Transcript: Is this the Tory death spiral?

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Is this the Tory death spiral?’

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lucy Fisher
Have we entered the Tory death spiral? Welcome to Political Fix from the FT with me, Lucy Fisher. I’m joined in the studio today by Political Fix regulars Stephen Bush. Hi, Stephen.

Stephen Bush
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And Jim Pickard. Hi, Jim.

Jim Pickard
Hello.

Lucy Fisher
Well, another week, another set of polls that seem to be even worse for the Tories. But before we get on to this disastrous set of MRP models, I think we’ve gotta talk about the huge scandal that has erupted and is engulfing the Tories regarding gambling. Jim, tell us what’s happened here.

Jim Pickard
So this began with the revelation that Craig Williams, who was the MP who as PPS was kind of, you know, the bag carrier for the prime minister, had placed a bet on the timing of the election just before Rishi Sunak announced it. And since then we’ve discovered that a policeman who was working Downing Street also did something similar. And then on top of that, the Conservative candidate, who happens to be married to a Conservative who was basically senior in the campaign, and as Chris Cook, the FT colleague, has looked at the data showing a spike of thousands of pounds of bets just before the election was called. So the question being raised now is who else knew about the election and put money on it? So the wider question now is do the cops get involved? Will they investigate? Will they charge people? I don’t think it’s something that people have been charged for in the past, but it is a form of insider trading.

Lucy Fisher
Well, that’s right. And we should say Craig Williams has admitted having a flutter, as he calls it, on the election. He’s now refused to answer any other questions including, crucially, whether he knew about the election date before placing that bet. Laura Saunders, the candidate you mentioned, Jim, is also only alleged to have placed a bet relating to the election. We don’t know exact more details than that, but she is indeed married to Tony Lee, who is the director of campaigns of the Conservative party, who’s now had to take a leave of absence. I mean, Stephen, this is just, you can’t write this kind of stuff. The head of the campaigns for the Conservative party has had to take a leave of absence two weeks before election day.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. I mean, I think, among other things, it is just an incredibly funny scandal, which I think is actually always particularly damaging for a political party. And I think that broadly speaking, you can sort of get away with being corrupt and effective or mean and effective. But once you have what is ultimately a very silly story, it kind of loses the thing that I think no serious political party can do without, which is the, well, is the perception that they are a serious group of people rather than what is alleged to be such low-grade corruption and also such easily detected. I mean, you do it with your credit card on the inter--. Yeah. It’s like, it’s literally it would be like, you know, it’s glorious in its own way, right?

Lucy Fisher
I think that you make a good point. Craig Williams only placed a £100 bet. It was 5 to 1, so he stood to make only £500. You know, that’s obviously not a small amount of money, but equally it’s a lot, you know, to be found out about in this way. We should say he said that it was a huge error of judgment. He doesn’t wanna comment further until the Gambling Commission investigation into him has concluded. But Jim, I mean, this has been a huge psychological blow to Sunak in his inner circle, hasn’t it?

Jim Pickard
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it is a serious problem for them in terms of public perception that Rishi Sunak came in after Liz Truss promising to be the serious managerial guy, the person who would bring back ethics into government and into politics. And it just kind of looks like the popular perception, which, you know, quite often I argue against people and say that politicians aren’t venal, they’re not in it for themselves. And yet you see something like this and it just, it’s kind of reminiscent of Partygate when people were making rules, but then they were breaking them in private themselves. It just adds to that sense of sleaze and double standards.

And it even gives an open call to Nigel Farage, I noticed, which was popping up and down saying, this is all toxic and corrupt and all the rest of it, turning a blind eye to the fact, of course, that there was a senior Ukip figure back in the night of the EU referendum. He made around 9,000 or 10,000, I think, on betting against sterling at the point where from memory, Nigel Farage was came out in the early hours suggesting that Leave had lost, but he’d already seen an enormous MRP poll saying that Leave had won. So yes, questions for everyone.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah. Well, and I think you make a really good point that maybe this is a wider issue, political betting, that is gonna have a spotlight shone on it now beyond just the bets potentially relating to this election. Stephen, this is yet the latest sort of error, gaffe, disaster that’s beset this campaign, starting with Sunak announcing it in the rain, then appearing in the Titanic quarter in Belfast. Then we had the accusations of Tory MPs doing the chicken run, including the chairman himself. Then there was Sunak leaving D-Day early, and now this. I mean, could it get any worse for the Conservatives? Talk us through the the MRP models we’ve seen this week and what they suggest.

Stephen Bush
Well, so the MRP models range from at the upper end for the Conservative party more in common showing them at the 160, 150 mark. So about as bad as 1997, a result which, given the scale of the other MRPs, is something I think everyone in the Conservative party would take with both hands where you have the Conservative party around the 100 mark in some cases, and in the case of Savanta, in a battle for second place with the Liberal Democrats in terms of seats.

So we are really talking about your apocalyptically bad results for the Conservatives. And then, of course, many of the seats they’re forecast to hold in those are on a knife edge. And the thing which understandably freaks out a lot of Conservatives is when you look at the list of errors that you’ve described and the sort of I was about to say small scale — small scale’s perhaps the wrong way of putting it — pervasive and constant incompetence of the Conservative campaign? If you are a parliamentary candidate and you know that it is close between you and the Liberal Democrats and close between you and the Labour party, do you think that CCHQ has the competence and wherewithal to make sure that they get your voters out on the day?

Jim Pickard
I think the only counterargument to that is that it works both ways, that a lot of these results are kind of close in the other direction. And Morgan McSweeney, who’s the head of the Labour campaign, has been telling people over and over again, don’t be complacent, don’t believe these polls at this point. And there are over 100 of these places where actually, that if the dial shifts a little bit against Labour or if people can’t be bothered to vote, then actually, the Conservative tally could actually be a lot higher than Savanta’s suggesting.

Lucy Fisher
Right. So Jim, one of the worst polls for the Conservatives this week was the Savanta and Electoral Calculus poll for the Telegraph, which suggested the Tories could be left with just 53 MPs which to remind listeners they got 365 MPs at the last election so this would be, you know, seven times fewer or thereabouts. It would also involve, they predict, Rishi Sunak losing his seat in North Yorkshire, which would be the first time that’s happened to a sitting prime minister.

What effect will a poll like that have on people who are thinking about voting Conservative, do you think? Will it encourage them to potentially think, well, we don’t want Labour to have this supermajority people are talking about? Might as well, you know, row in behind the Tories even though I’m angry with them. Or do you think it further encourages people not to vote for the Conservatives and to vote for other parties, whether it be Labour or Reform, Lib Dems?

Jim Pickard
So I think a bit of both actually. And I was talking to a Labour candidate just a few hours ago who was saying to me that they’d already heard a couple of people on the doorstep saying to them, oh, I was gonna vote Labour but I don’t want a supermajority and therefore I’m not gonna I don’t know whether it was not vote or vote Conservative, but I think that was a message that the Conservative party had been trying to get through. And maybe it is having a little bit of effect. I mean, it’s logical, isn’t it, if you’re more leftwing than Keir Starmer’s Labour party and you think they’re gonna have a majority of 100 or 200 or more than that, whatever, then maybe you would feel liberated to vote Green or something else. And likewise, if you just were not someone that into politics but you were inclined towards Labour, you might think, I’m gonna just go to the pub instead. So it could play out in all sorts of ways.

And it is the latest manifestation of something that I’m increasingly a little bit obsessed with, which is suggesting that so much of British politics, we are being led by the polls all the time. It’s like the tail is very much wagging the body politic of British politics. And I don’t really think it should be like that. But there’s not really much of a solution because we the media like interesting things. And if someone pops up and says they’ve interviewed 20,000 people and they, the net sum of this is that Labour’s gonna have the biggest majority in history, then we the media can’t really ignore it. So I don’t know how we can get through that conundrum.

Lucy Fisher
I was interested that I saw Scarlett McGuire, a pollster with JL partners, making this point on a broadcast show that, you know, if you didn’t have public polls, and there are lots of rules around having to publish all the data and the assumptions and the questions in the UK, what you’d get would be even worse, which would be people, you know, perhaps wealthy businesspeople commissioning private polls and then either using that to their own advantage and kind of the insider trading we’ve been talking about, or else briefing out parts of it selectively without all the data behind it. What do you think, Stephen?

Stephen Bush
Yeah. Well, in Israel, where polling in the final bit of the campaign is banned, you get — and anyone on that side of my family, please don’t be upset at my appalling Hebrew pronunciation — you get a thing called gevalt, which is essentially where the smaller parties go. If you don’t vote, Meretz will disappear. They won’t get into the Knesset. Private polling shows we’re gonna be wiped out. And it works for exactly the same reason that the supermajority stuff causes, you know, people who want the Tories out but aren’t that enthused by Labour or people who think the Tories need a rest, but would quite like the option to still be able to vote for the Tories in five or 10 years’ time to go, you know, actually, I don’t want the Tory party to be destroyed.

So I think if you have private polling, you have exactly the same horse-race journalism problems, but even less grounded in the numbers and the reality of what’s going on. I think is a problem that’s very hard to solve. Understandably in this election there are lots of people who think that the Conservatives need a period in opposition, but who either want to reserve the option to vote for the Conservatives in the future, or do not want the Conservatives to be so shattered that they end up in some alliance with Reform and they become a much more rightwing party.

So I think the flip side of that is yes, it does mean you get a lot of poll-driven journalism, but I think it was a bit of a problem in 2015 that people woke up having voted to destroy the Liberal Democrats and did kind of regret it afterwards.

Jim Pickard
And I think the extraordinary thing here to remind listeners is that these polls are talking about the Labour party getting around 40 per cent of the vote, which is what they got in 2017. Of course, they were defeated by Theresa May’s Conservatives. But this is all about the Conservatives dropping and an awful lot of it is about Reform under Nigel Farage rising. And it’s not inconceivable that on polling day, people who are telling these posters we love Reform, it’s not inconceivable that quite a few of them say, actually, it is still kind of first past the post system in a two-horse race, am I wasting my Reform vote in Surrey or Sussex or something?

Lucy Fisher
Yeah, I think it’s an interesting question. And I think, Stephen, it’s not just the media where the narrative is driven by the polls, but also I’ve been really interested in watching, you know, even clips of Starmer entering, you know, all sorts of campaign events or walking out of streets and seeing, well, you can see people treating him like he’s the incoming prime minister. It’s not so much he is standing taller and with more kind of stature, but the way people are approaching him seems to me to have subtly shifted. Which, Jim, brings us on to a fantastic interview you have done with Starmer this week. Lunch with the FT. Tell us about it.

Jim Pickard
So this has been in the offing for something like six months or a year. We’ve been trying to get this big Lunch interview with the then leader of the opposition.

Lucy Fisher
And you should tell people who haven’t, you know, aren’t familiar with a great institution that is Lunch with FT what it is.

Jim Pickard
Lunch with the FT is the best interview slot in British newspapers bracket slash websites because unlike most interviews, you go for a meal, you get to have three courses, have a few glasses of wine, everyone relaxes. You can get into a kind of deep conversation not only about their kind of professional life, but you can talk a little bit about their private inverted commas life and their cultural taste. And you can talk about the food and it really brings people out of their shell. Doing that with Keir Starmer in the middle of an election campaign when his time is very limited and the interview is spread out over two train journeys and half an hour in a café in Southampton, it’s a little bit different, but I’d like to think that hopefully I’ve managed to do a portrait of inverted commas our next prime minister, which brings him a little bit to life for people who don’t necessarily know him that well.

Lucy Fisher
So what did he eat?

Jim Pickard
Fascinatingly, he’s so hectic that he didn’t order his own lunch, so one of his aides ordered for him a vegetarian fry up even though it was 1:00. So we were having lunch in this café, Retro, in Southampton. He had avocado, hash browns, tomato, mushroom, egg. He didn’t touch the egg or the mushrooms because time was so short and we were trying to cram in this very deep conversation. Staff were trying to talk to him. People sat next to us trying to chat to him. We had the clock ticking a little bit. It was a bit of a test of my shorthand as I scoffed the fish finger sandwich at the same time. But we also did a little trip around the port where Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves were talking about their kind of decarbonisation fund that they’re trying to roll out. So there was a lot of hard-hat action and train journeys. I mean, I hope that I’ve caught the essence of hectic campaigning for a political party in 2024.

Stephen Bush
Jim, Lucy said earlier that she said earlier she thought, you know, people were reacting to Keir Starmer differently on the doorstep. Do you think he’s changed in himself in the time that you’ve seen him, you know, doing this interview compared to other times you’ve talked to him or, you know, obviously he’s gone quite a journey in terms of his public.

Jim Pickard
Yeah. I mean, the last time we did a big FT interview with him of that kind, like in the Weekend magazine section, it was right at the start. And it was a point where, you know, he was a relatively unknown character and Labour had just gone to their worst defeat in nearly a century. So nobody thought that they had a serious chance of winning the next election. You remember that famous quote in the Sunday Times about Boris Johnson squatting like a toad over British politics. (Lucy laughs) That’s what people felt at the time, though. That’s how it felt.

And then, of course, a year later, at the start of 2021, they lost that by-election in Hartlepool. We did another magazine piece about “Is the red wall gone forever?” just on the eve of them losing Hartlepool. And Keir Starmer was very openly talking about how he did think about quitting at that point. His closest friend outside of politics, a guy called Colin Peacock, said to him, you know, he didn’t want him to go for the leadership in the first place. But he said, “Look, this is the point you really should give up”. And Starmer said to me that he felt kind of shattered. His whole purpose in politics, he felt, was to rebuild labour and get into power. And here he was, a year in, going backwards, not making any impact at all. Should he quit? And of course, as we know, he decided not to quit. He went on to to recover in another by-election a little bit later.

And then later that year he did a big change in the Labour party internal rules at a party conference, which was a kind of, you know, flexing of the muscles and probably quite a major overlooked at the time moment of him seizing control of Labour, which he now uses as a metaphor for he’s capable of taking hold of institutions and, you know, changing them from within in a kind of serious way and making things work better.

Lucy Fisher
Stephen, I’m fascinated by what James Kanagasooriam — pollster, friend of the podcast — called “sandcastle politics”, which is that, you know, we might see Labour get a huge majority now, but it’s all built on sand and could be washed away at the next election, in part because people aren’t hugely inspired by Starmer or Labour, but they’re trying to kind of, you know, oust the Tories from power. And because generally in the UK and indeed across the western world, we’ve seen so much volatility in elections.

And Jim, of course, you made me think of this by pointing out how Johnson won this commanding 80-seat majority in 2019, and we all thought he’d have a decade in power. Stephen, do you think that we’ve seen the sort of last iteration of Starmer or if he does get in with a huge majority, will he feel emboldened to change again? Will he be worried about being ousted after five years? What do you think he’ll be like in power if we get the kind of majority the people are talking about? Will we see Imperial Starmer?

Stephen Bush
I think actually, regardless of the size of the majority, Keir Starmer will be quite different in power because let’s say, for example, that a bunch of people who are currently voting Reform get into the polling booth, go, wait a second. This is insane. This is, you know, this is just all a licence to have a much more leftwing government than the one I already have. What am I talking about? They all vote Conservative. Bunch of people stay home, right? And there’s a majority of 50. Well, there are 23 members of the Socialist Campaign Group, the Corbynite organising caucus, in the parliamentary Labour party, something that, you know, I think a lot of . . . 

Lucy Fisher
And will Corbyn — and we know he’s not in Labour — but do you think he will still be an MP after the election?

Stephen Bush
I think in a situation where Labour wins a majority of 50, you would assume that they would also have lost Islington North, right? Like in a situation where there’s a sufficient sense that the election’s a done deal, I would assume that various challenges to their left — you know, Corbyn in Islington North, Carla Denyer in Bristol Central — and they would all also be elected. In that situation this idea that these pretty austere Budgets as envisaged in their manifesto and costing document could actually be delivered and passed through the House of Commons — well, that’s not gonna happen.

But equally, many, many Labour politicians will tell you that their favourite prime minister is Harold Wilson. And most of what it means is, is I like the idea of winning but I’m aware there were lots of compromises I didn’t like about Tony Blair. And so Harold Wilson’s like your kind of safe, middle-of-the road answer. I think Keir Starmer has demonstrated that he’s one of the few Labour politicians who remembers that the word that his colleagues reached for when asked to describe Harold Wilson is devious. (Lucy laughs)

And I think we should assume that Keir Starmer has a final face that he will put on when he becomes prime minister, but the shape of that will be very dependent on, you know, is he the prisoner of his left flank? Does he have this huge majority which, you know, has challenges of its own? Because essentially, if these projections are even close to the right, the payroll vote would be vastly outnumbered by Labour backbenchers, many of whom would be the beneficiary of this very odd three-way split so would, I imagine, feel quite stressed about their re-election prospects from the jump.

But yeah, broadly speaking, the thing we know about this election is that both parties are lying to us about the need to have tax rises. So Keir Starmer — or in some weird mirror universe, Rishi Sunak — would be quite different to what they are campaigning on. And the question is, you know, can Keir Starmer manage that transition or will we in four years’ time be going, wow, remember when they had a majority of 400 and now they’re polling at 22 per cent?

Jim Pickard
I think what is inevitable is that with the passing of time being in power, the more it’s obvious that you’ve been unable to unlock a whole load of insoluble problems. And one reason why the Tories are heading for the bin is of course, they’ve had 14 years. And it’s the essential sort of see-saw of usual rhythms of politics. The thing I don’t know and is impossible to predict is how long it will take before the public say to the Labour party, you can no longer say it’s the Conservatives fault that the rivers are full of sewage and that the schools, you know, have a shortage of math teachers and that we have all these problems right across the public sector. We have, you know, councils going bust or all the rest of it. Is it a year? Is it two years? Can they keep it up for a term? I’m not that sure. And I think in a kind of social media world where it’s easy to whip up a storm of protest at the drop of a hat, I think they might find that patience does run out relatively quickly.

But, you know, the majority we’re talking about is so phenomenal that I’m not sure that he will be a hostage of a leftwing campaign group if there is a landslide, not least because the newcomers coming in have been so heavily vetted to remove any vestigial traces of hardcore socialism that a lot of them will do what they’re told, I suspect. That’s the presumption anyway.

Lucy Fisher
Well, let’s just move on finally to talk about Reform. They had their manifesto launch at the beginning of this week. Stephen, what did you make of what Nigel Farage had to offer on the policy front?

Stephen Bush
Candidly, in some ways very little, right, because he is completely freed from any need to make his policies cohere or add up, right? It is solely appealing to the Conservative party in so, you know, billions of billions of pounds of tax cut, net zero immigration. You know, he’s effectively just running as the Hyde to Rishi Sunak’s Jekyll but with the safe knowledge that he’s never actually going to have to turn into Hyde. The best from his perspective that could happen is he could win five or 10 seats.

I think what I was struck by about it was precisely that though, which is that of course, it is appealing to 15, 20 per cent of the electorate, to go, well, we’d just be a more pure version of ourselves. But the second you try and ape that, as Rishi Sunak has tried to do in this campaign, if you’re a governing party, people go, wait a second, you’re gonna bring back national service, how? You’re gonna have a quadruple lock for pensions with what money? You’re gonna do this with defence spending, etc, etc?

My main takeaway from the Reform manifesto is if, as I think is likely, the Conservative party decides that what it wants to do is to have some kind of tie-up with Reform, this idea that you can add those two blocs and are voting for those two parties together and they’re a sort of fungible rightwing bloc I think is a little bit for the birds.

Lucy Fisher
Jim, what did you make of it?

Jim Pickard
I found it absolutely fascinating. I thought the most interesting thing just in terms of the optics was that you had these public school-educated — for American listeners, private school-educated politicians — going to one of the very poorest parts of the country, Merthyr Tydfil in the Welsh valleys, where life expectancy is low, educational attainment is low, there’s a lot of unemployment. And basically they rolled out a lot of policies, some of which are very, very helpful to rich people. So for example, increasing the inheritance tax threshold from around £1mn for a couple to I believe £2mn. You know, instead of putting VAT on school fees, which is what Labour would do, these guys would give us sort of 20 per cent relief so you can send your kids to private school. So to me, that was a bit of a sort of a kind of strange confluence of policy and place, but . . . 

Lucy Fisher
But maybe it does have a side analogy with the US and the kind of Republicanism under Trump.

Jim Pickard
Yeah. In that if these rich people feel kind of culturally onside with you then you can forgive them for giving tax cuts to themselves. And there was of course, a lot of, you know, Reform UK would ban trans ideology, as they call it, in schools and a lot of stuff like that. The other thing is kind of where does the money come from, which is really interesting because of course they conjure up money out of a load of government spending cuts, which economists have cast doubt on.

But the main thing I’m interested in, and the reason why this manifesto launch by Reform UK should be of interest to people is because if we are serious that after the election, a very rightwing, grey-haired Conservative membership is gonna pick a more rightwing leader who could be tempted to work with Nigel Farage, be very interesting to look at the areas of potential overlap and where that could drive the Conservative party. I’m thinking particularly in terms of Reform saying we need to leave the ECHR immediately. Also in terms of we should drop net zero 2050 immediately. And you can see the potential.

However, the closer working or merger — whatever it turned out to be — you can see an echoing of what’s happened to the Republican party under Donald Trump on the other side of the Atlantic. And that would pose quite difficult challenges for a ruling centre-left Labour government if you have an opposition saying, well, every time you try and do anything to tackle climate change, you have the opposition just saying, well, why bother? We don’t need to. It’s all fake news, etc. Then, you know, in a few years’ time we could be seeing the seeds of this growing into something politically quite powerful, I suspect.

Lucy Fisher
Well, I’m certainly personally very interested in how Farage, if he gets into parliament, shapes the leadership contest that is already under way in the Tory party. There are candidates who have already installed key aides who are, you know, now explicitly approaching colleagues about joining their campaign or endorsing them after the election and the expected defeat for the Conservative party. And it seems to me that it’s shaping up as one of the key dividing lines. Those who are kind of accommodationist towards Farage would welcome him into the party fold and those who, you know, want to pull up the drawbridge. And I think that will be a key part of the conversation.

But, Stephen, I’d say if Farage gets in, there was one of the MRPs published this week that think he won’t win Clacton and indeed, Reform won’t win any seats. That would mean Farage’s eighth attempt and failure to get into Westminster. On the other end of the spectrum, the kind of polls that are very favourable to Reform, you’ve got, you know, YouGov that have put them, you know, ahead of the Conservatives in terms of vote share, at any rate. What do you think about how many seats Reform could get, or is it just too hard to say at the moment?

Stephen Bush
Well, we shouldn’t forget that we did have elections in May in which, broadly speaking, the Reform vote was at the lower end of what the polls suggested and the Conservative party was at the higher end of what the polls suggested. Of course, those were still thumping defeats for the Conservative party. That would still be a landslide setback for the Tories.

And we also shouldn’t forget taking the longer view that Farage parties have always disappointed under first past the post. They couldn’t beat Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats in Eastleigh, they couldn’t beat Ed Miliband’s Labour party in Heywood and Middleton. They couldn’t beat Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party at the depths of its unpopularity in the early winter of 2017, a time when the Labour party was losing everywhere to everyone. So I think I would always be inclined to bet against. And broadly speaking, if we had as well as all of us a robot which was programmed to just say, “Polls are probably wrong, add three points to the Tories and Nigel Farage will fail to get elected”, that robot would sadly be beating all of us in the FT stock picks. (Lucy and Jim laugh) And I’m therefore inclined to side with the robot on this occasion.

Lucy Fisher
OK, but Jim, just to play devil’s advocate, in May the Reform party only stood in one in seven seats in the local elections. They said this is not a focus for us. We’re, you know, going hell for leather for Westminster seats. Should we believe them on that? Or is it the case that if they don’t have that kind of network across the country, they aren’t able to, you know, really get MPs and they’re not, as Robert Shrimsley likes to say, like a real phenomenon?

Jim Pickard
I mean, where I agree with you guys is that, of course, Rochdale massively underwhelming for Reform in the local elections. They did terribly. But of course, remember, since then Farage has come back, made a lot of noise. It has been an atrocious Conservative campaign at the same time. And I think the thing about their potential influence the way I think about it is it only takes Farage to get a seat or a couple of them, two or three of them, and still have Reform somewhere between 10-20 per cent in the polls. Just that potential possibility that he could cross the floor and that a lot of Conservative MPs might like it. And I would make a very strong bet that if you put Nigel Farage in the mix for who would the Conservative party like to be their leader, he’d probably win, wouldn’t he? Do you guys disagree with that? And so as long as you know that he is the favourite for the Conservative grassroots and it has the prospect of him being in parliament, it does have the potential to coalesce that I don’t think we should lose sight of.

Lucy Fisher
I think it’s really a great question. I’m not totally sold that would be the case for the Conservative membership. And I think you have to remember, someone pointed out to me this week within the party fold that the activist base, about 5,000, 6000 people, is a lot more to the right of the wider membership of — I think this person suggested around 175,000, 200,000-odd members. And I think that, you know, they are not, you know, rightwing at the expense of wanting to win elections, these people who pay their subs and, you know, are so devoted to the party. So I’m more convinced that if they thought there was another candidate regardless of their tribe or politics that was likely to win a general election, they could yet row in behind that candidate.

Jim Pickard
My only response to that is that I lived through the whole Jeremy Corbyn leadership race nearly a decade ago, where you had one person saying very strong things, absolute purity of view in every respect, and then you had half a dozen other people who all sounded a bit similar. And I would imagine the Conservative leadership race with Farage and it could look a bit like that.

Stephen Bush
Also, I think the thing it’s always important to remember is that political parties react to election defeats, even ones which those of us covering them think are predictable, in unexpected ways. One of the reasons why Keir Starmer has been able to take the Labour party on a massive journey and broadly keep the majority of Labour activists with them, is — although this will, I imagine, be a bit of a shock to all of us who covered that election — that defeat was a shock for a lot of people in the Labour party. They were not expecting to lose the 2019 election as badly as they did, and they were therefore willing to back him when he rewrote the rule book, when he said, oh, I know I said this, but I actually meant that.

And ditto with Jeremy Corbyn, Labour losing the 2015 election, where they didn’t expect them to cause them to turn to a pretty unorthodox choice to lead them to. What is really hard to tell what Conservative members will do and feel up until the point the election actually happens, right? Because it’s one thing for people to go, oh, well, who cares about the Lib Dems when there are only 15 of them? They haven’t been a serious threat to the Conservative party since 2005. Then if you wake up and suddenly, half of your mates have lost their jobs, or if you’re a local association, your MP is gone, you’ve got a Liberal Democrat MP, you’ve got Liberal Democrat councillors.

Or equally, if you have a situation where suddenly you have a Labour MP who’s been elected with 25 per cent of the vote in your previously very safe Conservative constituency, then that will incline you to go, we just need to hoover up all of those votes on the right. And so much of this leadership election, which, as you say, is already under way, is going to be shaped by a result which yes, we know the headlines of, but we don’t really know what the feel of it will be for activists, because the feel of it on the night is always kind of different to what we’d expect. I mean, 2015 is another good example of that where I did not think covering that election that the Labour party would go, ah, well, the problem is that we didn’t bury New Labour enough. But it was really obvious even the weekend afterwards that was the lesson they had taken from it. And yeah. So who can say, really, until the Conservative party wakes up on Friday the 5th of July and concludes whatever it concludes from what will be a pretty bad defeat, I think.

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Lucy Fisher
Now, as the election draws closer, it’s worth remembering that it’s not just Tory MPs who could lose their jobs. There are many staffers who work for members of parliament who are also at risk. The FT’s Georgina Quach has been hearing from some of them, and she told me what their reaction has been to this snap election.

Georgina Quach
For a lot of people across the parliamentary estate, there was a huge amount of shock and disbelief. Rishi Sunak’s election announcement really took a lot of people by surprise. A lot of people had booked summer holidays, including a parliamentary staffer who I spoke to. He did request anonymity because he’s currently working for a Tory MP, and even though he’d been thinking for a while about what he wants to do next, he was still really in a state of shock about the election announcement.

Conservative MP in audio clip
Because it’s so abrupt, you just have no idea. The Tory Central Office is gonna slash jobs, right, after the election if and when the Tories lose. After July 4th, there’s going to be a whole bunch of Tory staff looking for jobs. In that sense, you’re competing against a lot of people.

Lucy Fisher
And what are the career prospects like for these staffers when they’re departing?

Georgina Quach
Well, I spoke to Rebecca McKee. She’s senior researcher at the Institute for Government and she dedicated a whole 132-page report to learning about staffers. And according to her research, she found that often a lot of people go on to work for charities. They might work for another MP’s office or as a special adviser — spad, as they’re often called — or they might choose public affairs and think-tanks.

So essentially, MPs are running mini-businesses, with employees that they are legally responsible for. Ipsa — that’s the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority — administers the pay and expenses, but the MP needs to go through the whole recruitment process. And so when the new parliament opens, finding staff can be a real challenge and it can be super chaotic, especially on day one. Here’s what Rebecca McKee, who wrote that Institute of Government report about staffers, had to say.

Rebecca McKee in audio clip
They basically want people who can hit the ground running and can say, OK, this is how, like, the Bill Office works. This is how all the various things around how you enter the chamber works, how putting down parliamentary questions works. And having staff who already know the estate really well or understand how it works is obviously, like, incredibly valuable.

Georgina Quach
So finding new staff when the new parliament opens is a real challenge. A lot of the people that worked with MPs on the campaign trail are not necessarily the best people that’s most suitable for working on the day-to-day stuff of casework, writing briefs or working an MP’s diary.

Rebecca McKee in audio clip
This is a job where you want somebody who you can really trust to work long hours with you. The people who have worked on political campaigns aren’t necessarily the best people for a job in parliament, and it might not even be something they really wanna do. And I spoke to a few people who had done that transition and then basically got very burnt out or very disillusioned with the job in parliament and just then wanted to leave fairly soon.

Lucy Fisher
I know what it’s like. You certainly do need a lot of stamina to work in parliament. I’m interested in the human impact of this and the fact that institutional memory is lost each time someone decides to leave.

Georgina Quach
I was really shocked hearing about just how high the churn rate is across the parliamentary estate when it comes to staffers — you know, up to 100 a month, and also special advisers and spads, you do also move on quite quickly. That’s at least what Emma Dean, a former policy special adviser in the Treasury in Downing Street, told me.

Emma Dean in audio clip
I remember being told the stats relatively early on that the average term of a special adviser was around 18 months. And so that’s sort of a significant amount of churn over departments, which in a lot of cases, is a great shame.

Georgina Quach
A lot of these special advisers like Emma, who we just heard there, are also working really closely with the network inside the department, whether that’s special advisers and civil servants. So when an election is called and spads are effectively forced to resign, they do lose that very close-knit network overnight.

And it often means, when election is called, that they need to scramble to find all the information they need for the campaign, for the manifestos and everything like that super quickly in, you know, a matter of days before the whole system shuts down. Emma Dean, who we just heard from, experienced this in 2019.

Emma Dean in audio clip
It’s very difficult because there’s people that you’ve been working with intensively for quite a period of time who very suddenly you are no longer with and no longer working with. And so you can go from seeing those people sometimes more than you see your own family and friends to not seeing them at all. And you don’t tend to have a chance to say goodbye either. It’s pretty traumatic, to be honest, and that’s happened with me a couple of times.

Georgina Quach
So after three years as a special adviser to the government, Emma Dean there, she decided that was enough and she left her post as a spad to the then chancellor in September 2022, just before Liz Truss came in as prime minister. She now works for a political consultancy, but she still really feels for the staffers and spads who are going through the turmoil of finding a new job.

Emma Dean in audio clip
I know there’ll be lots of people in both Labour and Conservative HQ who will be thinking and jostling for what is a relatively small number of roles. So that’s always at the back of people’s minds when they’re doing these jobs at the campaign. First and foremost and in front of mind, they’ll be thinking about how they position themselves well for what comes after.

Lucy Fisher That was former Tory government special adviser Emma Dean talking to the FT’s Georgina Quach there about that high churn rate in the world of politics.

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Just to finish up, campaign watch. Stephen, what are you looking forward to in the final full week of the campaign coming up?

Stephen Bush
So, to be honest, the thing I’m really looking forward to is the Conservative party’s, as a whole, reaction to this betting scandal. I don’t know about you, but I feel that the average Conservative — I was about to say MP — but the average Conservative parliamentary candidate I talked to at the moment is splitting tacks. Basic questions about the competence of the campaign, you know, the fact that visibly, they were putting resources in a wildly optimistic and stupid place, given the state of the polls at the start of the campaign and the fact that it feels to many a parliamentary candidate, the one thing the central command could get right was placing bets.

I’m just intrigued to see what . . . You know, I feel like we’re very close to that private grumbling becoming public on the record, on air, on local radio. And I think it’s one of the things that I think it only will take one tired interview for the taboo to break and the kind of public airing of grievances, which you sometimes see towards the end of a campaign that is expected to go badly for a political party. So I’m kind of intrigued to see if this last week sees them tighten up and focus on, you know, their core messages or if it sees a public row.

Lucy Fisher
Jim.

Jim Pickard
Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely the flip side of that. We were talking earlier about does being 20 points ahead in the polls give Keir Starmer, Labour leader, a different kind of aspect, a different kind of vibe. And the answer is very much, yes, in that people sees differently if you’re about to have, you know, to be a world leader in a couple of weeks’ time. And party discipline has been so strong for obvious reasons, like why would you, as a Labour person, rock the boat right now?

The thing that I’m looking forward to is actually the final week of the campaign where I’m gonna get myself back on that Labour bus for the final 24 hours of campaigning. I’m hoping we’ve got Scotland and Grimsby — just throwing random names out there, just criss-crossing the country — because we didn’t go on any of the buses, I don’t think, in 2019, but our accounts departments very generously put us back and back on the buses, and I wanna get on the road and just to taste that final kind of historic moment of campaigning.

Lucy, what are you looking forward to?

Lucy Fisher
Well, there are only a few scheduled moments of this campaign left, really, aren’t there? I’m thinking in particular of the Question Time event that’s happening on Thursday night. We’re recording just before that’s about to start, or even though this podcast will come out on Friday, there’s the BBC debate head-to-head between Sunak and Starmer next Wednesday.

But I’m particularly interested in what’s going on at The Sun on Monday, where there’s another of these now seemingly endless televised election events, which is being hosted by The Sun newspaper. And I’m really interested to see who The Sun comes out in favour for. It’s been, to my mind, quite noticeable. A lot of their coverage has been a lot more neutral, therefore favourable to Labour than traditionally it’s been; been a staunch Tory-supporting paper in recent years. So I’m keen to see what happens there.

Jim Pickard
Whereas The Times still looks a little on the Tory side, I would say, judging by their splash this week. Is that reasonable?

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Stephen Bush
Yeah, I think you’re exactly right.

Jim Pickard
Lucy?

Lucy Fisher
Endorsements, let’s see. Jim, Stephen, thanks for joining.

Stephen Bush
Bye, Lucy.

Jim Pickard
Thank you.

Lucy Fisher
And that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. Do check out the free links I’ve put in the show notes. They’re articles we’re making available on subjects discussed in this episode. There’s also a link there to Stephen’s award-winning Inside Politics newsletter and you’ll get 30 days for free.

Plus, don’t forget to subscribe to the show. If you have time and can leave a review or a star rating, then it will really help us spread the word. Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Audrey Tinline with Leah Quinn and Josh Gabert-Doyon. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Original music and sound engineering by Breen Turner. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio.

We’ll meet again here next week.

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