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Good morning from William Cash, the Mace Editor-in-chief
Labour roasted as Britain sizzles
Last night I attended the Conservative Summer Party – this year known as the “British Heroes” dinner at the Raffles London at The OWO in Whitehall – as a guest. It will come as little surprise that, following Kemi Badenoch’s kneecapping of the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson as a “spiteful class warrior” at PMQs, her speech writers were on zinging form at the dinner with acid jokes at both Labour and Reform’s expense.
Dressed up as tribal British Queen Boudicca, wearing a shimmering bronze dress, Kemi let rip in front of several hundred guests, saying that the “Conservatives were winning again – fighting for common sense”. She opened by saying “Who would have thought a year ago, when we were last together, that Starmer would be out of a job” and that her own popularity rating would be at a record high. She joked that maybe some of the night’s donor proceedings should go to Stamer’s retirement fund as he wasn’t the sort of ex-PM likely to be in demand on the global speaker circuit.
A recent YouGov poll found that 29% of Britons had a positive opinion of the Conservative leader, part of a “steady trend” in her favourability rankings. This is largely as a result of some feisty performances at PMQs – she is now being helped, so I hear, by David Cameron, probably the best PM dispatch box performer in the last 20 years - and popular policy announcements such as the abolition of stamp duty, family farm tax and VAT on independent schools.
Guests arrived to be greeted by Pimms, champagne and actors dressed up as British heroes from history books: Churchill, Wellington, Florence Nightingale, the Beetles, and even Sherlock Holmes (dressed in full tweed despite the 36% degrees heat).
It was a very different vibe from last year’s Tory summer party, held in the Science Museum, which felt like a throwback to the sort of black-and-white “ball” fundraisers of 15 years ago where half the auction lots were donated by David Ross, guests wore dinner jackets, and Sotheby’s Harry Dalmeny did the auction with donors getting into a bidding war to play tennis with David Cameron.
Ok, to be fair, being the Conservative party perhaps not that much had changed. Cameron auctioned himself off – won for £35k by leading UK property developer Kamal Pankhania (also a senior Treasurer of the Conservative party and a member of The Mace Advisory Board) for a round of golf with Lord Fink at The Grove course in Hertfordshire. Philanthropist and businessman David Ross, who underwrote the evening as sponsor, only donated one property as an auction lot this year, with a week at Full Moon Villa in Mustique going for £25,000 to a leading British financier and party donor who nearly ended up in a bidding war with an invited guest on his own table.
Kemi’s peaking blinders
The party mood was much more confident than a year ago when it looked like many of the usual big beast donors had shut themselves in their caves and were on the fence. The dozens of silent auction lots reflected a new buzz. My favourite was a “Cocktail Tour of Soho” with Richard Holden MP. Heaven knows how that will end up. Kemi herself was auctioned off to dinner with her husband Hamish – with the winning bid being for £95,000. A date in the Bamford box at the Royal Albert Hall with Sir James Cleverly made a very respectable £30k.
This year’s summer party had a sleek attack mode. Kemi laid into Starmer, Burnham and Farage, saying of the latter’s candidate in the Makerfield by-election: “If Robert Kenyon was their party’s top candidate, I’d hate to know what their 650th is like”.
The Tories’ dismal performance of just 2% was not mentioned although much praise was heaped on Douglas Lumsden, winner of the South Aberdeen by-election who made a cameo speech at the end to a standing ovation.
But it’s worth pausing here, 10 years after the Brexit vote, to take a look at the political landscape. Following Makerfield, there’s been plenty of Nigel-battering in the press with pundits, such as Farage biographer Michael Crick, rehearsing the familiar lines that Farage falls out with people, that he’s losing out to Kemi in the polls, that Restore are stealing their votes, that he’s running out of energy and that Reform’s top spokespeople – notably Robert Jenrick and Zia Yusef – are hardly best buddies.
All this against a media avalanche of articles, a decade after Brexit, saying that leaving the EU – Farage’s 25-year personal mission – hasn’t exactly worked out. Oh, and Britain’s likely new PM, Andy Burnham, has previously made no secret of his desire to rejoin the EU.
I have known Farage for over ten years. We’ve seen all this before. Having witnessed him in his many roles over the last decade, from celebrity jungle survivor to political exile to leading the last 300 national polls, I would caution against underestimating Farage.
Never write off Nigel
Almost exactly ten years ago, on 4 July 2016, when Farage resigned from UKIP, I wrote a piece for the Spectator saying that he would be remembered by history and cautioned about thinking his career was really over. A week may be a long time in Westminster but winning in politics is about playing the long game. Makerfield will soon be forgotten. Farage is still way ahead nationally as the anti-establishment party and leading the polls. Restore did not tear into Reform’s right flank as badly as anybody, not least Rupert Lowe, were bragging they would.
Only two weeks ago, national newspaper pundits were predicting that Restore might hit double digits in Makerfield and so increase the heat on both Nigel and Kemi, suggesting they would be forced to start their centre-right romance together to see off an oddball left-wing coalition.
Well, Kemi Badenoch made it very clear in her speech last night at the Raffles hotel that any talk of an electoral pact with Reform is the very last thing on her mind. So much so that she didn’t even mention it. The guests paying £1,000 to be there were practically thumping the table to spur on her attack narrative. So that narrative is over.
Back to battle
The truth is we are moving back towards the old battle lines, not the six-party Hydra that was being predicted. What’s interesting about the recent hype about Restore is that I hear Farage is not too bothered by the column inches because he thinks the more they get written about, the more people will realise they are beyond the pale. Their extreme views and neo-Nazi links make Reform now look almost mainstream.
Just look at the numbers and recent polling. Two days before Makerfield, Restore’s vote – nationally – was only 3%, according to the 16 June YouGov poll Westminster voting intention figures.
This latest YouGov voting intention poll for The Times and Sky News showed Reform UK leading on 25%, five points ahead of any other party. But according to PollCheck a few days later, Reform is polling slightly better and still leads Labour at 27% to their 19.1% with the Conservative’s a fraction ahead at 19.4%, the Greens at 13% and Lib Dems at 12.3%. Others, including Restore, are at 4.6%.
That is still a very good showing for Reform despite the Makerfield setback. Two years ago, before the general election, Reform had no MPs, no councillors and no money. Now it has eight MPs, 24 outright council majorities, 2,356 councillors and millions in the bank and –according to PollCheck, Reform UK has led across 300 consecutive polls.
So, Reform is still way ahead despite Kemi’s barbs last night. My view is that Farage will use the summer recess as a chance to regroup and reset. He isn’t somebody who likes to go on holiday and while other party leaders are in Norfolk or Ibiza, he will be doing what he does best: soft campaigning out of his beach house in Kent or Sussex. Anywhere, to be honest, other than Westminster where he spends little time.
Smooth operator
Yes, there have been a few setbacks and bumps in the last month or so. But that’s politics. The key to Farage’s success, I’d argue, is that he knows how to create an effective anti-establishment party that operates outside of parliament and uses his party’s swanky Millbank Towers power base as his own political HQ. Combined with the slick, American campaign-style press conferences that he stages across the country on a weekly basis, you have the blueprint for a thriving party that isn’t going to be easily rattled.
Reform’s MPs have crappy offices in parliament – normal for defectors whose offices are re-allocated – but they don’t use parliament because Farage has rewritten the playbook by making his political movement a non-Commons-based political force.
As for Restore, Rupert Lowe bragged about getting 20% of the vote but ended up with just 3,000 votes in Makerfield. That’s the capacity of the Baku Tennis Academy’s Central Court, in Azerbaijan. Hardly a political earthquake to worry about.
Unlucky numbers
If you look at the Downing Street honours board, Sir Keir Starmer is currently Britain’s 43rd-longest serving prime minister. As Mark Lefty, head of public affairs at Sodali & Co, notes in his insightful piece for us this week, “If a brave enough soul challenges Andy Burnham to become the next Labour leader, Sir Keir could still leapfrog the Earl of Aberdeen – a mid-19th-century, landowning Peelite – into 42nd place.”
Assuming a coronation or the very possible failure of another candidate to get the support of the 81 MPs needed to stand, however, it’s likely Starmer will stay 43rd. He will have been in Downing Street for just two years and a few days in change. That’s one place and a few months ahead of Sir Anthony Eden, whose premiership was considered extremely short when he quit on grounds of ill health in 1957, shortly after the Suez Crisis.
Lefty points out that while we’ve only had 58 prime ministers, five of the past six rank well outside the top 30 for length of time in office. Even David Cameron, who survived just over six years, doesn’t make the UK top 20.
A clear pattern, it seems, now cannot be ignored by either politicians plotting their routes to the top or, as Lefty puts it, “a public affairs industry that relies on a degree of stability to co-ordinate campaigns”.
No rules
The situation has been caused by a quirk that every politics graduate has at some point pondered – the UK’s unwritten constitution. The great disruptors of the past 15 years – Alex Salmond, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson – understood that there are no real rules. Political gravity, accepting conventions and the inevitability of quitting under pressure are concepts rather than necessities.
The rules surrounding when a leader should stay or go have no written rules. Just as general election victories no longer protect PMs, “failures to secure cross-factional support does not automatically render leaders vulnerable,” notes Lefty.
The lack of a written constitution and separation between executive and legislature always meant there was a risk that conventions would one day be ignored. The starkest contrast to today, notes Lefty, is Sir John Major’s premiership in the 1990s. The Brixton boy unexpectedly won the 1992 general election, but with nothing like Sir Keir’s mega-majority. Yet Sir John survived constant internal criticism during a period of Conservative civil war. He soldiered on to face Tony Blair in 1997, essentially staying in post by arguing that he had a mandate from the British people. Sir Keir is about to hand the keys to Number 10 to a man who was not even an MP a week ago.
Short shelf life
“Politics has changed; it was ever thus,” writes Lefty. He concludes that the “real problem facing public affairs and government relations professionals is the diminishing time to educate and persuade”. The advisers and political camps that influence ministers and oversee policy enjoy but fleeting dominance. Most political campaigns take time and arguments that had been won will need to be made over.
Burham’s campaign team, operating largely out of his garden in the village of Golborne, Greater Manchester, should be congratulated for what they have achieved in propelling Burnham forward towards a likely new home in Downing Street. But as Lefty notes, “there is no guarantee that our 59th prime minister will last much longer in office than his immediate predecessors”.
Time wasting at No 10
The Mace’s Lucy Carrier-Pilkington has been looking at how British business has been raising the alarm over the impact of uncertainty in Westminster on corporations, economic efficiency and government operations.
Alex Depledge, a serial entrepreneur who was appointed by Chancellor Rachel Reeves as her adviser on entrepreneurs, has warned that the machinery of government has already been “frozen for six weeks”. She expressed that, due to the changeover, Whitehall would remain stalled for many months to come. Depledge said: “We are going to lose six months, at best, probably a year once you start to brief the new ministers coming in. It is just a colossal waste of energy. The British people deserve better.”
The adviser made these comments the day after Sir Keir Starmer resigned as prime minister. Despite the in-party popularity of Andy Burnham, these comments are part of a new wave of criticism about the impact of the Downing Street revolving door on the government’s ability to make progress on vital issues. Key initiatives that are already likely to be delayed until the next prime minister is appointed include a crucial EU summit that Starmer said would be an important step in resetting UK and EU relations.
Depledge expressed concerns about how this will impact the ability of those in Whitehall to do their jobs. She said: “It is about carving out what we can get done within the parameters in which we are allowed to operate.
“There is some stuff we can’t do any more, but there are other things you can.
“My biggest fear is that I have to spend another year trying to get new ministers and new people to understand the burning platform and the need to move at speed.”
New ministers, new problems
The introduction of new ministers would likely lead to significant disruption across government, including changes among secretaries of state, junior ministers, special advisers and private office staff. While many civil servants would remain in post, there would likely be considerable changes in ministerial teams and political appointments, requiring time and resources to recruit and establish new working arrangements.
Furthermore, if Burnham and his cabinet were to introduce a different strategic direction for government, some of the work undertaken under Starmer’s administration could be deprioritised, revised or abandoned. The creation of new government departments would also require substantial administrative capacity, staffing and financial resources, potentially slowing the implementation of existing priorities.
Although thought very unlikely, a snap general election could be bad news for the Civil Service, as Whitehall will enter purdah which is known as a “pre-election period of sensitivity”. This means that, until the outcome of the election is known, no new policy can be announced. While previously agreed policies can proceed, it puts a halt to innovation and policymaking within the civil service.
All change – again
Whitehall has already been strained by repeated ministerial turnover during Labour’s time in government. Before Starmer’s resignation, 20 ministers had stepped down, with the departures of John Healey and Al Carns from defence roles representing particularly disruptive changes. Each resignation triggers a period of adjustment within departments, as officials must brief incoming ministers and adapt to their revised priorities. Prolonged political instability would risk exacerbating these inefficiencies, diverting resources away from policy deliver and slowing government decision-making.
The next impending changeover in government, which is likely to be substantial due to Burnham’s repeated promises of change, means that Whitehall is going to go through another substantial restructuring. The wheels of change will take time to turn. However, with Labour already nearly halfway through its term, it remains unclear whether the results will be felt before the next election.
The Advocate
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From the Archive
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Love or hate the current American administration, at least they have a consistent electoral cycle where the choice of the electorate is upheld, writes Lucy Carrier-Pilkington. Read more >
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