On 7 May there will be no competition. Reform is predicted to pull off sweeping victories in councils across the country, while the Tories are preparing to shoulder heavy losses. But at the Emmanuel Centre on Wednesday evening, Spectator readers were treated to a fight for the intellectual ground on the right. Representing the teal team, Danny Kruger, Reform MP for Wiltshire tasked with preparing the party for government, and Matt Goodwin, Reform’s candidate in Gorton and Denton, faced off against Claire Coutinho, shadow Secretary for Energy and Net Zero and Minister for Equalities, and Nick Timothy, shadow Secretary of State for Justice and shadow Lord Chancellor, on the Conservative side. The Spectator’s assistant editor, Isabel Hardman, refereed.
Claire Coutinho was ready to accept that Reform’s position on immigration might seem stronger
Proceedings were surprisingly amicable. Just days after Reform pledged to hold an inquiry into the ‘Boriswave’, all four speakers maintained that they are close friends. Indeed, Kruger, who defected from the Conservatives in September last year, joked that the event, which saw him debating former colleagues, was ‘a very painful experience’.
So what do they disagree on? The Conservatives were ready to concede that they do not have an unblemished record. Nick Timothy opened his remarks with the promise that he was not ‘here to say that the Conservatives got everything right’. He singled out Liz Truss’s budget, Boris Johnson’s immigration strategy and his former employer Theresa May’s net zero policy as key mistakes made by his party.
Indeed, his criticisms of Reform were relatively tentative. He called out Reform MPs for failing to turn up to important votes and noted that Nigel Farage has said that ‘it is literally impossible’ to deport huge numbers of people.
Pragmatics dominated the Conservative case. Claire Coutinho was ready to accept that Reform’s position on immigration might seem stronger, but pointed out that for all their criticisms of the last government, ‘they now have more people who sat around Boris Johnson’s cabinet table than we do’.
Returning to comfortable ground, the shadow Energy Secretary likened the country to a failing company in need of a new chief executive to turn things round. We need, she claimed, ‘a strong leader, a detailed plan, and the courage and determination to get over the obstacles that will inevitably be in your way’.
Both Conservative speakers accused Reform of u-turns. Coutinho slated Farage’s approach to the two-child benefit cap, defence spending and the triple lock, claiming that Farage has failed to take a consistent line on anything other than immigration.
Danny Kruger pushed back, blaming the Conservatives for keeping Labour in power. He argued that ‘the only thing standing in the way of a party of the right winning a majority at the next election is a small group of MPs’. Quick to dismiss the recent uptick in polling under Kemi’s leadership, he compared the Tory party to a broken but beautiful Bentley on the side of the motorway. Even if ‘the driver of the car has figured out how to make the lights go and the windscreen wipers move’, the car is not about to start any time soon. He did soften the blow with the assurance that he ‘like[d] Kemi’.
For Matt Goodwin, there is only one issue that matters: immigration. He spoke with fury about the rise in numbers under Boris and asserted that ‘our country within one lifetime will become completely unrecognisable’ thanks to ‘outrageous’ changes to the immigration system made under Boris. He jibed that Priti Patel, Home Secretary when net migration figures rose from 271,000 in 2019 to 872,000 in 2022, when she left office, still sits on the Conservative opposition benches. In response to criticism of Farage, he did make the potentially rebellious observation that ‘no leader is perfect, I think we can all agree on that’.
On the question of a leadership pact, it was Goodwin who held the strongest views. While Coutinho, on the Conservative side, refused to explicitly rule out a coalition with Reform, Goodwin was not so equivocal, arguing that having knocked on 7,000 doors in Gorton and Denton, ‘I know where the Tory brand is, and it’s dead. If we do a deal with a party that is absolutely toxic … if anything that just weakens our brand.’
In the end, Reform won the day, securing the support of 49 per cent of the audience against the Tories’ 44 per cent, with a swing in their favour at the end of the Q and A. The losing side did not seem too perturbed, though, with Nick Timothy joking that he ‘looks forward to the day when we welcome [Danny Kruger] back to the party’.
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