Deng Xiaoping literally was one. Nelson Mandela, George Fernandes, Friedrich Merz, Anthony Albanese and even Keir Starmer have all been called one.
Long after ‘the Long March’ – a year long a 6,000-mile military retreat undertaken by the Chinese Communists in 1935 – successive political commentators including a German student activist in 1967 who described “the long march within institutions” the tag ‘long marcher’ has come to mean a political figure who has survived extreme hardships, demonstrated immense ideological loyalty, and played a foundational role in building a political movement.
There’s one name in British politics I left out of the list above, but undoubtedly deserves it, and has indeed been called it before; Nigel Farage.
Farage started on his road in 1993. When I first met him about a decade later at a gathering of the ‘cranks and gadflies’ (an epithet bestowed on the party by Lord Howard and adopted as the name of a UKIP dinning society) Roger Knapman was leader, and Farage’s only stated ambition was “I’d just love my own show on LBC” (true story).
Well his long march has led him, via leading three parties, some multiple times, to where he is now. Coming back from holiday to – if sources are to be believed – bang some hot heads together to stem the infighting at the heart of Reform.
It is peculiar that Zia Yusuf, the hottest of those heads, has carved a narrative as a ‘Reform purist’ of the long marcher mould. Said to be still frustrated by the arriviste ‘failed Tories’ he thinks have polluted the purity of his arriviste party Yusuf forgets: Lee Anderson joined Reform in March 2024 (his third party) four months before Yusuf cancelled his Conservative party membership.
Zia is also not, despite him repeating it, the shadow Home Secretary. Indeed he is unlikely to be able to reach the rung higher unless the self-appointed ‘lethal electoral threat” actually stands for a ruddy election! And so far Reform have passed him over for such an honour.
Lelia ‘all-about-Reform-now’ Cunningham pulled out of standing as a candidate for the Conservatives at the general election of 2024, having long complained the Tories didn’t value her or take her seriously – and some ‘why am I not further up the London list’ behaviour – I may venture to think we are starting to see why.
But jibes aside, these are arrivistes. Reform’s long marchers are thin on the ground, Dan Jukes, Farage’s close advisor, Raheem Kassam was once and seems to be back, but oddly it’s Matt Goodwin I’d say qualify as he and I were close watchers of Farage’s progress years before a number of Tories added to Reform’s MP tally, or in fact were even heard of.
Lee was in Labour at the time.
Burnham, once MP for Leigh, can claim to be a long marcher, via his ten years out of Westminster having been a Labour Cabinet minister, and has, whilst away from the bubble and any stains that might leave, returned from his Manchesterian peregrinations to re-emerge as the Mayor of Britain. Or that’s how it comes across.
And Kemi Badenoch?
Well I’d argue she is a long marcher. True she didn’t come into Parliament until 2017 – so the ‘14 years’ schtick sticks far less to her – but she has been a member of the party and on the right of it since 2005.
But what when choosing who your top team should be do you think is better, a fellow long marcher or the arrivistes?
The answer, knowing Kemi, is not to be boxed in by the binary and plump for ‘both’.
Telegraph Political Editor Tony Diver’s divinations yesterday set the Bubble – still partly on holiday but thanks to Farage and Burnham busier this silly season than most years – into a bit of a tizzy.
So, you ask, will there be a reshuffle next week of Tory ranks?
Yes. Well, sort of.
Before I get into this, a few words on reshuffle speculation. I could not have written Oliver Dean’s piece about the Young Conservatives because I never was one, and I’m old. Old enough to know, and have seen many many times, that reshuffle speculation is the epitome of a mug’s game in political journalism.
Leaders don’t love them, as, with any limited resource, they usually annoy more people than they make happy. Journalists like them because it’s something to write and talk about. Every hack worth their salt wants to have the inside track, when most leaders keep their cards very close to their chests. Burnham actually proved this with all the speculation about Reeves, Miliband, Cooper, Streeting McFadden for Chancellor and a tiny number of people even mentioned the person who is actually Chancellor John Healey.
In pre-reshuffle mode remember the line about stopped clocks.
The other thing to ask and ask quickly is where is the rumour coming from. I have enough respect for Diver to think he has got hold of something, and his source is sound. However some of it is off beam. And why? Because there are three scenarios as to how reshuffle rumours start.
Two and three are almost constant to some degree. Ignore the white noise.
Also, it didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes, or a Tony Diver for that matter, to see that some changes were inevitable and not really a ‘reshuffle’ in the true sense. These are ‘machinery of government’ changes.
Claire Coutinho has a timetable set by biology not the party and will be going on maternity leave soon.
No, I don’t know when!
What I do know is it would be a pretty solid bet that the person who filled in for her last time will do so again, Andrew Bowie. It’s not like the concept is a surprise to either him, Claire or Kemi. So I’m going to suggest that’s what happens.
Julia Lopez a close ally and Kemi-long-marcher is shadowing a department that doesn’t exist anymore. You’d naturally want to rectify that. Neil O’Brien doesn’t shadow a department it’s true but he’s doing vital work and a position within was created for him because everybody, not least ConservativeHome kept arguin it was a strategic oversight that he wasn’t in already. Does Julia land a different kind of shadow cabinet role or attends shadow cabinet in charge of something Kemi deems needs doing? Maybe, it’s within the rules.
Helen Grant is shadow solicitor general, she is leaving Parliament at the next election, as I outlined on Monday, and is stepping back from her shadow role too. She has recovered from a battle with cancer, we wish her well, she says told members she is well, but that it’s time to step back. There’s a vacancy then for her role.
So far so not very surprising or mysterious, or shocking.
There is certainly within LOTO more acceptance that it would be good to boost some arrivistes to shadow minister of state level, than remove long marchers from the top jobs. Whatever some in the party may say about Priti Patel to ConHome, she too has been on a long march of service and internally I know there is a respect for that. If she went, I think it would be driven by a somewhat reluctant acceptance that she is the optically obvious, if slightly unfair, single scapegoat for the problems of the past on immigration. It would be an optics move and frankly I don’t think she needs to be too worried about next week.
As I say it’s not that kind of reshuffle.
It’s more about the new kids, the true arrivistes from 2024. Lam is already on the inside – and a ConservativeHome columnist – but it’d not be a surprise to see her to move a rung. Possibly room will, as Diver suggests, be made for Harriet Cross, Aphra Brandreth, and I’d add Jack Rankin.
I hope there is, not least it will stop their supporters telling me how much they really should be promoted. I don’t get to pick, folks!
Most of the team that Kemi started out with will stay, including Mel Stride, who increasingly is popular with our readers and on our Shadow Cabinet League Table, has been allowed to hire three new members to his support team, and is now mostly the target of ‘old regime’ attacks from Reform supporters, not Tories. Why will he stay? Well timing seems the real clue. Why, six weeks from a Conference, arguably more important than the last, and with what is expected to be a plethora of policy reveals, would you shuffle the deck that dramatically?
Stride and Badenoch have much they want to say about the economy in October, and with a Budget looming, I’d be surprised if they wanted to rock the boat so dramatically as to pass the baton, as Diver has suggested, to an excellent member of the team who is as it turns out about to be off the pitch to have baby.
So yes, sort of, there are some changes coming in the Tory ranks more for arrivistes than long marchers but it won’t necessarily be, as we used to call them in my reporter days, “a fully loaded, gold-plated, copper-bottomed bastard of a reshuffle”