The current political consensus appears to be that the next election is Reform’s to lose. According to one veteran Tory strategist the Tories are approaching an “Extinction Level Event”.
Political commentators are lining up to write off any hope of a Conservative revival, and it’s easy to see why. The Conservative brand is shot to pieces. The party has become the Ratners of British politics thanks to the utter shambles and failures of the last four Conservative governments under May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak. Forget the fact that they allowed Labour to regain power, and the disasters of the Corbyn years, a more dangerous consequence has been the revival of near moribund Liberal Democrats and the rise in popularity of Reform UK.
Although the Tories won 43 more seats in 1997 than they did in 2024, and no one was predicting the total demise of the party, the current Conservative leadership is making many of the mistakes William Hague did, mainly by moving both policy and rhetoric to the right. The old maxim that elections are won from the centre remains as true today as it ever was. It was only when David Cameron took over in 2005 that a lightbulb appeared to go on, and the party made an effort to appeal to those voters who had drifted off to New Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
Today I asked a dozen political contacts to guess how many of the 122 Conservative held seats in 2024 had Reform UK in second place. Ask yourself the same question now. Pause. Ready for the answer? Ten of my 12 friends answered between 30 and 50. The actual answer is nine. In 108 seats either Labour or the Liberal Democrats came second.
In 64 of the 72 Liberal Democrats seats the Conservatives came second.
Yes, the Conservatives do need a strategy to fight Reform, but they also need to attract back the swathes of voters who defected to the LibDems in 2024. That much is obvious. You can’t out Farage Farage, but you can develop policies which can be attractive to a more centrist type of voter. However, committing to leaving the European Convention on Human Rights is not one of them. That is highly likely to happen at the Tory conference.
While the Conservatives currently obsess about which of their MPs are most likely to follow Danny Kruger in defecting to Reform, they would be well advised to worry equally as much about the number of MPs and party members who might head towards the Lib Dems.
Shame on the BBC
If you purport to be a public service broadcaster, then surely one of things you must commit to do is to properly fund your news and current affairs department. And with a budget of nearly £6 billion, that ought to be possible for the BBC. Instead, BBC politics and current affairs is suffering death by a thousand cuts. Instead of cutting in the area of entertainment, each year the BBC cuts back its political shows. Where are the political documentaries that Michael Cockerell used to make, for example? Over the last few years Hard Talk has been disappeared, along with Straight Talk. This Week, a very cheap show to make and with a big younger audience went the same way. Politics Live was cut to four days a week and reduced to 45 minutes rather than an hour. Newsnight has been ripped apart and is now a cheap to make panel show and a shadow of its former self.
This year the BBC has announced that it is abandoning its coverage of the party conferences. Not a single programme will be broadcast from any of them – not Politics Live, not Newsnight. Nada. Yes, there will be a smattering of political reporters there, sniffing out the mood and the odd story, but nothing more. There was a time when the entire proceedings were broadcast live with a bespoke BBC2 evening show to round up the day. Admittedly, this was an expensive operation, but if you pride yourselves in being the country’s primary source of political news and coverage, to reduce that to close to zero is unforgivable. So it’s now left to the commercial sector to provide the coverage instead. Unlike the BBC, I will be broadcasting my LBC evening show from both the main conferences. It seems the mantle of public service broadcasting is slowly but surely being transferred to the private sector. The BBC should hang its head in shame.
Farewell to John Stapleton
There very few journalists and broadcasters who are universally liked and respected, with no one having a bad word to say about them. John Stapleton was one of them. It was because he was transparently real. There was no side to John and he wore his heart on his sleeve. I worked with him for five years at LBC, where he was known among the producers as “Honest John”. He had become a legend of breakfast TV over the years and was a calm and reassuring face at times of national crisis. He was a unifier, not a divider, and how many people can one say that of in our current media scene?