Transcript: Tories reel from by-election blows

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Tories reel from by-election blows’

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Lucy Fisher
What next for the Tories after two bruising by-elections this week? I’m Lucy Fisher and this is Political Fix from the Financial Times. Coming up, elections guru and top political pollster Professor Sir John Curtice is dropping in to crunch the numbers on this week’s two by-elections, and we’ll look at why Foreign Secretary David Cameron has annoyed some rightwing US Congress members this week. And in the studio with me are my FT colleagues George Parker. Hello, George.

George Parker
Hi there, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And the FT’s Rafe Uddin. Hi, Rafe.

Rafe Uddin
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
George, Rafe, what a week. Keir Starmer has suffered one of the toughest periods of his leadership, only to end this week with a stunning double by-election win. The headline figures certainly look impressive, particularly in Wellingborough, where a colossal 28.5 per cent swing to Labour was recorded, the second-biggest Tory to Labour swing in a by-election since the second world war. Rafe, George, I want to get your take shortly, but first, joining us to dig a little deeper into the numbers is Professor Sir John Curtice. Hi, John.

John Curtice
Good day to you.

Lucy Fisher
Just give us your first take. I mean, is this an unqualified success for Labour, or should we be caveating it?

John Curtice
I think we should be caveating it, though in so doing, be aware that we are now expecting quite a lot from Labour, given how far it is ahead in the opinion polls. So one of the caveats, caveat number one is that in Kingswood, at least, the party’s share of the vote lead over the Conservatives — around 10 points — was less than that was achieved by Sir Tony Blair in 1997, 2001 and 2005 in the constituency, although in fairness, in Wellingborough the performance pretty much matched what was achieved in 1997 and 2001.

But the second caveat is that you’ve quoted those two swings, but you need to appreciate that basically two-thirds of the contribution to that swing figure comes from the decline in the Conservative vote, and only one-third comes from the rise in Labour support and basically, in both constituencies the rise in Labour support, substantial though it was and particularly in Wellingborough — 19 points, it’s one of Labour’s best by-election performances — it’s still only half of the fall in the Conservative vote. And this, together with the fact that Reform UK seemed to be picking up much of the other half, is at least consistent with the evidence of the opinion polls in recent weeks.

Now, for every one person who’s going from Conservative to Labour, there is also one going from Conservative to Reform. So Sir Keir Starmer’s saying, you know, people want change. That seems to be clear: people still want change. But he then wants to go on to say, and the change they want is Labour. Well, some of them, yes, from his point of view. Enough of them to win a general election, yes. But all of them, certainly not, because it’s now pretty clear that it is Reform who are competing with the Conservatives, at least for votes, if not necessarily for seats. And that is a new development. These are the first by-elections in which Reform have really significantly registered. And it does come in the wake of their rise in support in the opinion polls.

Lucy Fisher
And we’ll dig a bit more into Reform. Just to pause a second on Labour, George — as John says, it feels in some ways it’s more a disfavourable view of the Tories at play here than Keir Starmer and his party and policies necessarily inspiring waves of support. What’s your take on the results today?

George Parker
Well, I think John’s absolutely spot on about that, you know, that you could argue that this doesn’t show a massive, you know, optimism, enthusiasm about the prospects for a Labour government. However, you know, look at the raw figures, the fact this was the second-biggest swing to Labour, I think since the second world war in a by-election. There is a question about how people will feel on election day in the general election. Does it matter that they’re unenthused by the Labour party? They may well stay at home and decide that the plague on all your houses, but whatever happens, that’s probably good news and probably enough to get Keir Starmer over the line. One question I’d be interested to hear John’s views is whether Rishi Sunak will be more concerned about the switch of voters to the Labour party or more concerned about the switch of voters to Reform in these by-elections.

John Curtice
I think his problem is he has reason to be concerned about both because both are doing him damage and both are helping to ensure that the Conservative party has still not made any discernible progress in advancing their position in the opinion polls. But I think we should also come back to this point about enthusiasm and about turnout. I mean, the Conservative party, you know, surprise, surprise, saying, oh, low turnout, you know, our voters stayed at home. It’s all right. It’ll be all right when it come the general election? The honest truth is, you’ve got to ask yourself, why were our voters staying at home, even if they were staying at home more than Labour?

But there is a broader point in which I think all of our politicians need to think about. On average now, there has been a 28-point fall in turnout between the 2019 general election and each of the by-elections in this parliament. That is now higher than in any previous postwar parliament. It’s even slightly higher than the fall (inaudible) in the parliament of 1997-2001, at the end of which only 59 per cent of people voted in general election. It was still an all-time low. And I think they, all of the parties have to ask themselves, well, why is it that we’ve got this deeply discontented electorate, is clearly unhappy about the government, but is also arguably a deeply pessimistic electorate that are not quite sure who’s going to solve the economy, who’s going to solve the health service. And it’s whether or not Labour can solve that that perhaps is the deal that Labour have not really sealed. Is it against that backdrop? It’s not entirely clear that a lot of voters are just simply going to decide to stay at home in the general election. Of course, so far as the broader health of our democracy is concerned, that’s something for all politicians to worry about.

Lucy Fisher
I was struck that it was obviously a low turnout in both these by-elections, fewer than 40 per cent of electors headed to the polls. Rafe, you, like me, have been in Wellingborough in the past week. You’ve been on the campaign trail more generally following Reform around the country. What’s your take on their appeal? What have you made of voters you’ve been speaking to who tell you that they’re backing the party?

George Parker
I mean, it’s always an interesting conversation move with Reform voters. A lot of them do sort of buy into the ideas that Reform puts forward. And it’s often a view of anti immigration policies and increasingly anti-net zero policies. And that does cut through to them. When I was out in Wellingborough over the weekend talking to voters, increasingly in the sort of town centre they would raise these issues with us in conversation. But on the flip side, that the Conservatives weren’t offering them enough when it came to these policies, and that shortcoming was a big part driving them away from the party.

Lucy Fisher
Did it feel to you that Reform voters were coming more from the Conservatives or were you speaking to people who had previously voted Labour but had decided to switch?

George Parker
All the people I spoke to who were thinking of voting Reform had previously voted Conservative. I mean, it’s hard when you’re gauging it off vox pops. We know that not all of Reform’s votes come from the Conservatives. Some of it comes from people who don’t know or sort of didn’t know who they were voting for beforehand. And then the rest comes from sort of third parties. But the bulk of it does come from Conservative voters and that’s a problem for the prime minister.

Lucy Fisher
John, Reform obviously got 13 per cent in Wellingborough, 10 per cent in Kingswood. It far outstripped their previous record of 5.4 per cent in the Tamworth by-election. But really, I mean, some observers were saying that was the bare minimum they needed to do to get into kind of low double figures, prove that how they’re polling nationally, which is about 10 per cent, was borne out and not a mirage. Have we really seen Reform reach a height? Do you think they should have done better, particularly in Wellingborough where Ukip got almost 20 per cent in 2015?

John Curtice
Well, first of all, a note about the 2015 Wellingborough contest: that was another contest in which the Labour party disavowed its candidate. And it’s very clear that the Labour vote in particular suffered then. So that probably helps to explain why Ukip did as well as they as they did. To be honest, what I was saying at the beginning of the night, and therefore I should be honest about this, is that I thought that to suggest that the polls were roughly in the right place, Reform needed to get about 10 per cent of the voting in Kingswood and about 12 or 13 per cent in Wellingborough. And that, in the end, is what they ended up doing.

You know, the point about Reform, it’s not that they are going to take seats off the Conservatives, unlike Labour. It’s that in taking votes off the Conservatives and particularly bearing in mind that Reform’s predecessor, the Brexit party, did not contest Conservative-held seats in 2019. So therefore anything that Reform get, it isn’t just adding to what Brexit had last time, it is completely from base zero, so they’re therefore particularly likely to take votes for the Conservatives above all in places that the Conservatives are trying to defend. And it’s that threat that means that in the end, the ability of Conservative MPs to fend off Labour’s challenge for their seat is indeed at risk of being made more difficult by the fact that Reform do now seem to be picking up votes, some of which at least Labour probably could never reach.

Lucy Fisher
And George, I mean, we’re recording this podcast on Friday morning. So far we’ve seen only Andrea Jenkyns, the long-standing staunch Sunak critic, come out of the woodwork to criticise him again and repeat her call for a change of leader. What’s your sense of how bad this is for Sunak and whether the Tory party will cleave together behind him now, thinking it’s too late to do anything else, or whether we might see an outbreak of discontent again over the weekend?

George Parker
Well, let’s just say, Lucy, so far the plotters haven’t broken cover. This is, as you say, being recorded on Friday morning and we hear they’re having meetings — plots about plots, I think is probably the best way to describe it — but I think we can expect over the coming days people on the right of the party to say that these results and the relative success of the Reform party shows that the Conservative party needs to tack right, take a tough line on issues like migration and possibility of talk about replacing Rishi Sunak with a more rightwing leader before the election, which I think will come to nought but will certainly be destabilising for the Conservative party in quite a febrile moment. But I think the fact that that discussion is even taking place is a sign of how dangerous the situation is for Rishi Sunak, because look at these results. The fact that the Conservative party haemorrhaging support to Labour, they’re haemorrhaging support on the right to the Reform party, and if you move off the right to try and fend off Reform, what about the blue wall and the battles you are fighting against the Liberal Democrats in some of the wealthiest seats in the country? I mean, he’s in a really, really tough political bind, I think. And I think those results last night just illustrate what a bind he’s in.

John Curtice
But there is another question that MPs on the right of the party need to ask themselves: why is it that Reform have advanced in particular at a time when the government did decide to become tougher on immigration? Have they, in fact, in focusing on that issue, an issue where indeed many Conservative voters are unhappy, they’ve actually helped to highlight the failure and therefore helped to fuel the discontent that the reform for which the Reform party is now (inaudible). Certainly, research I’ve done until last December suggested that while many a Conservative voter was unhappy about immigration, it wasn’t an issue that was related to whether or not they were gonna vote Conservative again. It was a bite-your-lip issue, it seemed. You were unhappy about it, but unless you were unhappy about something else, you weren’t going to defect from the Conservatives. That seemed perhaps this (inaudible) to be no longer the case in December. So you have to be careful as to whether or not chasing the Reform tail necessarily means that you succeed in bringing Reform down.

Lucy Fisher
Rafe, the by-election results at the end of the week have just been the cherry on the cake for Rishi Sunak, haven’t they, really? We’ve had the inflation figures out on Wednesday showing that inflation hasn’t continued to fall. The GDP figures on Thursday showed that the UK did enter recession at the end of last year. It’s not looking good for Sunak in terms of competence in him meeting some of his five pledges. Of course, two of those were keep inflation falling and grow the economy. I think attention is now turning to the tight public finances ahead of the March 6th Budget. George had his big scoop about the headroom there and we’ve had some more briefing from Treasury insiders trying to hose down hopes of a huge pre-election giveaway. How difficult is it gonna be for Rishi Sunak to try and move the dial with exciting Budget and fiscal offer to the public?

George Parker
I mean, it’s an interesting week, right? Because over the weekend we had this sort of issue emerge in Rochdale for the Labour party, which the Conservatives thought, great, the Labour party are fighting between themselves again. They’ve got a problem of antisemitism and we can carry that into the week. And then the momentum faded really quickly — the sort of technical recession news in the middle of the week and then the by-election losses, they just cement this view that the party just isn’t fighting fit. And so the idea which George reported on of effectively cutting public spending to fund tax cuts again sort of raises the point that Professor Curtice has raised about priorities and about the idea that, well, if you cut public services, which are a key issue for voters to fund tax cuts, does that actually cut through to voters? Probably not. So what do you do to get positive headlines that cut through to voters? Well, I think it’s incredibly hard for Sunak to actually figure that out.

Lucy Fisher
And John, you know, you’ve pointed out the interesting point that, yes, the Conservatives are languishing in the polls at the moment. But will Labour find themselves in as much trouble as a current government after 18 months if the inheritance they get on the economy is so difficult?

John Curtice
Well, I think that in a sense is the $64,000 question and bring us back to the beginning of this podcast when I was saying, you know, we’re holding Labour now to a high bar. In a sense, I think we’re now already beginning to ask ourselves not just what does Labour need to do to win the election — because that project seems to be going pretty well and the by-elections confirm that — but rather, what does Labour need to do to position itself in such a way that it might be able to maintain its popularity and avoid the same fate of the Conservatives given the very difficult legacy we’ll have of a tight fiscal position, a flatlining economy and failing public services? You know, a mixture that might mean you’re going to have to increase yet more in terms of taxation and certainly to take unpopular measures.

And I think the problem about the fact that it looks as though it isn’t just these by-election results, it’s a lot of evidence about Sir Keir Starmer’s relative lack of popularity, the fact that people are less likely to think that Labour is ready for government now than was the case before 1997, that the fact that their lead on the economy — yes, it’s there, but it’s not that big — that all of these things about the apparent lack of enthusiasm for the Labour alternative means that if indeed what Labour are going to achieve later this year is winning election on the back of discontent with the Conservatives, that might prove to be a rather poor foundation for maintaining the popularity of the government in difficult times thereafter. And I guess that perhaps is a risk now for the Labour party of perhaps being too myopic, of being so concerned and so nervous about what it does between now and October stroke November, that it forgets it might face a much bigger and much more difficult task beyond next October and November if indeed Sir Keir Starmer achieves this objective of getting the keys to 10 Downing Street.

Lucy Fisher
And George, just a word on Starmer. I mean, he’s obviously had this great end to the week, but there are deeper problems with his operation that have been exposed by this row over alleged antisemitism, haven’t there? And again, after him dropping the £28bn pledge last week and being accused of prevaricating and U-turning, again this week he was accused of indecision in his handling of the row over the candidate Azhar Ali — first defending him and then dropping him.

George Parker
Yeah, I think it’s been a poor seven days for Keir Starmer up until the point when the recession hit and we had these by-election catastrophes for the Conservative party. And as you say, Lucy, it did expose flaws and actually, divisions in his operation at the heart of Labour. £28bn saga was appallingly handled. It was shambolic. It dragged on for months longer than it should have done, frankly, and everyone could see this new term coming from space. And yet, even though that it was evident, everybody was writing about it, Sue Gray, his chief of staff, launched a leak inquiry into how this emerged. I mean, it was emerging everywhere, and the fact she did it then provoked complaints from people who had their phones checked and there sort of some people complaining they didn’t have union representation. But the fact that that made it into the public domain suggested that things weren’t entirely happy in the Labour operation. Sue Gray, we’re told, you know, the of course famously, the person who investigated Partygate in the Cabinet Office, was one of those people who thought they should have held on to the £28bn pledge.

And then the way he handled the whole Rochdale candidacy question as well was all equally shambolic and suggested double standards as well. The fact that he appeared to be willing to be less ruthless with someone on his side of the party, namely the the right of the party than with people on the left. So I think it did expose some weaknesses. But the meta picture at the end of the week, if you look at the way that real people have cast their votes in real elections and the momentum that Keir Starmer has, I think you’ll probably sort of take it as a win.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah. John, is that your take as well? I mean, you mentioned that Keir Starmer is not necessarily being seen as particularly popular among the public. Is he a potential weak link as we get closer to the general election? Nastily, deeply personal attacks against him will only ramp up.

John Curtice
Well, in a sense, it’s Labour’s good fortune that their standing in the polls doesn’t really seem to rest on Sir Keir Starmer’s popularity. If Sir Keir Starmer had hitherto been regarded as a popular leader, and all of a sudden the events of the last fortnight had persuaded people that maybe he wasn’t quite so effective after all, then maybe there is something for them to worry about. But because his personal standing and popularity isn’t really one of the essential foundations on which Labour rest, in a sense, therefore, that someone is (inaudible) from it.

Of course, it does bring us back to the point. What are the principal foundations of a Labour standing in the polls? Well, frankly, it is the mistakes that have been made by the Conservative party, and probably Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have done far more to ensure that they will win the next election, or at least have done at least as much as Sir Keir Starmer himself has done.

But I think, again, it comes back to this point I was making just now, that what we saw about the £28bn and about the handling of Rochdale, we were kind of going, hang on, is this the kind of thing that’s going to happen when they’re in government? I mean, if trying to handle an opposition is difficult, being in government with all the slings and arrows of misfortune is a lot more difficult.

And if the party is going to decide to change its policy because it’s constantly attacked by the opposition, if it’s not going to be able to sort out its candidate selection quickly and make speedy decisions. It’s gonna have to make a lot more speedy decisions when it doesn’t necessarily always know the full facts when in office. So that’s, well, again, a little warning sign; need to think about how you’re gonna handle things in government.

Lucy Fisher
Professor Sir John Curtice, thanks for joining.

John Curtice
You’re welcome.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene in clip
David Cameron needs to worry about his own country and frankly, he can kiss my ass.

Lucy Fisher
The reaction there from rightwing Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene to David Cameron’s intervention in US politics this week. Cameron wrote a piece for US political website The Hill, urging Congress to back a new military support package for Ukraine. Clearly, Marjorie Taylor Greene was not best pleased. It is hardly representative of Capitol Hill. It’s a question I put to the FT’s foreign editor, Alec Russell, who’s just returned from DC.

Now, Alec, you’re responsible for overseeing the FT’s scores of foreign correspondents across over more than 40 bureaus around the world and our coverage of global themes, so we’re very lucky to catch you in London for once. I know you’re often gallivanting across the world. You were in Washington last week, and I want to ask you a bit about what you picked up on the Hill. But just tell us, first off, this altercation between David Cameron and Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene — what happened here?

Alec Russell
Well, that was quite something. As in, to see a British politician wading into American politics as Cameron did. He basically called on Republican congressmen to back Ukraine and said otherwise it would be totally shameful and it would be appeasing, affectively appeasing a dictator. And American politicians don’t like being lectured by outsiders, and they’re rather surprised to be lectured by a Brit, because they tend to think of the Brits as they see us as being more on sides than other European nations. And it got quite a heated response from Congress.

Lucy Fisher
Well, it did. And I want to come on in a second to where you think things are going regarding American support for Ukraine in the medium term. But of course, on Political Fix, we focus on UK politics. Just give us your sense at this stage how you think Cameron is getting on in his role at the helm of the Foreign Office?

Alec Russell
Well, I have two perspectives on that. One of them is from inside the Foreign Office, and that does matter. They are broadly all overjoyed. They feel they’ve got someone who has a strategic view, is interested in thinking about the shape of the world and where it’s going. So that’s number one. More important, obviously, in terms of how he’s doing is how he’s doing on the world stage. And the truth is that if you’ve been a prime minister, you still have more lustre and more pulling power, so he can get to see world leaders in a way that most foreign secretaries can’t. So he can pull more strings. So he’s being, I guess, more effective.

Lucy Fisher
Be interesting to see how he does this weekend for the security conference. So let’s focus on what you picked up in Washington. Tell us about the situation with support for Ukraine.

Alec Russell
Well, I found it really, really startling and depressing. Fundamentally, there is a strong belief in the Republican party that Donald Trump is right when he says that it’s time to move on from Ukraine, or when he implies that it’s time to move on from Ukraine. And the argument that they make is as follows. It is no, no, no, we don’t want to help Putin, but we feel that he can no longer win control of the whole of Ukraine so we can move on from Ukraine now. There should be a deal. Ukraine is never gonna win back the territory that’s under occupation by Russia so a settlement must be reached so we can focus on China.

Most Republicans in Congress are against funding for Ukraine. And whoever you speak to practically in Congress in the Republican party articulates this view because Donald Trump articulates this view and he’s running the party.

Lucy Fisher
And, of course, Donald Trump has been bad-mouthing Nato members who he says aren’t stumping up enough cash for the organisation, and even making the somewhat insane suggestion that Russia should attack those Nato members that aren’t supporting the 2 per cent GDP minimum spending on defence. What’s your sense in speaking to policymakers and politicians in the US? Is Nato doomed under a Trump presidency?

Alec Russell
Well, I don’t think it is doomed. I think that Trump is playing obviously a provocative and arguably deeply reckless game in suggesting that the whole policy of collective defence is open to debate. He does, remember, have a point. That is that most European members of Nato have not been meeting the 2 per cent target of GDP defence spending. And that irritates and has irritated for a long time a lot of Americans.

So he’s beating that drum; whether he’d actually like to withdraw totally from Nato, I suspect probably not. But there are plenty of people who are members of the party and who are thinking about a possible Trump second term who say they would be quite happy to pull back from Nato.

Lucy Fisher
And how might Trump 2.0 differ from the first time around if he does get back in?

Alec Russell
Well, I think one thing that everyone has to appreciate is that there are people around Trump or who want to be around Trump, conservative opinion makers, conservative columnists, conservative thinkers who are planning for a second term. They’re thinking hard about it in a way that not many people actually thought he was gonna get elected in 2016. It was a surprise and they didn’t have a plan. There is a plan now. There is a domestic plan, which is very, very radical. It’s for cutting back a lot of the government agencies and for massively increasing the number of political appointees in the equivalent of the civil service. And there’s a foreign policy plan as well, which looks, the politest way of describing it is ultra, ultra unilateralist. Some people might describe it as isolationist.

Lucy Fisher
And what about the special relationship if Trump gets elected and indeed if Labour come into government in the UK? There could be several different moving parts of the jigsaw, couldn’t there?

Alec Russell
Well, that will be one of the really interesting things to observe. If it is the case that Keir Starmer is elected later this year, as is quite possible, and if Trump is elected around the same time, what on earth would that mean? They are really not natural political bedfellows. I think that Donald Trump will try and peel off countries in Europe to have separate relationships with them, and Britain would be an obvious one for him to alight on. Of course, Labour is also gonna be thinking and is thinking this has to be a moment that we move closer to Europe again on defence, and we need to be having more discussions with France, given that France and Britain have the two largest armed forces in Europe. But the UK also needs to work very closely with the EU in a sort of European defence mission.

Lucy Fisher
And do you think there’s the political manoeuvre room for whoever is in government in the UK to argue for that? I mean, lots of kind of alarm warning bells were sort of flagged by Brexiters about this idea of a European army. That’s a sort of spectre that still hangs over any talk of closer co-operation on defence.

Alec Russell
No. You’re right. I mean, there’s always been for Brexiters and the pre-Brexit Brexiters, the whole idea of a European army has always been deemed a bit of a nightmare. So the new government will obviously have to tread very, very carefully if it is the case that Donald Trump is elected and if it is the case that he pushes aggressively to withdraw from Nato. I think that Britain has always found a way of working with America, and I suspect that whoever is in Number 10 Downing Street, if there is a second Trump term, that person will find a way of having a workable relationship with America, ’cause that’s our special place in Europe, isn’t it, to have a good relationship with America and ideally, a good relationship with the rest of Europe. But all that said, if we end up with the most unilateralist stroke isolationist president possibly ever, or certainly in the last 100 years or so, then Britain is gonna have to think very carefully about that whole special relationship, which of course only dates back to the end of the second world war.

Lucy Fisher
Alec Russell, thanks for joining.

Alec Russell
Thank you very much.

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Lucy Fisher
So we’ve just got time left for Political Fix stock picks. George, who are you buying or selling this week?

George Parker
Well, I think I’m gonna be buying Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor. I think she’s had a pretty good week all round. First of all, she successfully killed off that £28bn-a-year spending commitment that she initially made herself, of course, back in 2021, but then realised it was totally unaffordable and finally, removed it from Labour’s manifesto; followed up by the fact that we entered a recession on Thursday. The R-word now hanging around Rishi Sunak, which she was quick to exploit.

And the other thing I’d mention is the fact that our colleague Jim Pickard and I have written a piece for the FT Magazine this weekend about Labour’s success in wooing big donors to support the party’s election efforts. In particular, we focus on three so-called megadonors who are giving £5bn each — that’s Dale Vince, Gary Lubner and David Sainsbury. And Rachel Reeves was instrumental, really, in wooing all of those people as part of their general business outreach. But in particular, when you speak to those donors, they often say they’ve been impressed by Rachel Reeves.

Lucy Fisher
Interesting. And I must say, I love the magazine piece, particularly the fabulous intro involving Dale Vince’s hippy convoy and an LSD trip, so I’ll put the link in the show notes for sure. Rafe, how about you?

Rafe Uddin
I’ll be buying Wes Streeting, who’s the shadow health secretary, really off the back of George’s great mag piece, someone who’s been wheeled out by Keir Starmer effectively as a sort of confident deputy on TV news to rebut any concerns about the party and an individual who when it comes to the NHS is probably going to be in a strong position to show leadership there, having battled cancer and dealt with the health service himself recently. And going into next week, where we’ve got a ceasefire vote being brought by the SNP, Streeting’s constituency with Ilford North is a fairly mixed constituency. It has a strong Jewish demographic and a strong Muslim demographic, and he’s shown often in the past that he’s able to straddle that line quite effectively. And when it comes to actually balancing that next week, I think he’ll be in a strong position to do so.

George Parker
OK, Lucy, how about you this week?

Lucy Fisher
Well, I’m buying a stake in GB News, the rightwing broadcaster, because I was just really struck on my travels to Wellingborough how many people I spoke to, particularly to a man and a woman, all those who said that they were interested in reform. And when I asked them about how they knew about the party, they said they were regular GB News viewers and that they’d seen Ben Habib, the deputy leader of the party and the candidate in Wellingborough, and Richard Tice, the party leader, on the airwaves, on the channel. And I just thought it was fascinating. It’s clearly getting a lot more purchase in some parts of the country than at least I had realised.

Rafe and George, thanks for joining.

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George Parker
Thanks, Lucy.

Rafe Uddin
Thanks, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And my thanks to Sir John Curtice for his great insights into where the Tories go from here.

And that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. I’ve put links to subjects discussed in this episode in the show notes. Do check them out. They’re articles we’ve made free for Political Fix listeners. There’s also a link there to Stephen Bush’s award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You’ll get 30 days free. And don’t forget to subscribe to the show. Plus, do you leave a review or a star rating if you have time. It really does help us spread the word.

Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Audrey Tinline. 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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