No one quite yet knows what Andy Burnham will be like as Prime Minister. But a preview of the coming Tory critique is offered by Neil O’Brien, the man tasked with co-ordinating the Conservative Party’s policy offering. ‘He’s tended to go with the soft left all the time, WASPI women, always the sort of easy answers’, he says. ‘I just don’t see any fundamental reconsideration of the big choices that got us into this mess.’ Burnham might be ‘more deft’ than his predecessor – but there is little sign he is willing to countenance ‘some big break with Starmerism’ on Britain’s economic woes.
An Opposition criticising the government is nothing new. O’Brien, though, is refreshingly willing to hold his own party to account. Asked for the biggest mistake of the last Tory administration, he says instantly: ‘The level of immigration. I’m completely seared by it… the overall level of it was just radically too high.’ He admits that ‘lots of other small things’ went wrong ‘along the way’. He praises areas like deficit reduction and education where the Tories had a plan between 2010 to 2024 but highlights health as an area where it did not. ‘We just didn’t go in the right direction’, he says. ‘It’s not the fault of any one individual person, but collectively it’s a failure and we need to learn the lesson.’
Unlike many of his colleagues, the Leicestershire MP has some experience of what it was like to be involved in Opposition policy making before. As the-then director of Policy Exchange, he recalls padding the corridors of Norman Shaw North in the late 2000s as the Cameroons prepared for government. There is still an ‘active sort of centre right think tank scene in the UK’, he says, ‘all of Onward, CPS, CSJ, Policy Exchange, all still pumping out very, very good things.’ He suggests that now is a time to ‘think big – you sort have got to think big because things are pretty screwed.’
O’Brien is the man entrusted by Kemi Badenoch to draw up the roadmap to the party and country’s recovery. He is one of a series of Tory frontbenchers, now in their late forties and fifties, who never reached the cabinet but is now keen to make up for the past. ‘When you read the memoirs of the people involved in the Thatcher years, you see how the failure of the Heath government led on to the success of the Thatcher one: the things that caused them to lose in ‘70 to ‘74. They were all seared by that experience and determined to do things very differently and learn the lessons.’
Unlike Thatcher, Badenoch has no monopoly on the right, with Reform UK posing an existential threat to her party. O’Brien argues that experience in office is a benefit, not a burden, in convincing the country that the Conservatives are better placed to reverse British decline. ‘Being a minister is a total practice game, you do learn along the way.’ He warns that some on the right are being too naïve about what office entails. ‘Unless you’ve really been in there, it’s easy to believe all kinds of easy beliefs about what the nature of the problem is and how easy it is to fix.’
He argues that the Conservative Party is now a fundamentally different beast to that which governed until July 2024. ‘This is not just new management’, he says. ‘But a radically different party and doing things very, very differently.’ O’Brien’s office is just by Badenoch’s: he pops in to see her and other shadow cabinet colleagues regularly throughout the week. He praises her as ‘a real first principles person. She likes to come back, in a way that’s quite challenging to, “What is the principle? What is the underlying story?”’ This, he believes, helps the party from getting ‘lost in all the detail of policy.’
‘This is not just new management’, he says. ‘But a radically different party and doing things very, very differently.’
Reform, he argues, lacks the experience, ideological rigour and the necessary credible personnel to succeed. He cites the Labour candidate who stood against him in 2019, a ‘hardcore Corbynista’ who ‘opened the bidding at Market Harborough Farmers’ hustings with the immortal words “Comrades”. She is now Reform’s leader on Wolverhampton Council – I mean talk about an intellectual journey.’ O’Brien argues that ‘the fact that it is a populist party’ means ‘you attract a different type of person to a conservative party ‘. Burnham’s arrival offers the opportunity for politics to be reset to a more ‘kind of classic left-right economic fight’ which will challenge Reform ‘because they’ve faced in a lot of different directions.’
Some worry that the Tories are becoming too narrow a party: during our interview Lord Barwell loses the Conservative whip. The Thatcher manifesto of 1979 was written by Chris Patten: might there not be a need to retain competing intellectual traditions? ‘There’s room for debate and there’s room for disagreement’, says O’Brien. ‘However, you’ve got to be clear, particularly given what happened before, you’ve got to be clear about what we absolutely will deliver.’ The churn of politics means that ‘the public need to have to be able to really bite down on something and know that it’s really solid and that you really are going to do what you say.’ The cost of energy and stopping the boats are both fundamental, says O’Brien. ‘We do need to be super clear that we’re doing it, right? If you don’t want to be part of it, then don’t be part of it. But that is what we’re doing’.
The irony is that O’Brien did not vote for Badenoch in 2024, preferring, instead, Robert Jenrick. Asked how he feels about the Newark MP’s sacking from the Tory party, O’Brien gives one of his shorter answers. ‘Obviously, I thought it was sad that he left. Obviously, it’s a real shame, but I’m not sure what more there is to add to that really. Obviously, you don’t want any of these people to leave and go off and do their own thing but it is what it is.’ He recounts phoning Badenoch up during the summer of 2024 and telling her that he would be backing her rival because of a single issue: the need for Britain to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
O’Brien’s track record suggests he is often a harbinger of Tory thinking. Back in 2024, just a third of party members wanted to leave the ECHR; now it is party policy. All sitting MPs and future candidates must commit to that if they wish to stand next time. O’Brien admits to being pleasantly surprised at how the party has stuck together over the issue: ‘Everyone said that there would be this massive bust-up.’ He praises the work done by Lord Wolfson, the Shadow Attorney General, in his 185-page report on the problems caused by the ECHR. ‘I was already in favour of leaving. And then you read the Wolfson Report and you’re radicalised, like, “Oh, we can we leave it tomorrow?”’
‘We have certainly been thinking about, you know, what would we do if there was a general election tomorrow’, he says.
O’Brien has been in post as Shadow Minister for Policy Renewal for twelve months now, working with Victoria Hewson in Badenoch’s office to perform a sense-check on policies. He functions as a kind of middle ground between the instant reaction of Opposition and the ‘mega long term archaeological stuff.’ ‘We have certainly been thinking about, you know, what would we do if there was a general election tomorrow’, he says. ‘What if Andy Burnham walks into No. 10, calls an election and how would how would we get things together. We’re certainly doing that.’
As a former adviser to George Osborne, he was heavily involved in the former Chancellor’s Northern Powerhouse project. If Burnham’s mission for regional government is going to succeed, O’Brien warns that private sector buy-in is essential. ‘The things that make any difference are the things when you get big private sector anchor industries to move in… being more aggressive about getting those investments in, I think is a better bet than moving around any function of government.’ He points to both the tax environment and public sector productivity, issues on which Burnham has been less vocal. ‘My worry is it’s all like micro things like that [No. 10 in the North] whereas macro policy is pushing in the other direction.’
Badenoch leads the smallest Opposition in modern history. The task of scrutinising Labour is made harder, O’Brien says, by the government’s unwillingness to provide proper answers in parliamentary questions. ‘They’re just taking the piss on a massive scale.’ To combat this information asymmetry, he is using new techniques to buttress traditional forms of scrutiny. ‘For the purposes of research, I am a heavy Claude addict. For any kind of data analysis, it’s just fantastic… That is a genuinely useful development for us as an Opposition that helps even the playing field a little bit.’
The last 18 months have difficult for the Conservatives but O’Brien confesses to a certain sense of schadenfreude at watching Labour’s hubris unfold. He is proud of the party’s work securing U-turns on the Schools Bill and family farms’ tax. ‘There’s been lots of moments of satisfaction watching them having to change course on all these things’. Having held Labour to account, the challenge is now to convince the country that the Conservative Party is fit and ready to lead it once again. O’Brien, as one of its leading policy brains, is relishing the chance to play his part.
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