We are on the home stretch of the party conference season. It’s the turn of the Greens this weekend and Zack Polanski – now a distant 6-1 shot to win the Holborn and St Pancras by-election next week – has given his big speech, promising to keep Andy Burnham’s Labour honest. ‘Vote Green and watch Labour move,’ he cried, citing the government’s shifts on Israel and fossil fuels.
Polanski is now the one in the hotseat with the regional broadcast political editors. James Heale is down in Brighton keeping an eye on things and rounds up the best of it here.
The Greens, somewhat bizarrely, seem to have briefed that if they can turn 30 per cent of the 2024 Labour vote in the by-election, they would then be just four points behind. ‘This is on a knife edge,’ a source says. If the bookies are to be believed, it must be a very wide knife.
The Greens aren’t the only ones speaking without fully digesting the implications of their words. After Burnham sought to downplay the eight-year probe which found wrongdoing on a gargantuan scale by Manchester City, Downing Street was forced to issue a clarification.
Then, earlier today, came the news that the PM has appointed the ubiquitous Louise Casey to oversee efforts to find money to pay for his grand social care plans. It turns out that tweaking the triple lock on pensions will only raise £5 billion a year by the end of the next parliament and there is a sizeable black hole in the plans. This is a bit of a humiliation for John Healey, the Chancellor, who is having his homework marked by the battling baroness. Perhaps No. 10 thought the Treasury would use the large sums involved to kibosh his big plan.
All of this will boost confidence among the Tories, who head to Birmingham this weekend, that there is space opening up for a common sense party which thinks through its plans. The challenge for Kemi Badenoch is that this is not how voters think of the Conservative party.
As she showed in her interview with me earlier this week, Badenoch is in a bullish mood and is not frightened of the ‘nasty party’ sobriquet which used to be tossed around. She unveiled plans to ban under-25s from slipping straight from education onto a life on benefits and proposed a ‘Ready to Work’ scheme to get them prepared for the workplace. I understand the morning papers will have details of Tory plans for an extensive new prison-building programme.
Some Tories I spoke to this week were a little concerned that, with Burnham fluttering his eyelashes at the voters, being gobby and strident may be a turnoff. They will be heartened by a focus group conducted last night by More in Common with voters in Lincolnshire – a key Tory-Reform battleground. Most were current and former Conservative voters. Many liked Badenoch personally, but would not vote Conservative in an election tomorrow.
They were mostly impressed by Badenoch and her willingness to get stuck in. Sean, who works in engineering, said: ‘She’s like a female version of Boris Johnson, except that she’s an absolutely impeccable speaker. I find when she talks, she’s very powerful.’ Peter, who works in adult education, said: ‘She’s an amazing public speaker. She comes across really well… I certainly don’t dislike her… I believe in her conviction.’
Peter warned that ‘argument for its own sake’ could be ‘an own goal’. Rob, an operations manager, said: ‘If Labour said the sky is blue, Kemi will say, no, it’s not, it’s green. She’s argumentative for the sake of being argumentative.’
But she was defended by Gary, a self-employed painter and decorator: ‘The point of opposition is to be the opposite. They ain’t going to get anywhere by just agreeing with everybody.’ Fiona, who is not working, agreed: ‘If you want to make changes and difficult changes, you are going to upset people. But if you explain the changes well and your thought process behind it, then I think people will go with it. It could be that you will ruffle some feathers, but I think that actually that’s what we need, because something’s got to change now.’
The group was sceptical about Burnham. Gary was typical: ‘I think he’s talking sense, but, to be honest, I don’t know whether he can actually achieve the things he’s asking for, because most of the stuff he’s talking about is for long-term.’ Sean said: ‘Andy Burnham is Keir Starmer in a crew neck T-shirt.’
They made clear that there is a gap in the market for a party which uses tax breaks for small businesses to kick start growth. Joanne, a hospice volunteer co-ordinator, said: ‘People [who] want to get on, that work hard, whether that’s businesses, business owners, employees, at the moment they feel like there’s nobody in their corner.’
Gary, who runs a small business, added: ‘Andy Burnham is old-time Labour. He’s very socialist, and I think he’ll do a lot of things for people who work for the system… But he don’t do anything for self-employed people. He don’t do nothing for small businesses. He don’t do anything for the farmers. This is where Kemi needs to come in and say she’s going to get rid of some of these stupid taxes.’
By the end of next week, we’ll know if it’s an opportunity she has grabbed.
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