’ the big question for the Conservatives is can you shift that favourable view of the leader to extend to the party brand itself? At this stage – page one of the middle book – that still looks hard.
The machinery of the party may not be broken, but it is still reduced, it still took a lot of damage in local elections, and you can feel all you like that there is a message now to offer on the doorstep, but it’s not much use if you don’t have enough people to get onto doorsteps.
I’ve mentioned before that I suspect the coming Conference will see more policy forthcoming but that’s ten to twelve weeks away. Look out, as we at ConservativeHome will, for summer ‘pitch rolling’, getting people ready for the announcements to come.
There has to be a demonstration, that we aren’t going to fall into the same mistake Starmer did.
Morgan McSweeney – remember him? – resurfaced this week to talk to the BBC’s Nick Robinson to admit what we all guessed that in the four years he and Starmer were in charge of the labour party they both failed to realise the changes to governing Britain since 2010, and had simply not prepared enough for what they would do in government.
If the Tories are stuck with that label of being unprepared, they’ll never get a second chance. Everything they have said and done in the last twelve months suggests they know that, have been doing the work, but, whilst I believe them, it’s not the same as the showing your workings.
The next three weeks will go by quickly, far too quickly one suspects inside Camp Burnham. But soon the game will once again be afoot. Buckle up people I sense this is going to be a very bumpy ride.