Owen Matthews describes himself as a ‘Proper’ Conservative. He’s a Solicitor, Chartered Accountant and Insurance Professional, He’s also Treasurer of Queen’s Park & Maida Vale Conservatives.
Warren Buffett famously observed that “it takes twenty years to build a reputation and just five minutes to ruin it”.
In the City we treat that as more than a folksy aphorism, dictum meum pactum (my word is my bond) is literally the motto of the London Stock Exchange after all. As a former City solicitor, banker and insurance professional I have never felt the need to hide my politics. In the regulated world of financial services, you quickly learn that reputation is hard earned and easily spent. Clients, compliance officers and counterparties all notice how you conduct yourself and who you associate with. One wonders how many of Reform’s more enthusiastic supporters could say the same without stifling a nervous laugh. Meanwhile, the Conservatives, bruised, diminished and still deeply unpopular in large parts of the country, are quietly discovering that serious people are lining up to stand for them.
Kemi Badenoch’s people report more than two thousand applications for the candidates’ list.
They are running a rigorous process designed to weed out the time-wasters, the wets and the careerists who had scant regard to party unity when it came to pushing their own agendas and treated the last government as a retirement home with expenses. The party is, for once, trying to look like a government-in-waiting rather than a therapy group for the recently defeated. Reform, by contrast, continues to field candidates who would struggle to pass the basic due-diligence checks required to open a children’s savings account. Vetting failures, social-media scandals and the occasional wild conspiracy theorist are not simply bugs in the system – they are the system.
The reputational risk is not abstract, financial and other scandals keep attaching themselves to Reform with the persistence of limpets clinging to the side of a rock. Large, undeclared gifts, suspicious-activity reports, police inquiries into the provenance of donations, the tangled affairs of long-time associates: the details change, the pattern does not. In the City this sort of endemic risk is noticed and priced accordingly. In politics Reform simply doubles down and pretends the problem is media hostility. Meanwhile serious people take note.
It is not only those in the Square Mile who notice. Reform still lacks a shadow health secretary, a credible defence spokesman, or a shadow foreign secretary – though given their recently unveiled much hyped ‘Operation Fortress’ policy those last two absences probably elicit little surprise. Richard Tice has said that Farage himself is actually the party’s defence spokesman. One man, wearing many hats: the political equivalent of the founder acting as chief cook, bottle washer and night watchman.
Of course, Farage is at pains to point out that Reform is no longer the ‘one-man band’ his critics once mocked.
The party has acquired defectors, donors and a handful of faces who can fill a GB News studio. Yet like it or not, its success or failure still rests heavily on his remaining at the helm. In the City we’d label this key-man risk: too much of the organisation’s prospects concentrated on one individual’s continued presence and performance. While he has just won his Clacton by-election convincingly, as was expected once the main parties refused to entertain his performative hissy-fit, it changes nothing about his party’s underlying problems. The financial inquiries, the undeclared gifts and suspicious activity reports all remain. Farage may find himself fighting another contest sooner than he would like. Moreover, lingering doubts about whether he will even be at the helm by the time a general election is called, fuelled by his advancing years, twenty-a-day habit and fondness for Claret – only deepen the uncertainty. High-calibre applicants – people with careers, mortgages, professional reputations and ultimately, something to lose – do not queue to board a vessel whose captain may not still be on the bridge when the ship leaves port.
Robert Jenrick likes to sneer that the Tories have become the “party of Belgravia”. It is a neat put-down, but it is also largely nonsense.
Consider the recent local election results in London. The Conservatives returned more than four hundred councillors across the capital while Reform managed seventy-nine and the consolation prize of Havering. The party of Belgravia, it turns out, still has broader residual appeal than the party of the perpetual grievance. Yet, amongst the same polite society Jenrick invokes when he paints us as captive to the SW1 set it is true to say there is a lingering sense that Reform are not PLU (People Like Us), or, if one prefers the older formulation, NQOCD (Not Quite Our Class Dear). That is not wholly snobbery, though of course snobbery plays a part. It is simply recognition that institutions matter and parties which treat competence and financial probity as optional extras eventually discover that the better candidates have decided to go elsewhere.
None of this is an argument for complacency.
The Conservatives still have a mountain to climb and a long list of failures to live down. But the candidate numbers, the London results and the simple professional calculus of reputational risk all point the same way. Whilst the Conservatives are still capable of attracting people who actually have run things, Reform is still struggling to attract people who would not require a PR crisis-management team on speed dial the moment they were elected.
In the City we are paid to notice these distinctions. Politics, for once, might usefully do the same.
Owen Matthews describes himself as a ‘Proper’ Conservative. He’s a Solicitor, Chartered Accountant and Insurance Professional, He’s also Treasurer of Queen’s Park & Maida Vale Conservatives.
Warren Buffett famously observed that “it takes twenty years to build a reputation and just five minutes to ruin it”.
In the City we treat that as more than a folksy aphorism, dictum meum pactum (my word is my bond) is literally the motto of the London Stock Exchange after all. As a former City solicitor, banker and insurance professional I have never felt the need to hide my politics. In the regulated world of financial services, you quickly learn that reputation is hard earned and easily spent. Clients, compliance officers and counterparties all notice how you conduct yourself and who you associate with. One wonders how many of Reform’s more enthusiastic supporters could say the same without stifling a nervous laugh. Meanwhile, the Conservatives, bruised, diminished and still deeply unpopular in large parts of the country, are quietly discovering that serious people are lining up to stand for them.
Kemi Badenoch’s people report more than two thousand applications for the candidates’ list.
They are running a rigorous process designed to weed out the time-wasters, the wets and the careerists who had scant regard to party unity when it came to pushing their own agendas and treated the last government as a retirement home with expenses. The party is, for once, trying to look like a government-in-waiting rather than a therapy group for the recently defeated. Reform, by contrast, continues to field candidates who would struggle to pass the basic due-diligence checks required to open a children’s savings account. Vetting failures, social-media scandals and the occasional wild conspiracy theorist are not simply bugs in the system – they are the system.
The reputational risk is not abstract, financial and other scandals keep attaching themselves to Reform with the persistence of limpets clinging to the side of a rock. Large, undeclared gifts, suspicious-activity reports, police inquiries into the provenance of donations, the tangled affairs of long-time associates: the details change, the pattern does not. In the City this sort of endemic risk is noticed and priced accordingly. In politics Reform simply doubles down and pretends the problem is media hostility. Meanwhile serious people take note.
It is not only those in the Square Mile who notice. Reform still lacks a shadow health secretary, a credible defence spokesman, or a shadow foreign secretary – though given their recently unveiled much hyped ‘Operation Fortress’ policy those last two absences probably elicit little surprise. Richard Tice has said that Farage himself is actually the party’s defence spokesman. One man, wearing many hats: the political equivalent of the founder acting as chief cook, bottle washer and night watchman.
Of course, Farage is at pains to point out that Reform is no longer the ‘one-man band’ his critics once mocked.
The party has acquired defectors, donors and a handful of faces who can fill a GB News studio. Yet like it or not, its success or failure still rests heavily on his remaining at the helm. In the City we’d label this key-man risk: too much of the organisation’s prospects concentrated on one individual’s continued presence and performance. While he has just won his Clacton by-election convincingly, as was expected once the main parties refused to entertain his performative hissy-fit, it changes nothing about his party’s underlying problems. The financial inquiries, the undeclared gifts and suspicious activity reports all remain. Farage may find himself fighting another contest sooner than he would like. Moreover, lingering doubts about whether he will even be at the helm by the time a general election is called, fuelled by his advancing years, twenty-a-day habit and fondness for Claret – only deepen the uncertainty. High-calibre applicants – people with careers, mortgages, professional reputations and ultimately, something to lose – do not queue to board a vessel whose captain may not still be on the bridge when the ship leaves port.
Robert Jenrick likes to sneer that the Tories have become the “party of Belgravia”. It is a neat put-down, but it is also largely nonsense.
Consider the recent local election results in London. The Conservatives returned more than four hundred councillors across the capital while Reform managed seventy-nine and the consolation prize of Havering. The party of Belgravia, it turns out, still has broader residual appeal than the party of the perpetual grievance. Yet, amongst the same polite society Jenrick invokes when he paints us as captive to the SW1 set it is true to say there is a lingering sense that Reform are not PLU (People Like Us), or, if one prefers the older formulation, NQOCD (Not Quite Our Class Dear). That is not wholly snobbery, though of course snobbery plays a part. It is simply recognition that institutions matter and parties which treat competence and financial probity as optional extras eventually discover that the better candidates have decided to go elsewhere.
None of this is an argument for complacency.
The Conservatives still have a mountain to climb and a long list of failures to live down. But the candidate numbers, the London results and the simple professional calculus of reputational risk all point the same way. Whilst the Conservatives are still capable of attracting people who actually have run things, Reform is still struggling to attract people who would not require a PR crisis-management team on speed dial the moment they were elected.
In the City we are paid to notice these distinctions. Politics, for once, might usefully do the same.