In which the writer praises Stephen Bush and tentatively suggests some ideas that differ from his

Stephen Bush is an interesting and thoughtful writer. I recommend that you look out for his work in the FT, and not only his political writing but also his comments on cultural matters. He seems to me to be a man of both intelligence and taste.

That's my (glowing) review of him. But what does he say about me? I'm sorry to say that the picture here is a little more mixed. I make "smug asides" and my "analysis, such as it is, is a greatest hits of partisan wishful thinking". I say "increasingly ridiculous things". At one point, he gave the (sensible, but I think inapposite) advice to "Live in the real world, stand up for decency regardless of the rosette colour, don't excuse-make for opening up the tent to include people who don't think I [Bush] am English." (In fact, the advice to live "in the real world" was given to me twice.) I was also said to have caricatured Bush's point and he suggested that my "need" to do so "tells its own story". 

Gosh. 

(More below the break.)

As I say, Bush is an intelligent man. I don't think of him as given to playing the man rather than the ball, or to intemperate comments. So what did I say to prompt this reaction? 

[UPDATE: the comment that includes the word "rosette" was apparently not aimed at me but was by way of general advice to the Conservative Party. I think - but am happy to be corrected - that the other comments were directed at me personally. I could add various other comments that Stephen has made to me since I posted this, but I don't propose to continue updating in that way. The point is: he's pretty miffed at me.]

Rather than carry out a kind of retrospective relitigation of our discussion (read it all on BlueSky if you want - it's a website a bit like Twitter), what I will do here is try to set out the ideas that I mooted to the world in general (and which Bush saw and commented on) and see if, by putting them in one place without the restrictions of the microblogging social media format, there is anything here that Bush (or the world) wishes to criticise. 

Here goes! (At the very least there might be some "greatest hits" to follow, even if the band is not your favourite.)

The discussion concerns the current strategy adopted by the Conservative Party. Bush thinks it's rubbish. I modestly suggested that I had "at least ... an attempt to understand what might be going on here" and I suggested a theory to explain what Bush sees as unmitigated crassness. 

(I should point out that I am not a Conservative politician, party employee, strategist, consultant, pollster or anything of that kind. I am a bystander trying, like Bush, to make sense of the world. I'm not trying to "sell" this strategy or indeed to say that it is anything more than a plausible interpretation of what the strategy is. I'm not saying that the strategy is going to win the next election either - that seems implausible on any strategy, starting from here - I'm just saying that it might not be quite as idiotic as Bush suggests.)

So. The Conservative Party lost the last election - badly - and is a much diminished force in terms of MPs, support, energy, ideas, etc. No-one is terribly interested in hearing from the party. It is polling in the 20-25% range, which is pretty poor. What to do?

The traditional view - and one which, I hope I say without caricature, is somewhat close to Bush's view - is that tacking towards the centre is the way to go. There are lots of seats which the LibDems won from Cons, for example, and in order to tempt swing voters in those seats back to the Cons then a centrist offering is necessary. Let's look at history: how did Lab come back under Blair, or the Cons under Cameron, or Lab under Starmer? In each case, by a deliberate and well-signalled ditching of older, more fringe-y views and a similarly definite espousal of centrist views (or at least centrist mood music), perhaps even explicitly embracing the other side ("heir to Blair").

The problem with that idea right now, it seems to me, is that political landscape looks materially different today from how it did after other big losses in the past. According to the last few opinion polls, the party with the largest support is Reform. Moreover, Reform have a lot of momentum behind them: they did really well at the last election, certainly in terms of vote share, but even in terms of MPs. They have all the energy and vitality that the Cons don't. If there are to be any high-profile defections, they seem likely to be from Con to Reform, not vice versa. Moreover, Reform might be in line to receive huge sums of money from the richest man on earth, and they seem to have some level of support from the most powerful man on earth. 

And they are a party on the Right of the political spectrum.

That's a problem. There is a non-zero chance that a new and exciting party on the up, hitting its stride while the Cons are in the doldrums, could usurp the Cons as the main party of the Right. The worry here is that something akin to what happened to the Liberal Party mighthappen to the Cons: outflanked on the Left by an exciting young party on the make and then, once first past the post does its thing, abandoned on the fringes of politics (until the glory days of Nick Clegg). If Reform can outflank the Cons on the Right and appear to be the new default right-wing party then ... well, it's curtains.

That said, while lots of things are going well for Reform, it also has a lot of weaknesses. Even its strengths are perhaps weaknesses: support from Elon Musk or Donald Trump is not necessarily a positive in this country. And then there are its more obvious weaknesses: its leader and public face is a man with a great knack for publicity and for treading the fine line between being cancelled and being too mainstream to be 'edgy' but, for all his talents, he is massively off-putting to most people. The party seems to have a support ceiling so long as he remains at the top. Apart from Farage, the quality of personnel appears poor - and it's likely to stay poor: few respectable professionals will want to tell future employers or prospective in-laws that they are Reform candidates; and Farage has a tendency to suck the oxygen out from anyone who might threaten his position at the top of his party du jour (where now are the likes of Sked, Kilroy-Silk, Carswell, Banks ...? often they have left the country). Poor quality of personnel means not just the odd embarrassing scandal from time to time, but also policies that crumble under examination: a recent example is the Reform policy on energy, which I will let you look up for yourself, but which I can tell you has not enjoyed much respect in the right-leaning parts of the internet. If Reform can be stopped from becoming the default choice now, then they are likely to look unconvincing by the next election.

So Reform is the biggest threat to the Cons' status as the default right-of-centre party. That's one problem to face. But, equally, there is an opportunity there: Reform's current supporters are likely to become disillusioned with it as they see more of it and as Farage's support reverts to the mean, which means that those supporters are a potential source of supporters for the Cons. Indeed, one might well think that Reform is a better target than Lab: both are polling on c.25%, but that is a decline from Lab's (already slightly underwhelming) 35% at the last General Election, perhaps indicating that we are close to its 'core', unshakeable support, while Reform's 25% is a big increase from its (already historically impressive) 15% at the GE, perhaps indicating frothy, low-information, 'soft' support. 

The positive way of looking at it is that combined Con-Reform vote is at c.50% - enough for a massive victory - so the prospects for the Right, if it can be unified under the Con banner, are bright.

The upshot of that analysis, it seems to me, is that right thing to do now - many years out from the next election - is to face down Reform and try to attract its voters. Now is the right time to try to plant seeds, to try low-profile and niche issues - just to try something different. If the current Con leadership talks to Reform-supporters and the Reform-curious, in their information ecosystem (e.g., the podcasts they listen to, but you don't), using their language and paying attention to their concerns then, if and when Reform looks to them like a bunch of oddballs or losers, many of those Reform voters will have positive feelings towards the Cons and will come round to them. Even if they don't feel terribly warmly towards the Cons, they may well be persuaded that the Cons are much the better choice if the only plausible alternative is Lab. Getting to that degree of receptivess to the Cons will take time, but now is the time to start.

In the meantime, thinking about other swing voters (maybe there are some still within Lab's 25% or the LibDems' 12%?), patience is a good thing. The Government will face difficulties: every Government does - and one with no growth for years to come will face lots. Cons are the official opposition, they have a better standard of candidate and worker than Reform, they are seen as moderate (according to the polls) and therefore well placed to pick up the centrist floating voters who get disillusioned in due course. Let's not worry about them yet.

Of course, it's important that, while opening the door to Reform voters, Cons don't lose their position as the respectable voice of the Right. The potential floating centrist voters must not be put off forever. As I say, current polling says that voters see Cons as "moderate", which is good - but that must be maintained. So it's also important to put down markers that show that Cons are not embracing the madder fringes of Reform-ery (much of which is extremely online and therefore influenced by US concepts and personalities). 

Here's an example I gave on BlueSky of Badenoch making a clear statement that falls within the moderate mainstream of UK politics (i.e. Zelensky is not a dictator and the UK stands with Ukraine), and thereby distancing herself from Trump, while also picking out a good point that Trump makes from among his bad ones. It's a difficult balancing act and I don't envy anyone trying to do it.




There are also three other aspects to this strategy.

First, don't come up with policies now. No-one cares, for a start, and they can be hostages to fortune: not everyone can drop policies as brutally as Starmer dropped the policies on which he won the Lab leadership election.

Second, avoid traps. A good example is VAT on school fees. In many ways, it's like fox-hunting was for Blair: a high-profile policy, not making much difference to the purported beneficiaries (foxes or the state education budget), but causing a lot of pain to some people, but those are people who the Cons ought not to support if they want to look like ordinary folk. Hague took the support where he could find it and aligned himself with the tweediest countryside elements, allowing Blair to look liberal, modern, metropolitan and so on by contrast. Badenoch has avoided becoming the "member for Eton" - and rightly so: Reform voters are no fans of posh schools either.

Third, keep pushing the various attack lines on Lab - you never know what might do to this Government what cake and parties did to the last one. No-one cares about Lord Alli, or Chagos, or WhatsApp group chats, or Reeves' embellished CV at present - they're all "why are they bothering with this online crap? It's not cutting through" now - and that's true until suddenly one of them does capture the public imagination. (As a footnote in this context, picking up the concerns of the online Right - e.g. Chagos - is a good way of signalling that the high-information opinion formers on the Right, those dithering with Reform, should stick with the Cons. Maybe no-one except some online weirdos cares about Chagos, but keeping those online weirdos from abandoning the Cons altogether is part and parcel of keeping Reform in check.)

Finally, I think it is worth making the point that Lab has to do something similar. Lab is in a much easier position than the Cons: for some reason, the Green Party in the UK is the dog that steadfastly refuses to bark by outflanking Lab on the Left, so Lab has the luxury of taking on board as many right-wing ideas as it wants (building more of Heathrow and not caring about the carbon emissions, for example), while leaving left-wing voters with nowhere else to go. But it is polling in the mid-20s and it needs more voters - and it similarly sees Reform as a potential source of them. That explains why Starmer recently told the House of Commons that the tribunal decision to admit a Gazan family was via a "loophole" that he intends to close: he, too, appreciates that Reform voters needs their concerns to be listened to and addressed.

Anyway, there you have it. That is my attempt to make sense of why the Cons are currently addressing Reform issues and Reform voters. I don't think there's anything partisan in what I say. For my part, I'd rather they (and all of us) were talking about completely different issues, but I try to live in the real world, as Bush has recommended to me, and I think that means dealing with supporters of the most popular party in Britain right now, and dealing with them honestly and in good faith, but also without pandering to them or embracing their silly or repugnant ideas. That's how democracy is meant to work, in my view. 

Another part of democracy is, of course, lively public debate. To that end, I again encourage you to read Bush - and I thank him for prompting this contribution to that debate. 

FURTHER UPDATE

I'm not on first name terms with Stephen and it seems that agrees with my theory, at least so far as it what I originally described it as, namely "an attempt to understand what might be going on here":