Reform

The new year is off to a bad start for Kemi Badenoch’s Tories. The latest update to The Spectator data hub’s poll tracker shows that – on average – Reform have just overtaken the Conservatives to become the second-placed party in British politics. As Steerpike reported this morning, YouGov’s first Westminster voting intention poll since the July election revealed that, while support for Starmer’s army has dropped nine points since polling day, Nigel Farage’s Reform has seen support rise by ten points. Combine that with the Tories dropping two points, and The Spectator poll tracker – which looks at the average of all political polling – puts Reform in second place on 24 per cent of the vote.

We are nearing the 50th anniversary, next month, of Margaret Thatcher becoming leader of the Conservative party. Only one other woman has ever become leader while the party was in opposition, and that is Kemi Badenoch. Mrs Badenoch is well aware of the strategy her legendary predecessor pursued between becoming leader of the opposition in 1975 and prime minister in 1979, and is sensibly emulating it: a willingness to include rivals in her shadow administration, and to take her time setting out policies (there is, after all, unlikely to be an election before the spring of 2028, by when anything could happen); but to precede the announcement of specific policies by statements of principle, to give a broad idea of what the Conservatives stand for.

Almost the whole of the British political class failed to understand that the rise of Ukip after the 2010 general election was not some fringe irrelevance but was in fact likely to have major consequences. Academics Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin were two of a select band of political futurologists who were onto the Ukip advance early. By the time their insightful book Revolt on the Right was published, Ukip had already forced an EU referendum pledge out of David Cameron and the book was therefore read by many dumbfounded Westminster insiders as if it were a crammer for a module that had unaccountably not been covered in the standard curriculum.

The government is starting to have an opinion poll problem, but it has nothing to do with any great threat from Keir Starmer or the Labour party. While the Tory ratings have gone from high to low 40s and Boris Johnson is not as extraordinarily popular as he was in January last year before the advent of the first dry cough of coronavirus, that’s not the issue of concern at all. On the contrary, the problem is that the Prime Minister may be getting addicted to favourable ratings and increasingly unwilling to put them in jeopardy by taking difficult or unpopular decisions.

Scots may be getting vaccinated against Covid, but they already have the highest rate of immunity to the appeal of Nigel Farage to be found anywhere in the UK. So it was not a particular surprise that Farage today stayed away from the launch of the Scottish offshoot of his new entity, Reform UK. Instead it was left to party chairman Richard Tice to unveil the identity of the leader of Reform UK, Scotland. The sitting MSP Michelle Ballantyne, who stood unsuccessfully for the leadership of the Scottish Conservatives less than a year ago before going independent, has become the Scottish leader of Reform UK, without needing to win a single vote. The good news for the party is that Mrs Ballantyne came over as sensible, credible and inoffensive, not unlike Mr Tice himself.

Former editor of The Spectator and Daily Telegraph Charles Moore is tipped to become chairman of the BBC. Despite being proactively encouraged to put himself forward for the job of director-general earlier this year, Moore made clear he would not be applying for the role. Firstly, he didn’t think he’d get it, writing in his Spectator notebook that he is ‘not a woman’ with ‘no plans to become one’ and ‘under the BBC’s diversity rules, uniformity of gender is required’. Secondly, the job didn’t appeal. He wrote ‘bureaucracy is the enemy of creativity. The BBC can only be a bureaucracy.