Happy New Year to you all.
This Christmas I tried something new that made me happy. I went hundreds of miles away from my own country and its politics. I’ve spent much of it standing in a vast open space with very few people and watching the sky light up, or feeling a blizzard roar through mountains as it rolled in off wintery sea.
I’ve been in ‘the high North’ of Norway in the long dark of an Arctic winter. The Northern Lights or a storm force blizzard are on the sort of scale that almost literally blow you away whilst also making you feel very small and insignificant.
That sense of being so tiny in the wider planetary scheme of things, steers you towards a stepped back review of who you are and what your place is in the world.
What do you really believe? What are you doing? And, yes while we are at it what am I for?
Looking back over the past year and the things I’ve written and said, whilst there’s a bit of me that thinks “I said that would happen, and it has” there’s a few people in politics I have perhaps turned my fire on unfairly or issues where I should have taken more of a step back to see the bigger picture.
The main recipients of my sharpest criticisms have been politicians, or their associates, who seem to lack any self-reflection, self-awareness or a sense perspective. People who give the impression they see things in simple black and white terms and come across as instantly convinced they are right about everything all of the time.
Staring in awe at the kaleidoscopic majesty of lights in the sky alone in a vast landscape it reminded me that I and indeed the Conservative party need to step back regularly and see if they can divine a bigger picture, a glimpse of where we are at in the wider scheme of things. In politics not doing so makes you philosophically flawed and strategically weak, and we can’t afford either right now.
I tried to go further and see what might be coming over the horizon.
If as I suggested months ago 2026 sees the Tories a slowly growing but consistent second in the polls and narrowing the gap with front runners Reform then a battle is coming and the Conservative party must be prepared for how uncomfortable it might get. Shots have already been fired.
The recent el-Fattah story has seen Reform’s online advocates brand the Tories traitors as a whole. Quite apart from the fact that Nathan Gill their brief leader in Wales was an actual one, this attack is based on a lie. No politician of any rank, in any party “granted” this dreadful man citizenship, because they were neither consulted nor asked to opine. Nor did the rules provide a way to stop it. That system seems highly ripe for review and Kemi Badenoch laid out the position in an article for the Mail.
But don’t get distracted by the details of this issue, there’s something wider at work.
Step back a bit and you’ll see these are the opening skirmishes in a conflict about to play out.
Reform are far from comfortable with the evidence that not only are the Tories not dead, but they are also becoming a threat Reform thought they’d dealt with. They spent last year thinking the Tories could be discounted and framing the future as a straight tussle between themselves and Labour. Labour like dull witted sheep, inadvertently played along and in fact just ended up hurting themselves and boosting Farage, whilst continuing to disintegrate themselves.
This year will see a lot of Reform fire turned on the Tories, now they’ve decided to go it alone, and to their frustration it’s the supposedly destroyed Conservatives who may stand in the way of that.
Be prepared to re-run the debate with renewed intensity on the only alternative, which is do we all team up to all but guarantee Labour are a one term government?
The debate will be different now.
The parties are further apart the closer they get in polls even if Reform still have a very strong lead. There will be arguments made on this site for and against some form of deal either now or for post an election, and if the rivalry gets too intense that debate will only get more fractious.
Of course both parties will continue to benefit from Labour’s plodding rudderless plight. If sources are correct, a move against Starmer is coming, and soon. When the most vigorous criticism of this Prime Minister comes privately from his own MPs not opponents, then he’s heading for the knacker’s yard in weeks not months. He’s not up to the job, and there’s targets a plenty but we should give thought to our strategy to take on any new leader should they get one.
The voters will give their verdict again in May and whilst all suspect Labour to get an almighty kicking, the Tories private assumption at Conference was they’d get one too. Reform have reasons to feel confident but Badenoch just needs things not to be like last May and to come-through-even-with-bruises, but the party has to push harder now to achieve get to even that stage.
That’s why I hope this Christmas and New Year Period away, have focussed minds but given perspective.
Conservatives need to be the only party that has the honesty and bravery to accept no party has a monopoly of good ideas, or has all the right solutions in a neat and simple slogan. Because if they can, that’s how they will drive the ongoing work to come up with the best platform on offer. A platform tested by questioning, forged by answering doubt and fashioned within a bigger picture.
Take a look at the leader, since she’s stepped into a brighter spotlight, and performed.
She has her flaws, and I think she knows what they are and has clearly been working on them. One of the criticisms often levelled is that she lacks self-awareness and doesn’t listen. Well it is obvious to close observers she’s had just enough of the former to work effectively on the latter. The before and after of this personal reflection is now obvious to see, and given her the end of year ‘report’ she’d have wanted. I think she has enough self-awareness to agree that in and of itself, it won’t be enough, and there will be ever more demand to continue the process.
One of the most refreshing things she told me this year was in response to a question I’d asked about Labour’s astonishing loss of ministers in an entirely preventable orgy of hypocrisy, and whether the Conservatives should ‘be careful what they say in opposition’? She took the point but added we should hold the party’s representatives to standards, but recognise nobody is a saint nor should we expect them to be. Or worse still, make the mistake Labour did, and claim we are. There was an honesty to having the perspective that accepts in every party ‘look, sometimes people will let you down and make mistakes, let’s not excuse it but at the same time just accept that happens’. You deal with it and move ahead.
Not only as person, but as Editor of this site, I have to have the self awareness that not everything the party does, everything the leader says, and everything we want to do, is always right, and I’ll always agree with. I don’t really trust people of whatever party who can’t or won’t accept that about themselves or their party. It takes perspective, honesty and an understanding of who we are and what we are working for, to work past that and get things done.
It’s never a waste of time to ask yourselves privately ‘are we getting this right? Is the political prism we’ve tended to view things through, actually right for today’s problems and those coming down the track? Do we want to right the ‘wrongs’ of the past or try to fix the future, knowing deep down, that will need constant review.
Core values – now we are starting to rediscover and even celebrate them – needn’t waiver but policy has to adapt.
In May of last year I stated that “the next few months are going to be very difficult for the party and its leader”, and so it proved. If we are to avoid a repeat of that this year then within Badenoch’s ‘renewal’ concept must be the ability to step back, see the bigger picture, reflect, be self-aware, and have the foresight and – since she likes the phrase – the balls, to respond to that.
conservativehome.com (Article Sourced Website)
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