Like yesterday was it was box office.
Like in Westminster terms this was box office, But if this was
a divorce, this is basically like a posh episode of
EastEnders. Who's the one group of people
that Nigel Farage does not particularly like having in his
parties? Ambitious people.
And you even saw in the press conference he was giving those
nervous little Robert, don't you dare do anything.
The rule seems to be that you the one thing you can't do is is
question Nigel or challenge Nigel because he will then come
back and and and finish you off. Hello and welcome to the
forecast. It has been quite the week in
Westminster. A sacking, A defection and a
deepening crisis on the right. Robert Genrick's move to Reform
has capped off a dramatic few days for the Conservatives.
While Nigel Farage has celebrated the moment, calling
it a historic realignment of centre right politics in the
United Kingdom, the Prime Minister has described the
Conservative Party as a sinking ship.
Genrick himself has said his defection will unite the right.
So what does this mean for the future of the Conservatives?
And what does Genrick's defection mean for Reform?
Is there a real possibility that Reform could win the next
election? Here to unpack the latest of the
deputy editor of Conservative Home, Henry Hill, and our senior
political correspondent, Paul McNamara.
Thanks very much, both of you, for for joining me, Paul.
First, the party line from the Tory leadership seems to be
we're better off without him. You know, like when you're a
teenager and you're dumped. I didn't want to go out with you
anyway. Are they right?
I mean, God love them, they are putting on a good spin.
But in if this was a divorce, this is basically like a posh
episode of EastEnders. Kimmy's kicked out Bobby Chris,
he's found out he's having an affair with No, he's bloody
hell. They've turned up to the Queen
Victoria and now they're shaking up together and he's slagging
off everyone in her family. And he never really loved her
anyway. This is like yesterday was it
was box office. Like in Westminster terms, this
was box office and the start of the day was a desperate bid from
everyone to try and get up on top of the of the headlines.
And Kemi did like she did a a great job.
I don't know what you're experiencing from everyone that
you were talking to the Conservatives, but it didn't
actually play the blinder first, first thing in the morning.
But did it look like that later on?
That's the question, I suppose. I mean, I, I, I think that,
yeah, broadly speaking, Kemi Begnock has strengthened her
position in the party partly because her main rival has left
it, but also because she played yesterday broadly very well.
She acted decisively. If the if the defection was
going to happen, then it's she has minimised the damage.
She took the wind out of their sails.
If there was any chance of anyone following Robert, that
seems less likely now. But I do think I'd be interested
to see what would happen if a politician tried just admitting
that something wasn't great and that they were sad that it.
Happened. Stayed in their party.
Well, well, no. Or, or if somebody left
admitting that they were a loss, right?
Because frankly, if if you're if you're Kimmy Babenok and you
have such a low opinion of Robert Denrick, why was he your
shadow justice secretary, right? Like he was indisputably 1.
The most popular shadow cabinet member with the grass roots 2
really an influence on her own policy thinking since she has
adopted his policy on the European Convention on Human
Rights. And three, one of the few
members of the shadow cabinet who've had any luck getting into
the media in a very unpromising media environment for the
Conservatives. Now if he was planning to
defect, you can still be like well you know better.
It were done quickly and all the rest of it, whilst acknowledging
that having a senior member of your shadow front bench leave
the party to go and join what is in parliamentary terms, a much
smaller party is a bad thing. But that's not how this really
works. Everyone has to immediately, the
moment somebody leaves me like, well, I never liked them anyway.
And and we're all just supposed to ignore the fact that they
have promoted them and given them senior positions and all
the rest of. It, I mean, it's a similar,
sorry, it's a similar argument, isn't it, that they are putting
to Genrick, Robert Genrick that if you were so unhappy, you
know, he's, he was brutal and named colleagues in his speech.
If you were so unhappy, why don't you stay in and tell us?
Well, so I, I think my suspicion there is that actually, and this
is a bad thing for British politics in general and it
doesn't just apply to the Conservative Party, is that
there really isn't, if ever there was space in political
parties for that to happen. Because especially if you look
at the way that Kimmy Bade not ran the leadership, and this is
very specific, but she ran as the unity candidate, right?
And then she populated her shadow cabinet with lots of
people who were previously in the cabinet from various wings
of the party. That makes having a full and
frank interrogation of what went wrong over the past 14 years
very difficult. If you're overriding priority is
not to alienate or embarrass anybody.
And I think that the rise of of social media and and the media's
appetite for and and expectation of information also doesn't
help. I remember during the Tory
leadership contest, I can't remember which show it was on,
but the host said to me, you know, we watched some clip or
other and said, yeah, isn't the Conservative Party talking to
itself? And my response was, is having a
leadership contest, to whom should it be speaking?
All right, this is when it's supposed to be working out what
it says to everyone else. But everything was being
examined through that external lens.
And I think that it's unfortunate that a lot of what
Robert Jenrick said in his criticisms of the Conservative
Party, there's a lot of truth to it, but he clearly felt that he
couldn't. There wasn't an adequate forum
for that inside the party. But there's what you say and
there's how you say it, right? I mean, you can think all that
and you can have a, a view that the party hasn't got it wrong.
A lot of people in the Conservative Party think exactly
the same. But then they're thinking that
and they're saying it and then they're saying it in an absolute
drive by and chucking grenades left, right and centre and
kicking the dog on the on the way out.
Which is, I mean, that press conference was it, it was, it
was quite something. There was no holding back there.
That wasn't just I'm done with you, you guys have got it wrong
and I move it on. I mean, Danny Kruger left.
He's done it in a far more reserved fashion.
Robert Generate left and it was, I mean, it wasn't in the manner
in which he wanted to. Like there was a choreography
there that he wanted and he gets found out and it doesn't happen
like that. He was setting fire to the house
on the way out last night. I think that both Kemi and
Robert could have benefited from being a little bit more like
Danny. What did?
You What did you think of Kemi's video?
The the one the. One in the morning when yeah
well, I I and a couple of other journalists I spoke to because
of the blurred background and the fact that it wasn't
professionally. My first thought was is this
real yeah, AI right I was just like I just want to check is
this actually happening yeah and it.
And then it turned out that it was.
And I think that clearly, because the Conservative Party
does have access to production, right?
It does have a proper camera and a set up and a set for her doing
things. And so I think the fact that
that was how it was delivered suggests that if this smoking
gun came to light, it probably came to light quite quickly.
Yeah. And they.
It's like it. Was done at home.
Wasn't it? Yeah.
And they really felt that they had to, you know, get it is a
little bit like, you know, that that clip, that that video from
President Erdogan during that coup in Turkey when he was
filming from the plane, there was a real sense of like, right,
we've got to get on this as quickly as possible.
And in fairness, it did work. And I suspect that even if he
hadn't been planning on doing it before, one of the reasons that
Jenrick was so vociferous in the press conference is because he
and Nigel Farage needed some way to try and claw back some of the
points for the day. When despite the fact, you know,
it's remarkable and that despite the fact that the loss of Robert
Jenrick and the loss of a member of the judder cabinet is
objectively a very bad thing for the Tory Party.
The general consensus is that Kenny Bade not won defection day
because of how she because of how she managed it and and, and
she did manage it very well. So I think that's why they were
pressing back. One, the thing that, you know,
people in Reform were saying last night was, OK, yeah, she's
done all right here, but the front pages tomorrow are all
going to say that very senior Tories left to defect to Reform.
And lo and behold, every single one of the front pages is Robert
James left and he's gone to Reform.
It's not. Didn't Kenny do really well out
of this? She did well and it's gone down.
How she performed yesterday and how she bought by the horns has
gone down well with some Conservative members, some
councillors, a lot of her MPs, but ultimately the big story.
But what about the fundamental issues you say?
It was utterly damning about the Tories, wasn't it?
It was saying, you know, Britain is broken, broken and you've
broken it. I mean, slightly ignoring how
long he's been within the party itself, how damaging is that and
how many people who remain in the Tory party will be thinking
he's got a point here? Well it's a 2 edged sword
because I, you know, there is a clear danger for Nigel Farage
and being like the Tories cannot be trusted.
And if you don't believe me, ask any of the Conservative cabinet
ministers that I've been pleased to welcome into my parliamentary
party. But again, the danger that it is
so dangerous to the Tory party because there is a lot of truth
to it. And one of the people who
acknowledged that historically was Kemi Batnock.
During her leadership campaign. She didn't have any specific
proposals. In fact, that was one of the
dividing lines to do between her and Robert Jenrick.
But if you go back and you look at Kemi Batnock's leadership
campaign, she is saying, why did we talk right and govern left?
You know, we need a really deep interrogation into what went
wrong. I'm an engineer and I know how
to do that. And then it didn't happen and it
still hasn't happened. And you know, when Priti Patel
went out on, on, on the media and asked to be thanked for the
Boris wave. And you know, there's like,
well, OK, if you're going to be, if you think that the level that
immigration got to under the Conservative Party is a problem
that you need to fix, having somebody in your shadow cabinet
who thinks it's something that's praiseworthy is probably
something you should fix. Again, nothing happened because
of that imperative of unity. So it it is a very difficult
thing for Kemi to do now because she didn't get a mandate for any
of these big changes in her in her leadership pitch.
So so where did the strategist go now, given what happened
yesterday? Because you've got this slight
contradiction that Kemi Bednock has started to do better, that
it's widely being said that she did well yesterday, and yet you
have all of these problems identified by Robert Jenrick
with potentially many people within the party agreeing with
him. I.
Think the strategist is still trying to figure this one out?
Emy's complete right? One of the problems that the
Tories have got now is that if you ask most people in the
street to name anyone on the Tory front bench, I don't think
they're coming up with a particularly long list for you.
There aren't many people in the three front benches that have
name recognition that that are proven media performers that can
get out there, that can sell their message.
Robert Genrick was doing that. Whether you agree with him or
disagree with him, he was someone who was doing that,
doing that messaging for the Conservative Party.
One of the things that the Tories have already started
saying and Labour and Lib Dems have already started pointing
at, start pointing at Reformers saying oh look, it's either
Tories 2 point O or it's the Tory B team.
I think what a lot of people they are set within the
Westminster bubble sort of forget is that most people are
not us and are not looking at the news day in day out.
Most people are getting on with trying to pay their bills and
they're not looking at the psychodrama of all of these
things. It matters a lot to all of us.
It matters a lot to Tory party members and people who write
their campaign day in day out. Most people don't engage with
politics until the six months before an election.
So all this that goes on and you say, oh, look, they've got
Jonathan Gullis now and they've got Marco Longy's.
You know, no one knows who many of these people are.
So as much as you say, oh, it's, it's all the Tories.
If it's Tories that you don't know and you haven't really
heard of and you haven't engaged with since the last election
five years ago and you've forgotten about, it's still
really the party of Nigel Farage.
And as long as he's getting out there and doing really well on
the on the messing, that's really what is cementing itself
in in people's minds. I mean, I, I think that's true
of a lot of them. I think that, for example, that
it was a highway quite I, I, I was added an event with
relatives who aren't particularly political and what
they were saying on the day of that defection was, was he the
tax evasion guy? So I think that there are which.
May not be the recognition he. Wants which may not be the,
which may not be the recognition he wants, but but there's more
than just optics, I think to this, which is that reform might
actually end up governing the country potentially or in a
position to govern the country. To do that it needs hundreds of
people who are capable of being ministers, It needs hundreds of
people who are capable of being at least possibly good MPs.
I'm not going to say very good MPs because, you know, none of
the parties have a generally amazing threshold on that at the
minute. And it needs people to
presumably lead quangos, it needs people to lead regulators
and there. Is to write laws.
Exactly where The Who are the law officers going to be in a in
a reform government? So actually I think one of the
biggest structural challenges facing reform is the personnel
problem. There should be space in reform
for hundreds of Robert Jenricks or people like him.
But the the challenge has always been that, you know, generally
speaking, if you're a very able person, going into politics
involves making some big sacrifices, at least in the
short to medium term. So who are the people who make
those sacrifices? Well, they tend to be ambitious
people. Who's the one group of people
that Nigel Farage does not particularly like having in his
parties? Ambitious people.
And you even saw in the press conference he was giving those
nervous little Robert, don't you dare do anything.
It's like if that's what you're doing on day one at the press
conference where you unveil this person, that suggests that this
is a really quite deep structure.
So he may not be a shoe in for a reform chancellor Post I Mr.
Degenerate we've got we've got, I mean, they've got absolutely
no idea. But generally speaking, the rule
seems to be that you the one thing you can't do is is
question Nigel or challenge Nigel or over shadow Nigel or
even on at least one memorable occasion, succeed him by
agreement because he will then come back and and and finish you
off. So to the extent to it.
Interestingly, Robert represents the 1/3 of the Reform
parliamentary party that were ministers in Rishi Sunak's
government. But no, I don't.
It will be interesting to see how Farage handles him.
Because if Farage can't accommodate 1 Robert Jenrick, he
has no prospects of accommodating enough talented
people to make. As you say that he needs more
Robert Jenricks. He means more.
He needs more Robert. Not necessary from the Tories,
but just in general. But but the but Tory defections
specifically, it is a double edged sword, isn't it?
Because you start to look as you say, like Tory Party 2.0 or a
sort of Poundland Tory party. But at the same time, you need
that experience and you need people to come across, surely.
You do. I almost wonder that.
So whenever anyone talks about defections, about how this is
going to go down, everyone talks about MPs and what's happening
in Parliament, who's going to be the next person to to walk the
floor? And everyone talks about voters
when it comes to an election and who they're going to vote for.
But what always gets missed is the bit in the middle.
And this is like your grassroots membership and parties live and
die by their membership because as much as you can have someone
being a media performer and doing great and it comes through
an election, when it comes through a local election, any
election, you need people who are willing to walk the pavement
for you and knock on doors. And the real detrimental effect
I think here, and this is the thing that's worrying people,
isn't necessarily in peace, but it's memberships, it's
counsellors, it's OK. Well, maybe you're not going to
have a whole lot of Tory members who go and join Reform, but are
they going to turn up on a rainy Tuesday night to go and a knock
on a door for you? And if they don't, well, your
vote's going to, your vote share is going to go down.
If they don't do it in the local elections, are they going to do
it come the general election for your MP and all of a sudden you
get this degradation in support and it's very hard to win any
election when you don't have those grassroots numbers.
So when you look more broadly at the sort of, you know, Nigel
Farage talks it about, you know, realigning the right of British
politics, where has that been left?
So the spectre that's haunting the right is the spectre of
Canada after 1992. So in 1992 the the Canadian
right split actually on much the same lines that we have.
The other party was even called Reform and the Progressive
Conservatives, which were the big Tory party in Canada, went
down to two seats. And even though they went down
to two seats, it still took a decade for those parties to
unite into the Conservative Party of Canada, after which
point they won. But for that decade the Liberals
had some very, very easy election victories because
despite the fact that you had two fairly sizeable right wing
parties, each of which got a respectable vote, they hated
each other and therefore there was no prospect of forming a
government. And I think that that is
something which both sides are very aware of.
But the difficulty of it is that actually there is quite a lot of
bad blood, especially at the senior level between Reform and
the Tories. But also neither of them have
policy programs yet. So they've got nothing to build
a coalition around. And that's why I think we keep
seeing their differences emphasized because until they
have discrete things that they stand for, the only thing to
talk about to their divisions, because otherwise there's no
point having two of them. So does the right in this big
mass rely on Labour continuing to U-turn, to make mistakes, to
look weak? Today.
I was thinking this yesterday. Remember there was that thing a
couple of months ago where some people would make the point that
Keir Starmer has the reverse Midas touch, where everything he
touches turns to something not great.
Keep it clean. Keep it clean.
I've seen this yesterday. We started the day yesterday.
The new story yesterday was that Elon Musk was all of a sudden
making big changes to Grokken. This was a a win for Downing
Street. I was interviewing West of the
street yesterday morning and he was like absolutely, Prime
minister's played a blind on this one.
This is a win for Downing Street where where, you know, no one
has taken it to Elon Musk like we have.
Elon Musk wasn't being verbose like he like he normally is.
Two hours later, no one is talking about that story.
Got zero coverage yesterday evening.
Keir Stammer couldn't even get a day's worth of news cycle out of
that one good story, because all of a sudden events turn against
him and the whole of the top end of most news programs and the
front pages of every single newspaper was this story.
It was the conservative. It was reform.
And an interesting thing about reform because for
understandable reasons people tend to to treat reform in the
Tories as the two right wing parties and focus on the
internal dynamics of the right. But actually, if you look at
Reform, they came second in 98 seats in the general election,
of which 89 are held by Labour, right?
Labour is also the party in government making lots of
unpopular decisions. And even the seats that Reform
UK already has have actually sort of a much bigger level of
sort of government spending. And if you look at Reform, the
voters, they don't tend to be small state, low tax.
They're socially conservative, hardline on law and order, but
generally quite in favour of public spending.
One, it's going to be quite interesting to see how reforms
senior leadership, all of whom are committed Thatcherites,
adapt to that. We've already seen Nigel Farage,
for example, flip on the two child welfare limit, but two
that suggests that actually at the next election, not
necessarily at all future elections, the Tories and Reform
might not be each other's primary target necessarily
because there's quite a few seats in the South, the and the
east and bits of the Midlands where Labour won because the
Tories went almost extinct. And you've got nervous Labour
MPs with many narrow majorities which the Tories could
potentially take back. And Reform have a very, very
different map of where their primary attack seats are.
So there will be some places, and you were talking about
earlier about grassroots activists, most as important as
councillors because actually party memberships have drindled
to almost nothing and there are now some very nervous Tory MPs
in former heartland counties where there are more MPs than
councillors after last year. So that will be a a
battleground. But actually I think that
focusing purely on the idea of a Tory reform battle ignores the
fact that both of them, their best prospects for growth in the
next election, are taking chunks out of Labour.
And Nigel Farage yesterday saying next week he'll be
announcing A Labour defection. Yeah.
I don't know whether that was a joke or not initially.
No, and there's some movies about who that person is.
If we paid you money, would you tell us?
Pay me money, Jackie, I'll tell you anything.
Like Nigel Farage. Is the master at garnering
headlines, and he's been. He's been amazing over the last
six months about when nothing has been going on.
He's been able to Jack up an event where the cameras turned
up. He's been able to say something,
do something and make it happen so that he dominates the
airwaves. Now that didn't quite happen in
the sequencing which he wanted to happen with Robert Germet,
but by Christ, they, they did it yesterday.
On that point of Tories and and Reform at war with each other.
It's quite funny talking to senior people in, in Reform then
I, no, we're, we're, we're just taking them over.
We're, we're, we're not even taking them over.
We're just, we're just replacing them.
That's it. It's almost like the Liberals
in, in, in the early 20th century.
It's like, no, the Tories are dead.
We're just taking them over. Well, some people come, you
know, come over to us. They need to come to us now
before the end of the first week of May.
Otherwise they're, they're not welcome.
But that's it. We're just, we're just in charge
now. The other thing that Farrar has
always been very, very good at is recognizing that as the
leader of what is normally a small party is that he is at his
most effective when the big parties are trying to do
something about him. And so, for example, during the
UKIP years, he was always talking about, oh, I'm having,
I, I've spoken to 9 Conservative MPs always, always having these
conversations. How many of them actually
defected over that entire period?
It was 2. But he understands, you know,
and this was a big distinction between him and Richard Tice
when Richard Tice was Reform leader, because Richard Tice
would be like, we need to destroy the Tory party.
It's a great force for evil and all the rest of it.
And if nothing else, that meant the Tory party wasn't going to
try and adapt to you. And last time the Tory Party
tried to adapt to Nigel Farage, it left the European Union.
So he is very, very good at this.
So I would not be surprised if I'm sure they might be a Labour
defector. But Farage understands that it
is entirely to his advantage to always have an ambiguous and a
larger than real implied number of potential defectors.
So either of you expecting it it to be a a Labour MP or any Tory
MPs to follow Robert Jenrick? It would be your biggest
surprise if Fraser Reeves all suddenly turns around tomorrow,
Says that's it, I'm off. I'm joining reform.
That'd be that'd be a. Good watch.
Who? I mean Shabana Mahmood.
Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Oh, they'd. They'd love it.
Oh, no, Yeah, that'd be great. But yeah, I've come to believe
that Labour cannot deliver the immigration policy that Britain
needs. But no, I I've got shockingly
conservative homes. Labour sources aren't all they
could be. Looking ahead, predictions are
always terrible. You know, you see how quickly
things moved yesterday. The next big test is the is the
local elections. Who will this play best for?
I mean, on current polling reform, reform wildly
outperformed pollster's expectations last time.
The conservative polling is better, but not that much better
than it was a year ago. I think this is one of the
reasons, the sort of the less cynical reasons for looking at
why supporters Robert Jenrick are a bit jaded about the Chemi
bounces it's being called, is that Chemi became leader in
November 24 of a party on 25 points in the polls.
She then took it to 17% and has now got it to 20%.
And there there's a slight frustration that she's getting a
lot of credit for this bounce when net Chemi is still -5
points from when she took over. And the, the, the devastating
thing about that set of local elections last year, as I
alluded to earlier, is the Tories, 2/3 of their counsellors
and their counsellors are the overwhelming majority of their
infantry. There are now large parts of
England where there is functionally no conservative
ground machine. If that happens again, even it
or anything like it happens again, even if it is slightly
better than last year, even if the trajectory is gently
upwards, you're just eating away at the thing that allows you to
mobilize your vote. And if you're talking about high
engagement voters who are prepared to turn out because of
a national air war media campaign, those are reform
voters, right? The advantage, which is the
structural advantage of the Conservative Party, the Labour
Party, the big parties, is that they have the people who have
the addresses of all their supporters and we'll go and
knock them up three times and we'll drive them to the polling
station if they want it. If that goes, then suddenly the
fact that Reform has a fairly vestigial membership structure
at all, even if it has a large number of nominal members,
counts for a lot less. So what do the Conservatives do
to stay alive? To survive.
I mean, you're probably the best one to answer this, but.
Did they change shape? I mean, so they have to, I mean,
it's actually incredibly difficult because in the the in
the short term, if you're looking at a survival general
election, you want to avoid losing too many votes to the
Liberal Democrats or prior to the election of Zach Polanski
and the Greens going in a much left more left wing direction to
the Greens because there are well heeled Shire seats where
that was a real danger. But essentially you need to try
and find a way of reconciling is the fact that you're dependent
on the votes of the over 50 fives who love public, lots of
public spending on them. The fact that you are nominally
a party of lower taxes who's meant to appeal to the
economically aspirational, which requires you not necessarily
taking all of their money to hose it at your existing voters.
And the fact that they do need to just public opinion has
shifted very far on law and order and things like the
European Convention on Human Rights.
And I think one of the missed opportunities of the leadership
contest, and one of the reasons that that that can be made not
running as a unity candidate, maybe hit the snooze button on
this, is that the party is paralysed by the fact that it's
MPs fundamentally disagree on these questions.
And until they have that fight, there's a, there's a sort of,
there's a tendency to elevate unity above everything else.
But actually the party is divided.
You can tell because it is almost incapable of making
decisions and it needs to have that fight and someone needs to
win. Look at the front bench of the
Tory party. Do you look at who do you see
there? You think, OK, that's the person
now who's going to be able to step up, fill the void on on on
days when either they're not getting the coverage they want
or they need to land a blow. This is the person that we're
going to. Put there is there is they are
currently auditioning for that position.
There is not currently another Robert Jenrick.
There are there are some who are better media performance.
Claire Coutinho is very good, yeah, but.
She's been out a bit the last couple of weeks.
She seems to he's learned Robert Jenrick's patented walking
towards the camera video technique, one of the earliest
adopters of the but she's currently in energy and
important as that brief is in policy terms, it's not something
that really lets you get the blows in on a day-to-day basis.
They've put Nick Timothy in injustice now again, he was a
Home Office spat for a very long time and obviously that
intersects quite a lot with justice.
So on policy that might be really good is I've not seen
much of him as a as a kind of frontline communicator.
And This is why I think that the party would be better to be
honest and recognise that Robert Generec is a loss to the party
because actually it does not have very many people who are
capable yet or at the moment of doing what he did.
Paul, just to sum up, does this story mark a really significant
turning point or a source of intense bit of psychodrama?
Might you say that is over and done with now?
It's not over and done with. I think this will be seen as as
a as a big moment. I don't think it will be seen as
a turning point. It's really a marker of this is
where momentum is going at the moment.
And while there were some people who were thinking for a bit, OK,
actually maybe reforms, the lead in the poll is, is is coming to
an asset. Maybe it's slowing down.
Oh, there's a bit of a chemi bounce.
She's done quite well the last little while.
Maybe she's bouncing. Actually, no, the momentum is
still very much on reform side. We'll be.
Talking about it again, Henry Paul, thanks very much for
talking to us. That is it from the forecast
today. See you next time.